Such a lot of wonder. All around. 4WTC.

For me, Paris is the prettiest city. That may not be the most enthralling adjective; one could say it about a lollipop. And Paris is a bit of a lollipop, and gooey marzipan, dripping with delight, grand but delicate somehow, ou grand et petit, comme les palais près du Pont Alexandre III, and ringing with harmony. 

This comes of tearing a city down and starting from scratch under the exacting, exhaustive eye of France's youngest ruler before Macron in 2017, Napoleon III, and one of history's boldest visionaries, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. Chosen by the Emperor after a grueling competition, Haussmann went about creating the center of Paris in his own image. The swagger of wide boulevards connecting royal residences with major cultural institutions, four major parks, and overflowing with his distinctive florid style, at every turn, on every block, an architecture whose describing adjective honors the father: Haussmanian. 

Five story buildings clad in creamy limestone line the miles of streets, whose intersection with the many angled boulevards make for some pleasing concoctions. The classicism from which he drew abounds.The Greek columns, the Roman arches, but slathered all over that with very little regard for anything like restraint are the very French festoons of oak clusters and laurel swags, cartouche, balustrades, touches of sensual twisting vines of a far-off emergent Nouveau in grille work and magnificent lampposts. And capping every building everywhere, the gentle slopes of the dormered, charming mansard roofs.

Take, as an example, the masterpiece by Charles Garnier, this pinnacle of the Second Empire style, The (old) Paris Opera, whose breathtaking opulence garnered its architect bragging rights immediately. Everyone referred to it as Le Palais Garnier. It certainly took my breath away when I emerged from the Metro surprised to find it right behind me and struggling to fit in into my field of vision. It is almost too much, in a sumptuous way, the gilt, gilding the lily, and inside, beyond the legendary Grand Staircase in the soaring lobby spaces, its gallery is a dizzying display of some kind of Neo-Baroque encyclopedia of everything beautiful in the universe. Many prefer this walk to the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. 

Why do I go on like this? Not everyone liked it. The Haussmann Plan for sure, for its rigorous adherence to a kind of zoning aesthetic, the loss of centuries of history as nearly any trace of Medieval Paris was wiped off the map, and The Palais Garnier in particular--in fact, its controversies continue as the Opera has effectively moved out to the newish, boorish Opéra Bastille. It was seen as folly, and the memory of all those who had fought and died in the Revolution and subsequent communard uprisings seemed sullied by this ostentatious display of whatever fetish with royalty compels a population to suppress their own needs for the glory of the few.

But given time, architecture grows on people. And we, as cultural consumers, have some responsibility here as well, to engage with it, and ask ourselves, "What, exactly, is going on here?" It can be difficult to do that in the case of major urban developments when so much is happening so quickly. It's only when we allow for the specific individual charms of each building in Paris or, say, Hudson Yards for a contemporary example, does an apparent monotony flower into harmony. I think our brains struggle for an early context, a rudimentary understanding, and we settle on that typically shallow analysis until we take the time to really let a concept, a painting, a building sing. 

And that happened for me a few days ago at the oft ridiculed and cruelly critiqued site of the new World Trade Center.

I was, as usual anymore, with a group. The first building to be completed in what is called the 'original periphery' of the first World Trade Center was the new Tower 4. So we've been living with this building, and many of us almost daily, since November 2013. I made some early assumptions about it until Thursday when I had a brutally frank reckoning with myself, standing at its very feet:  I have no idea what that building is doing. I set out correct my record. 

The architect, Fumihiko Maki, is Japanese and the 1993 Pritzker Prize Winner who studied both in Japan and in the States, taught at Washington University in St. Louis, worked for a stint at NYCs premier firm, Skidmore Owens and Merrill, and whose works are sprinkled across four continents. They include the Annenburg Center for Public Policy at Penn, the MIT Media Lab, and the somewhat prototypical 51 Astor Place, a less successful version of Tower 4, its squat, massive array of glassy angles seems dropped uninvited into a once uncongested plaza.

Despite 51 Astor, he is renowned for fusing an Asian love for delicacy, form, and craftsmanship with a Western flair for statement and confident power. His Tower 4 is this difficult duality rendered exquisitely. And my rather lengthy French Introduction was to make an initial point here about why Maki's building is great art. 

During the Second Empire, Parisian architects turned to their classic predecessors for a template. Their movement was a Neo-classic movement, paying homage, using the best elements of great civilizations, referencing the drama of the Baroque for good measure, and then throwing the art forward with the kind of lavish details that made a statement about its population: Our carefully crafted culture is something we treasure here.

Maki produces Tower 4 at a similar crossroads in architectural movements. The Modernists were, for a time, supplanted by the Postmodernists. But as I alluded to in the discussion of Johnson's AT&T Building, the movement didn't have the breadth of possibilities to sustain itself, and some 'purists' wanted a return to a sleek modern form indeed for its purity, its practicality, and in the case here, its appropriateness among all the buildings going up at the plaza which are intended, according to master-planner Daniel Liebeskind, to represent healing crystals standing guard over the memorial called Reflecting Absences. Maki's is a Neo-modern building. It is derivitive only to the extent that the Modern is a jumping-off place for him. Watch how he deconstructs the elements of the ubiquitous glass box and subtly reassembles them into something distinctly of the 21st Century.

(There are already a number of movements beyond the Neo-modern! The Metamodern, the Remomodern, and, for my Canadian friends, Vancouverism, for example. Artists are always way ahead of us.)

So while I thought I'd met Tower 4 before, I hadn't. I'd made those early assumptions. I'd think it was one thing, and then, on other days, I'd think, no, I was wrong, this is what that building is doing. I get it. But it was still cursory. I was still wrong, and, oddly, satisfied for a while to be so until my subconsciously frustrated brain found itself on the threshold of revelation. 

I did appreciate the lobby for its unabashed success from the day the building opened. I find it entirely inviting, calming, graceful, and deceptively vast. Let me first contrast it to the bottom of the most famous flashy new guy on the block, One World Trade Center. The bottom twenty stories of Tower One comprise a reinforced concrete bunker. It was designed to make people feel safe. It is certainly very safe in there, reinforced as it is with the thickest rebar ever manufactured. But when one thinks this through, it is a capitulation to fear, a design driven by panic. 

Now when I first saw a photo of Tower 4's lobby under construction, I was underwhelmed, too. Its depth looked constricted, its height protracted, the tension all wrong, its ceiling sloping down to an abrupt wall that seemed to be in the wrong place, cutting the room off too quickly. But I underestimated the grace of Maki's use of materials. 

White bracing between the panes of glass in lessening volume gives the entrance an extraordinarily airy feeling, one of hospitality, and one of the best uses of a new-ish prevailing theory that the exterior and interior of a building should be fluid, that you don't quite notice, or care to notice the exact moment you're in. I find something lovely about that on a quantum level. 




And that wall that came too soon? Covered in polished black granite, doubling the feel of the size of the room, reflecting the polished black granite outside on the memorial. 

And all of that leading to corridors treated with softer richer colors of brushed mahogany panels interspersed with floor to ceiling LED displays depicting clouds and waterfalls and any number of soothing images. It says to me, "We will live our lives as humans, with civility. This is what WE cherish." 

What was confounding me was its shape. For the life of me, I could not figure out how the building was put together and what it looked like as a whole. And that's unusual for anyone. Because our early assumptions about the shape of a building are typically correct. Not all, but the majority of buildings throughout history use symmetry for its pleasant effect and it's simplified floorpans. We assume symmetry in fact. Symmetry is an ingrained, perhaps evolutionary hallmark of attractiveness in Western culture certainly.  As a species we tend to pick more symmetrical mates as it was a perceived indicator of a sturdy gene pool. We like it in our art, as well. Lacking that, we yearn instead for balance. In a Victorian conscious display of asymmetry, we still can see the shape of the thing.

I can't think of too many buildings that rely on an optical illusion to shatter your expectation. 

When you encounter Tower 4 for the first time, it is normally from Church Street or Broadway behind Church. From this vantage, Tower 4 looks like a conventional shaft of a building, like the original Twin Towers, in fact, and Maki allows the only glass detailing on the building, near the top, some vertical glazing, a tender nod to the outer wall columns so recognizable on the first towers.

And let me talk about the glass here. Floor-to-ceiling panels that fit into panes so precisely, so uniformly throughout, that the seams on the entire building are barely visible. This is glass-wall-curtain construction like we have never seen, a testament to Maki's precision and just as much the precision of the army of glaziers and fitters, engineers, formen/women who execute the design. Hats off. 



The wall on Church shines liquid-like, a vast mica crystal, sharp, cool, but not off-putting, no, more cool in a refreshing way, like spring water. 

But it is when you walk around the building, to the sides that face inward towards the plaza and the profound sadness of that day, and the days and years of courage that followed, do Tower 4's surprises reveal themselves to you. 

It is not an uninterrupted 74-story shaft. At the 50th floor, it is as if half the building had blown away, and on a dramatically sharp angle as well. It is stunning, with a whisper of pain or sadness in the razor-like edges. For the first four years, I thought it was two towers in extremely close proximity to one another. 

But that is an illusion. Maki runs two chamfered corners up 

the length of two edges of the tower. In the delicate, oragami-like folds, our mind sees a separation that does not exist, a lovely metaphor in and of itself. 

So what does this building really look like? It started to drive me crazy because you can never take it all in at once. Ah. But you can climb above it and look down at the footprint, thanks to the galaxy of satellites Google Maps has circling the Earth looking down on us, and no doubt in our windows.

So, here for you, my poorly-wrought findings:

The building I thought was two vertical towers, side by side, is actually two buildings on top of one another, a trapezoid on top of a parallelogram. And I've marked the chamfered corners as well.

Look at the artistic capital Maki earns with this ingenious use of space. Two separate angular vertical towers would be nearly impossible a sell as commercial real estate in the Financial District where the wide-open floor plan has become the preferred model for efficiency. So, we have an Eastern solution of form to a Western predicament of space.

But by making us see that which is not there, he is making us see two towers again. One broken, the two of them clinging to one another, closely, embracing nearly, some have said fraternally, the little brother, wounded, protecting his big brother from the brunt of the calamity. 

I look at this building now and I see love. It is a massive, but simple abstraction of love, dressed in perfectly fitting glassy gossamer, so reflective it rises and nearly disappears, into the heavens.

It took me four years plus change to get there, but the unobtrusive second-shortest tower at the new World Trade Center is a masterpiece. And a reminder for those us who are symmetrically challenged, balance is lovely too.