Design Coping: Remembering 9/11

That day I wasn't feeling all too well to begin with. I arrived at the office and the first plane had already hit one of the Twin Towers. We were confused and discussed whether this was an accident or not. I thought that it wasn't possible to hit the Twin Towers by accident and was sure it was an attack. Nobody could imagine that it was more than a small sports plane that had hit the building, it was inconceivable at that moment that it had actually been a passenger plane. Calls from the city, only 50 miles away, still came in at that moment describing the circumstances of what had happened. We decided not to work this day and go home. I arrived at my apartment, turned on the TV in the very moment the second plane hit the second Twin Tower. Now it was certain, this was an attack. The towers collapsed, taking with them thousands of people. I called my mother in Germany telling her I was OK, yet had still to hear from friends in the city. By then calls into Manhattan were no longer possible, the cell phone system on the top of the Twin Towers had also been destroyed.

That day, terror had won. Someone had used us as a weapon against ourselves.

Like many, I had nightmares of planes flying into the apartment complex, incredibly slowly but inevitably. There were Anthrax scares in the commuter train, where some mysterious powder had been found on a seat and the police would stop, enter and search the train. It took me months to go to the Riverside and look across the Hudson to where the towers no longer stood, or even go back to Manhattan for a visit. Then Afghanistan was attacked and the Bush Administration created the Department of Homeland Security. Soon friends were arrested simply for their heritage and spent days in suburban detention facilities without being able to notify their families. And then Iraq was invaded and that felt like a violation, as if we we had become not much better or pretty much like those who had attacked us. Maybe we did.

On the days to follow my feeling was that it made no sense to design and build architecture when someone could simply come along and blast it to bits.

I did participate in the memorial competitions for a very personal reason, though. My father was buried in the USA and I had recently visited his grave for the first time. It was important to me that all people had this opportunity following 9/11 as well. My designs didn't win, yet my Ground Zero New York poster was presented alongside Fritz Koenig's stoically brilliant response. It was also a statement of coming to terms with the situation – a form of design coping, if you will – and if it could help others as well, all the better.