The most famous, if not the tallest

Before the fire, before the ash, before the
Bodies tumbling solitary through space, one
Thin skin of glass and metal met another….
Two man-made behemoths joined in a       fatal kiss.

Although this poetic and deeply philosophical expression of the author’s love (no other word will suffice) for the Empire State Building ostensibly celebrates the 75th anniversary of the great American icon, it has been thrown into more poignant relief, indeed could never have been written at all in its present form, without the sudden and awful twin demise of another icon just a few hundred yards downtown.

Tragic irony, dramatic paradox, narrative necessity, call it what you will, it is solely on account of the world-shaking catastrophe that architect William Lamb’s ‘palace of dreams’ stands so nobly in the numbing aftermath, once again resplendent and supreme, in Scott Fitzgerald’s words ‘as inexplicable as the sphinx’, a mythic lighthouse of possibility around which the rest of New York’s urban jungle chooses to subordinately arrange itself.

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Mark Kingwell’s intellectual mission throughout this multi-disciplinary study is a kind of Grail-like quest for its iconic and simulacral quintessence. Robert Venturi of Philadelphia once told me that the essential architectural element of our time was no longer space nor the enclosure thereof. In his influential opinion, the kernel through which all ‘built organisms’ must now be judged and evaluated is their iconicity and the degree with which it is suffused by hidden communication of meaning.

Unequivocally, Kingwell would agree. He considers the Empire State ‘a potent icon of Western capitalism and ingenuity’, but one that, unlike the ill-fated Twin Towers, was not nearly as crudely related to and associated with unacceptably brash ideas about wealth, greed and free marketeering. The former has always been the tower of Everyman, first and foremost.