Remembering '9/11' and 'Ground Zero': a key panellist at the International Architectural Symposium in Pontresina (ASP), Hani Rashid, recalls the September 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in the US. He talks of rebuilding plans submitted for 'ground zero' at the following ASP.
| Auteur | Shepard, Lyn |
Two years have passed since that eerie moment when the International Architectural Symposium, Pontresina (ASP) met in the Alpine splendour of the Upper Engadine valley.
At the time, some key panellists--New York designer Hani Rashid among them--never did arrive. Rashid had remained stunned, bewildered, and stranded, not even boarding a grounded jetliner during the nation's maximum-security alert now recalled grimly as "9/11".
He tells Swiss News, how he and his five-year-old son had watched in disbelief from their Soho apartment, the two lethal hits from hijacked jetliners that file World Trade Center took and collapsed.
"It was 8:50 a.m., and I was getting my son ready for his preschool class," Rashid recalls. "Our loft in Lower Manhattan is on the top floor with access to the roof, and as I was putting a coat on, we heard a plane go over very low. I thought 'Well, that's strange over Lower Manhattan,' and then I heard a kind of pop, and I went out on the deck, never thinking I would see what I saw.
"In fact," he said, "I spent most of my time viewing the horizon line, because I just naively assumed it would land down at the street level. But my son was pulling on my pant leg and saying 'Look at the World Trade Center!" He had seen it immediately. The smoke had just cleared from the impact, and there was a gash that registered in my mind as if somebody had taken a black marker and literally drawn the profile of a plane's body in the side of that building. And then I had a lot of trouble trying to figure out the scale of the impact.
"My mind reverted back to the small plane that hit the Empire State Building early in the 1930s. And then I think the strangest thing was that I had responsibility over my son, trying to keep a stoic face the whole time I was holding him. We watched basically the entire day, because I realised it would be futile to leave the roof. I didn't want to turn on the television. I didn't want to expose him to that. I couldn't very well hide what had happened from him. So it was really a matter of making him feel secure about this thing, as horrific as it was. Not that I could deal with it much better.
"My son's mother--my design partner--called from Germany," he tells Swiss News. "It was at that moment that I actually broke down, because she told me she had been watching CNN from the same angle and had seen people jumping from the buildings. I hadn't seen that. I had been too concerned about dealing with my son's...
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