Art Deco at Ground Zero: five years after 9/11, how about a design actual human beings might like?

• Author: Seavey, Todd

WHEN MOHAMMED Atta flew a plane into the World Trade Center five years ago, he was not only a terrorist striking a blow against America. He was a former architecture student striking a blow against modernism, the mid-20th-century style often characterized by geometric shapes, cold glass and steel, Louis Sullivan's minimalist principle that "form follows function" and Adolf Loos' more puritanical rule that "ornament is crime."

We'll never know if such a thought crossed Atta's mind in his final moments, but it wouldn't have been the first time terrorists saw modernist architecture as a weird imperialist imposition. In 1997 Basque separatists threatened to blow up Frank Gehry's Spanish branch of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilboa, which looks something like a giant titanium cabbage. A variety of traditionalists and leftists have criticized ostentatious, gaudy-modern sites like the Planet Hollywood restaurant bombed by Muslim terrorists in Capetown, South Africa, in 1998. Not all the critics are insane.

Now would be the perfect time to relearn some of the lessons lost when modernism explicitly rejected the past, so that something can be built at Ground Zero that is elegant in the most timeless sense of the word, elegant in the way that the Woolworth Building, mere blocks from the Trade Center site, is. Elegant the way many buildings from the first, all too brief generation of skyscrapers were a century ago, before modernism declared ornament, decoration, gentle curves, and playful details to be frivolous.

Tom Wolfe summed up the case against modernist architecture in his 1981 book From Bauhaus to Our House, explaining how the European modernists of the early 20h century consciously cast tradition aside, believing they could create not just buildings but aesthetics and cities according to simple rational principles. The results were cold, ugly, inhuman, and impractical. (Modernist buildings, with their flat roofs and massive facades, were often leakier and draftier than expected.)

The arch-modernist Le Corbusier wrote maniacal diatribes against traditional aesthetics, calling old, organically developed towns "things that have merely happened" rather than being planned, fit only for meandering "pack donkeys." He dreamed of razing all of Paris' old buildings in order to replace them with his now all-too-familiar trademark concrete public housing blocks. When an early critic of Le Corbusier called him boring, he dismissively denounced the doctrine of...