Architectural Martyrdom

Definition

Goldberger's term for the transformation of a building's meaning through destruction or threatened destruction, so that it becomes beloved, symbolic, or sacred precisely because it was lost or attacked. Its paradigmatic case is the World Trade Center: a pair of towers he had resented, then grudgingly accepted, and never admired, became "our first skyscraper martyrs" after September 11, 2001, "inexplicably bound up in a whole set of other values that martyrdom embraces." The towers were sold as postcards "the way they used to sell pictures of Malcolm X or John F. Kennedy," and the destruction put them "essentially out of the range of normal architectural criticism." Goldberger names a second, preservation-side martyr: McKim, Mead and White's Pennsylvania Station, whose demolition in 1963 was "the martyr of preservation" and produced New York's Landmarks Law; its replacement by Madison Square Garden made preservation appear, to a fearful public, the only defence. Against the martyr stands the saviour — Grand Central Terminal, rescued through the Breuer tower battles to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1978 and now "fully restored."

Key Thinkers

• Paul Goldberger — formulates architectural martyrdom through the World Trade Center and Pennsylvania Station.
• Minoru Yamasaki — architect of the World Trade Center towers. (PAGE NEEDED — see log.)
• McKim, Mead and White — architects of Pennsylvania Station. (PAGE NEEDED — see log.)
• John Summerson — "all architecture has to die before it can touch the historical imagination."

Related Concepts

• historic-preservation — martyrdom is preservation's most powerful argument and its most dangerous emotion.
• memory — destruction converts a building into a carrier of collective memory.
• iconic-architecture — martyrdom as an accidental, posthumous route to iconic status.
• site-of-memory — the memorialisation of the destroyed building's site.
• architectural-memory — the personal and collective memory work that martyrdom performs.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• source-notes/goldberger-2009-why-architecture-matters — ch. 6 (pp. 132–34, 157–58) develops the concept from the World Trade Center and Pennsylvania Station.

Open Questions

• If destruction can confer meaning that the building never earned on architectural grounds, is martyrdom a form of criticism's abdication or its most honest recognition of social value?
• Does the martyrdom of a building distort the subsequent preservation debate by making every demolition feel like a sacrifice?