The Other Side of Darkness

But precisely because they are the responses to well known, oft-repeated economic forces, the handsome designs for tall buildings coming out of the studios these days cannot match, for daring or urgency, what resulted from the ids. The tremendous pressure at that moment, and the outstanding determination of New York and the United States to rebound, made the ids the best episode in the history of American skyscraper design since the 1950s.
It was an unusually passionate tryst among an eager, engaged citizenry, an alert press throughout the world, and intelligent and astute architects working at absolute top form. In its remarkably brief life, the ids produced ideas that will long be worth consideration.

But it was, of course, more than a design exercise. It was also a radiant example of American idealism. Americans, and especially New Yorkers, were shaken and angry, but were nevertheless feeling good about themselves: they had survived the worst attack on their native soil since the Civil War, but they were making a comeback. And as always happens at such times — for better or worse — they were feeling good about American virtue, American ideas, and the power of American ingenuity to make a rotten situation better. The surge of resolve, so apparent during the Innovative Design Study, happened, of course, before the US invasion of Iraq and the long slide into the reign of prevarications and excess most visibly represented by George Bush’s administration in Washington.
Since 2003, there has been no episode in American architecture, and perhaps in American culture as a whole, more rich in ever-controversial American optimism than the ids. For its duration, the tall building once again became for Americans what the Empire State Building had been in the grave hours of the Depression: a powerful symbol of hope, the ultimate modern expression of expansive ideas joined to huge material forces and processes, a promise of good times to come on the other side of darkness.