{"id":676,"date":"2010-08-20T01:58:07","date_gmt":"2010-08-20T01:58:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/cityofbrass\/2010\/08\/the-original-mosque-at-ground.html"},"modified":"2010-08-20T01:58:07","modified_gmt":"2010-08-20T01:58:07","slug":"the-original-mosque-at-ground","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/2010\/08\/the-original-mosque-at-ground.html","title":{"rendered":"The original mosque at Ground Zero"},"content":{"rendered":"

I really don’t have anything left to say about Park51, barring any new developments (pun intended). But the repeated phrase “mosque at Ground Zero” was ringing familiar to me for some reason, and I just realized why – this old article from December 2001 in Slate, about the architecture of the World Trade Center<\/a>, and how architect Minoru Yamasaki drew his design inspirations from Islamic sources:<\/p>\n

\n

Yamasaki received the World Trade Center commission the year after the Dhahran Airport was completed. Yamasaki described its plaza as “a mecca, a great relief from the narrow streets and sidewalks of the surrounding Wall Street area.” True to his word, Yamasaki replicated the plan of Mecca’s courtyard by creating a vast delineated square, isolated from the city’s bustle by low colonnaded structures and capped by two enormous, perfectly square towers-minarets, really. Yamasaki’s courtyard mimicked Mecca’s assemblage of holy sites-the Qa’ba (a cube) containing the sacred stone, what some believe is the burial site of Hagar and Ishmael, and the holy spring-by including several sculptural features, including a fountain, and he anchored the composition in a radial circular pattern, similar to Mecca’s.<\/p>\n

At the base of the towers, Yamasaki used implied pointed arches-derived from the characteristically pointed arches of Islam-as a transition between the wide column spacing below and the dense structural mesh above. (Europe imported pointed arches from Islam during the Middle Ages, and so non-Muslims have come to think of them as innovations of the Gothic period.) Above soared the pure geometry of the towers, swathed in a shimmering skin, which doubled as a structural web-a giant truss. Here Yamasaki was following the Islamic tradition of wrapping a powerful geometric form in a dense filigree, as in the inlaid marble pattern work of the Taj Mahal or the ornate carvings of the courtyard and domes of the Alhambra.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Indeed, the WTC was a monument to the finanial Mecca of Wall Street, two great minarets as an abstract mosque to Commerce. They really were magnificent buildings, weren’t they?<\/p>\n

\"World<\/a><\/p>\n

And it’s a travesty that nine years later, Ground Zero is still a construction site.<\/p>\n

photo from user berkessel on Flickr<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I really don’t have anything left to say about Park51, barring any new developments (pun intended). But the repeated phrase “mosque at Ground Zero” was ringing familiar to me for some reason, and I just realized why – this old article from December 2001 in Slate, about the architecture of the World Trade Center, and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":165,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[378,25,379,26],"class_list":["post-676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-read-this","tag-ground-zero-mosque","tag-news","tag-park51","tag-politics"],"yoast_head":"\nThe original mosque at Ground Zero - City of Brass<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex, follow\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The original mosque at Ground Zero - City of Brass\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I really don’t have anything left to say about Park51, barring any new developments (pun intended). 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City of Brass is his weblog, which was founded in 2002 under the name UNMEDIA. He is a co-founder of the annual Brass Crescent Awards. The name City of Brass refers to the Story of the City of Brass in the Thousand and One Nights, and the poem by Rudyard Kipling of the same name: Here was a people whom, after their works, thou shalt see wept over for their lost dominion; And in this palace is the last information respecting lords collected in the dust. -- Thousand and One Nights, Story of the City of Brass IN A land that the sand overlays, the ways to her gates are untrod, A multitude ended their days whose fates were made splendid by God, Till they grew drunk and were smitten with madness and went to their fall, And of these is a story written: but Allah Alone knoweth all! -- Rudyard Kipling, The City of Brass (1909)"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/165"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=676"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}