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A. I was in Tokyo when I became aware of the attack. However, even though I saw the collapse of the World Trade Center repeatedly shown on the television, at first I couldn't take it in as real. How could the towers have collapsed so easily? What could have happened to the thousands of people who were working in the buildings? At the World Trade Center there were huge sculptures by Calder and by Masayuki Nagare... There was no way I could convince myself that it could all have been lost in an instant. It was when I received notice that the opening of my new building in Milan, scheduled for that weekend, had been postponed, that the worldwide impact of the event came home to me. In the middle of the following month, on the way to St. Louis on business, I visited New York for the first time since the attack. Many public places were on full alert, which I had never experienced before, and this brought home to me again the extent of the damage done by the attack. Q. You have a proposal for a memorial tomb for Ground Zero. A. Why did such a tragedy occur? It's easy to attribute it to the breakaway of some radical Islamic fundamentalists, and to draw a diagram of the conflict between America and Islam. Indeed, the World Trade Center was a symbol of America, and at the same time, it was also a stronghold of globalizing capitalism. On the flipside of twentieth-century global modernization, the problems of religious conflict and poverty have been left unresolved... I think the explosion of these social tensions led to the destruction of the World Trade Center. While I was standing at the site of the towers, now reduced to dust and ashes, paralyzed and speechless at the cruelty, a local journalist who had accompanied me asked, "Undoubtedly, something will be built here one day. If you were the architect, what would you want to build?" I couldn't answer immediately, but in any event I would never agree to the idea of building another skyscraper comparable to the World Trade Center. That is utter nonsense. I left the site promising to call him when I came up with an idea, and the question was on my mind on the entire flight home. My thought was, "The mere reconstruction of an economic symbol would achieve nothing. To console and quiet the souls of the thousands of people lost, and above all, to raise the hopes of the coming generation, isn't a 'blank' open space what is needed now?" After I arrived home in Osaka, I immediately put together this proposal. Q. While many architects have proposed symbols to take the place of the World Trade Center, your idea seems totally different. A. It might be too "empty" for a proposal by an architect. However, it never occurred to me to consider architectural forms for the site. Concerning the dimensions of the memorial, I worked out the actual size from the radius of the equator, so that it communicates a message of globalization through dialogue rather than through economics. The resulting scheme is a gentle swelling in the ground --- which forms a part of a sphere --- 30 meters high, with a circular base over 200 meters across. Seventy thousand or more people could gather here. Of course, I doubt such a proposal would actually be accepted, but my hope was that someone discovering such a scheme might sympathize with the idea. |
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