Skyscraper and the Airplane Humanity

Skyscraper and the Airplane

Humanity in Technology in Adam Goodheart's "9.11.2001: The Skyscraper and the Airplane."

British painter Lucien Freud has made his living off of painting ugly portraits. Recently, his depiction of an overweight woman sprawled unpleasantly on a couch broke the world record for the most expensive painting sold at auction by a living artist. For Freud and the painting's buyer, the human element brought a spark of beauty to the most horrific and ugly scenes. By weaving vivid imagery and historical fact, Adam Goodheart conveys similar attitudes toward beauty and humanity with his poignant essay "9.11.01: The Skyscraper and the Airplane." Goodheart's descriptions were part of the "torrent of words [that] rushed to fill the void, contain the terror, and offer meaning to what had just happened" (Stein 187). Though Howard F. Stein's article reviewing and interpreting September 11th essays, including Goodheart's, in terms of cultural psychodynamics suggests that the attacks issued "an assault on the American cultural sense of self and group boundaries," Goodheart describes the attacks and their aftermath as a catalyst that allowed Americans to understand their cultural selves and groups, even their basic humanity. By describing how two of the most mechanical and sterile symbols of the modern era actually represent the beauty, awe, and horror of the cycle of human life and death, Goodheart suggests that the magic, mystery, poetry, and importance of humanity and the human spirit are not lost, even in this technological age.

With the first sentence of Goodheart's essay, the author establishes a unique connection between the horror of human emotion and death and the mechanics of engineering by presenting the reader with the conflicting warm and emotive images of "fire," "ash," and "bodies tumbling solitary through space" with the cold and sterile images of "one think skin of metal and glass" (Goodheart 187). Although Goodheart is not the first essayist to use the events of September 11, 2001 as a springboard from which to ponder the human existence -- Jean Gardner follows a similar model to discuss the issue of sustainable cities in her article "Architecture as Eternal Delight: Reflections on the Attack of the World Trade Center" -- Goodheart's essay is by far the most concerned with the intangible element of human existence. Brilliantly, Goodheart uses one of the most passionate evokers of human emotion in the last decade, the September 11th attacks, to elicit from the reader a response involving all the passion, poetry, and mystery of life and death. Following this provocative rhetorical strategy, Goodheart draws the reader into a short course on technological history, a subject that would generally strike readers as dry, mechanical, and an antithesis to human passion and emotion. Drawing on the connection between technology and humanity that he establishes at the beginning of the essay, and the human emotion evoked from that connection, Goodheart manages to describe both the skyscraper and airplane as representations of humanity and the cycle of human life and death.

In his narrative of skyscraper history, Goodheart begins by personifying the skyscraper, identifying it with humanity by describing the building as being "born in a single piece," much like a human child is born (189). This association of technology with humanity continues as Goodheart describes the "skyscraper's exterior" as its "skin," and paraphrases an architect who spoke of the buildings "in Darwinian terms" (189). Not only is the skyscraper personified in that it is given human physiology, but also Goodheart goes onto describe the building's sexual humanity by giving it a "male" gender and noting its "crudely phallic thrust" (191).

Although describing the skyscraper in terms of human physiology and sexuality certainly personify the building, allowing its obvious association with the human element, Goodheart furthers this analogy by associating the steel contraption with human faith, passion, and the fear of death. Goodheart does this by including early reactions to the elevator. Although most now take the contraptions for granted, humans are still "required to entrust their lives, on a daily basis, to technologies whose inner workings [remain] a mystery" (190). By including this segment, Goodheart has established the skyscraper as something far more than a cold, mechanical tower of glass and steel. Instead, he associates the building with humanity, not only physiological and sexual humanity, but also spiritual humanity. Established as a location where one must entrust one's life to technology, the building has the spiritual consistency of a cathedral or burial ground instead of the cold, emotionless consistency of a modern, mechanical building. Seen in this vein, the Twin Towers are now seen as additional casualties of the September 11th attacks, symbols of the passions of humanity rather than technological milestones. This interpretation of Goodheart's work is similar to Stein's interpretation, as the author suggests that Goodheart uses September 11th observations "for the comparative study of violent social movements as responses to many forms and ages of modernity" (197). Goodheart suggests that modernity and technology is still swept up in the beauty of humanity, and uses the September 11th attacks to illustrate the binding of technology and human passion.

Similarly, Goodheart defies the traditional conception of the airplane as a superhuman, modern marvel. Instead, he defines the contraption as a sanctuary for human sacrament, a mode through which humans are forced to consider their humanity and immortality.