The passing scene: November 13, 2014

Thank you for your service by Elizabeth Herrin for Medium.

All of My Friends Are Dying by Vince Emanuele for World News Daily.

John Fogarty defends ‘Fortunate Son’ song choice at Concert for Valor by Randy Lewis for the Los Angeles Times.  (via Bill Harvey)

Can you honor veterans for their service, while still thinking that the war they served in was wrong, or even that all wars are wrong?  My answer is: Yes.

College Athletes of the World, Unite by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for Jacobin magazine.  (via Bill Harvey)

I thought that star college athletes had it good, but evidently not.  This article was an eye-opener for me.

The Mystery of Ray McGovern’s Arrest by Ray McGovern for Consortium News.

CIA critic Ray McGovern was arrested for trying to attend a panel discussion in which CIA ex-chief David Patraeus participated.  His ticket was bought under somebody else’s name.  So how did the police at the door know to be on the lookout for him?

The rise of the new World Trade Center

After years of effort and numerous setbacks, three of the proposed seven towers to be built at the World Trade Center complex have “topped out,” reaching their structural maximum height. Seven WTC was completed in 2006, Four WTC topped out in June of this year, and the tallest, One World Trade Center (formerly known as Freedom Tower), just topped out at 104 floors on August 30. Financial difficulties have left the future of the remaining towers in doubt, and have raised concerns about the still-incomplete National September 11 Memorial and Museum, as the foundation that runs the memorial estimates that it will cost $60 million a year to operate.

Click on One World Trade Center: Construction Progress for more great pictures from The Atlantic’s In Focus photography web site.

Islamic architecture in the Twin Towers

I never knew that the design of New York’s World Trade Center was influenced by Islamic architecture, but evidently it was.  Laurie Kerr, writing for Slate about three months after the 9/11 attacks, explained:

The World Trade Center’s architect, Minoru Yamasaki, was a favorite designer of the Bin Laden family’s patrons—the Saudi royal family—and a leading practitioner of an architectural style that merged modernism with Islamic influences. …

Interior of World Trade Center

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.

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.

The shimmering filigree is the mark of the holy. According to Oleg Grabar, the great American scholar of Islamic art and architecture, the dense filigree of complex geometries alludes to a higher spiritual reality in Islam, and the shimmering quality of Islamic patterning relates to the veil that wraps the Qa’ba at Mecca. After the attack, Grabar spoke of how these towers related to the architecture of Islam, where “the entire surface is meaningful” and “every part is both construction and ornament.” A number of designers from the Middle East agreed, describing the entire façade as a giant “mashrabiya,” the tracery that fills the windows of mosques.