On Friday, September 14, at the end of the week of hell, I drove past the Milwaukee Art Museum and noticed pedestrians along the new bridge that connects the Calatrava addition with O’Donnell Park.
In light of the horror in New York and Washington, D.C., the art museum’s directors had opened the latest phase of the addition two days ahead of schedule, inviting the public into the pavilion and reception hall for free.
I circled around and parked on Wisconsin Avenue.
Visitors stepped onto the bridge tentatively at first, then marched curiously on, watching workers planting trees in the gardens below. Inside the glass-peaked reception hall, smiles broadened, eyes glistened and heads lifted to meet the late-summer sunlight streaming in from all sides and washing across the Italian marble, white and pure.
The building took on the appearance of a modern cathedral. Bouquets of flowers were placed inside to honor the victims of September 11. And shielding the visitors from construction overhead, a huge trans-lucent curtain hung, an unintended veil of mourning.
As they gawked and wandered about, strangers struck up conversations with each other, reaching out, as we needed to do, talking about the remarkable building, taking our minds away from the sadness.
It was a welcome antidote to the terror and despair that had darkened our world.
The attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon shifted our attention to grave notions of safety and defense. Discussions have begun on whether to rebuild the Trade Center. Debate is under way on how to make all buildings more flame resistant, more shatterproof, more impenetrable.
In the name of precaution, we will be inclined to over-react. Laws will be written to restrict access. Architectural designs will be drawn to separate the public from the private realm.
We could barricade the doors. In our airports and post offices and theaters and art museums, we could install more metal detectors and hire more armed guards. But buildings ultimately cannot protect us. We know that now. They can provide comfort and utility, a place to work and play. But what measure of protection do they give? What can be done to a building to guard us from an attack of such magnitude as the attack on the World Trade Center?
I returned to the art museum with my family on the Sunday after the attack. Again the museum teemed with visitors, more than 5,000 throughout the day, the museum’s largest single-day attendance ever. In the midst of the crowd, displayed along the galleria, were large glass sculptures by artist Dale Chihuly, beautiful shapes and colors. Visitors passed within inches of the fragile glasswork. There were no railings, no ropes, no Plexiglas protectors, nothing to separate the people from the art. And at the end of the day, nothing was damaged.
In his design of the addition, Santiago Calatrava sought to make a “transparent building.” The vast panes of glass, the airy pavilion and gallerias, the all-white interior and exterior, even the brightly lit parking garage – all work to create a public space that is enticing, inviting, welcoming, physically and expressively permeable.
In the months and years to come, we will be tempted to withdraw, to break away from each other, to raise the walls and bury our sense of trust. But by retreating to a fortress mentality, we sink closer to the level of those who are hiding from justice in a cave.
Two weeks after the attacks, I delivered my son to college in Chicago. He wore his first beard, but he is still on the cusp of manhood, still an innocent, and I am still his protector.
As we drove through the Loop, the Sears Tower looked especially vulnerable, looming dark against a clear, blue sky, the tallest building in the United States.
“Stay away from the Sears Tower,” I told my son, but it was lame advice, an expression of my powerlessness and fear.
My son’s college campus is bordered by stone walls and iron gates. Security guards are posted at the entrance to his dorm. But he is not protected.
“Security is mostly a superstition,” someone once wrote. “Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.… To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.”
As I returned to Milwaukee from Chicago, the new art museum looked ever as vulnerable as the Sears Tower, yet rebellious somehow, courageous in its exposure, its glass panels sweeping and broad, its concrete arches graceful and supple.
The building is everything it should be – a work of art, a civic gathering place, a symbol. In a way not previously known, the art museum represents the best of what we can do, the best of who we are, brightness in one of our darkest moments. Like Manhattan’s now lost World Trade Center, like Chicago’s Sears Tower, it is an icon, Milwaukee’s symbol of free spirit, its prow and mast and mechanical sails reaching upward and ever outward.
