SM Fugue

Asad Raza

 

Fugue

noun: fugue; plural noun: fugues

1. Music: a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase (the subject) is introduced

by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts.

2. Psychiatry: a loss of awareness of one’s identity, often coupled with flight from one’s usual environment, associated with certain forms of hysteria and epilepsy.

Oxford Languages

 

ONE

I may belong to a minority in remembering the World Trade Center as a poetic structure. The reasons I do have to do with how it expressed certain classic qualities of New York City. Manhattan’s grid, and New York’s prolific displays of maps of itself and its subways, streets, and configurations, make it an easy city in which to feel at home. People produce cognitive maps very quickly there and feel comfortable navigating its terrain almost immediately. This quality of ease, which is so different, for instance, to the impenetrable ball of yarn that is the map of London, is perhaps the origin of the pervasive sense of belonging experienced by New York visitors and residents alike. No labyrinthine local knowledges prevent the first-timer from getting from 53rd and 6th to26th and 10th.

 

Visually, the World Trade Center gave the sense of a vertical grid, elongated just as Manhattan is elongated, with an avenue of sky running in between. Unexpected views of them would often crop up, maybe when turning south from Houston Street onto Sullivan, or standing on the corner of Lafayette and Spring, or while driving north on the New Jersey Turnpike. Emerging from the Brat Pack–era hangout The Odeon, way downtown, their almost ominous presence suddenly loomed over you. A visual metaphor sprung to reality; they towered over neighboring skyscrapers the way New York towers over its neighboring cities. Dark masses illuminated by a bright grid, they signified New York, and the late twentieth century itself.