Willa Cather, Daniel Libeskind, and the Creative Destruction of Manhattan

Abstract

There must be something wonderful coming. When frenzy is over, when furnace has cooled, what marvel will be left on Manhattan Island? -Willa Gather, 1912. It seems to me that architecture is, in fact, machine that produces universe which produces gods. It does so fully through theories or reflections, but in ever non-repeatable and optimistic act of construction. - Daniel Libeskind, 2004. Creative Destruction In The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, Max Page offers a new vision of modern urban development through a history of New York City's architectural destruction. Central to Page's thinking is that convulsions of capitalist urbanization that shook Manhattan in early twentieth century were not defined by simple expansion and growth but rather by a vibrant and often chaotic process of and rebuilding (2). Exploring impact of wrecking ball on New York's shape-shifting cityscape, Page shows how this continual cycle of destruction encapsulated the fundamental tension between creative possibilities and destructive effects of modern (3). The result is a fascinating account of mutability of urban landscape and competing social and economic forces that are still shaping cities today. This article considers in which a similar urban tension between creation and animates two very different yet interrelated New York texts. One is a 1912 short story about skyscrapers by American modernist writer Willa Gather. The other is an actual skyscraper: Daniel Libeskind's Freedom Tower, which is currently under construction at Ground Zero site in Lower Manhattan. What links these two city texts is theme of urban disaster. Gather's story is about of a high-rise building at height of city's first great moment of vertical expansion. Libeskind's design, which comes in wake of precisely such a disaster, is about architectural renewal of skyscraper form in postterrorist landscape of New York. In such terms, both Gather's story and Libeskind's design are implicated in process of creative described by Max Page. Gather's narrative concedes creative possibilities of modern city but stresses its destructive energy. By contrast, Libeskind's architectural vision responds directly to an act of urban but emphasizes creative possibility. My argument is that, in contrasting ways, these two disaster narratives register long-standing cultural anxieties about modern urban development and deeply transitory nature of urban landscape. To develop this line of thought, I want to focus my discussion on diverse ways in which Gather and Libeskind interpret vertical New York, paying close attention to symbolic significance that they both attach to city's modern skyline. Gather's Towering Inferno In May 1912, Willa Gather published Behind Singer Tower in New York magazine Collier's. The story, as John Murphy notes, is emphatically about New York as futuristic American City, complementing the theme of destructive ambition in her first novel, Alexander's Bridge (which also came out in 1912), and anticipating Carl Linstrum's complaint in O Pioneers! (1913) about city's tendency to overwhelm its citizens (24). To this I would add that Behind Singer Tower is also about legibility of urban space, what Michel de Certeau, adapting Lefebvre, calls texturology of city (92) -for one of Gather's main points in story is that a close reading of skyline can offer insight into form of modern urbanism that she refers to as the New York idea (44). In a morbid prefiguring of skyscraper explosions of September 11, Behind Singer Tower is set in smoldering aftermath of a high-rise hotel fire that traps and kills hundreds of people on upper floors of building. …