Target Architecture:
The Role of Old Buildings in the Management of Global Conflict.
Columbia University
The Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation
James Marston Fitch Colloquium
Saturday, February 23, 2002
Band Room, Lerner Hall
The destruction of the World Trade Center, its identification and execution as a target for outrage at global inequality, is a searing example of the role of landmark architecture in the definition, management, and discharge of violent conflict. The role is an old one and has at least four parts. Landmark architecture, first, identifies conflict: it's the buildings, not the bodies, that say where it is and what the issues are. Landmark architecture as target or prize then frequently regulates the dynamic of the conflict, as it energizes participants and spectators to destroy or protect the architecture and as the fate of the architecture motivates their endurance, as at St. Paul's, or their surrender, as at Hiroshima. The actual damage or destruction of landmark architecture is often the catalyst to bring global conflict to a crisis, as at the World Trade Center. With the end of the conflict, damaged architecture becomes a vehicle for memorialization, and when repaired or reconstructed, for resolution and reconciliation.
This year's colloquium seeks a better understanding of this role of landmark buildings, undertaking its inquiry as a response to the Trade Center disaster and as a way to enrich and enlarge the School's understanding of the values of architecture itself. It particularly means to see if a better understanding of this role might not expand the potential of target architecture in the management of conflict, as an activator of successful intervention and mediation, and whether more work on the subject might usefully be done at Columbia.
