Unmonumental

A few days ago the New York Times website had an interactive feature about the “East Bathtub,” a section of the World Trade Center site where construction is way behind schedule. Workers are on the job twenty hours a day trying to catch up. Each day’s delay costs the Port Authority $300,000.

The bathtub is an 80-foot-deep pit, the foundation for two new towers. On the screen, the image of the pit moves slowly, providing a 360° view of this eerie abyss, an ocean floor with backhoes bent over like abandoned sea creatures. Men stand in the pit as though to give scale.

Monuments must go up, it seems. They must aspire, literally breathe out and fill the sky. But there is something moving in the idea of digging down, creating a void – the inverse of the inevitably bombastic buildings to come. A hole cut deep into the strata of the city, lined with the remnants of oyster shells and ships’ hulls, the fossils of flora that grow no more.