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A lecture at Columbia University – Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture

February 4, 2002

The destruction of the twin towers in Manhattan on September 11, 2001, has led to reconsideration of previous catastrophes which destroyed major urban centers and the following reconstruction, so as to seek some lessons for those thinking about how New York should rebuild.

Kenneth Maxwell examined the case of Lisbon in 1755 when a great earthquake struck, probably 9 on the Richter scale and which was followed by a rare Atlantic tsunami. Between the earthquake, flooding, and subsequent fire, much of the city was destroyed and some 20,000 people lost their lives. The earthquake occurred at a critical moment during the Enlightenment, provoking a major philosophical debate in Europe that involved such luminaries as Rousseau and Voltaire, as well as a great debate between theologians and scientists as to the natural or divine origin of such disasters.

Lisbon then was a city of some 200,000 people and one of Europe’s richest. A great entrepot for colonial goods and their transshipment to the rest of Europe, it was also a city that benefited from the first great gold rush of modern history in Brazil, which brought enormous wealth to Portugal during this period. Hence this catastrophe also resonated throughout Europe’s commercial and banking circles.

The reconstruction of Lisbon was a model of Enlightenment town-planning under the draconian direction of the Marques de Pombal. The remains of the old city were leveled and old property rights and property lines were overruled so that a modern highly functional city, laid out on a grid-iron pattern with an elegant commercial square facing the river, could be rapidly constructed. Buildings were all rigorously standardized in terms of design and they were to be constructed in a manner that would prevent them from being vulnerable to future earthquakes, as well as providing sanitation, fresh air, and light for the inhabitants. In this, Lisbon was far ahead of its time. Pombal’s urban engineers in effect had developed a utilitarian city where many of the elements involved in the construction were pre-fabricated and standardized according to a master plan.

Two important traditional elements were missing from Pombal’s reinvented Lisbon. Unlike London after the Great Fire of 1666, where Christopher Wren’s plans focused around the reconstructed cathedral of St. Paul, or other cities in the period where the focus might have been the royal palace, neither church nor monarchy were made central to the new Lisbon. Instead the central focus of Lisbon became a riverfront commercial square, or Praca do Comercio, which was placed on the location where the old royal palace and royal square had stood before being destroyed by the earthquake and tidal wave. This elegant square was Palladian in style and was probably based on copies of designs by Lord Burlington— Pombal had been Portuguese Ambassador in London during the period of Lord Burlington’s most famous architectural urban designs.

Previous reconstructions of destroyed cities faced difficulties in overriding preexisting property lines and claims. This was very much the case in London. Or new cities in the eighteenth century were constructed as adjuncts to old urban centers and became in effect “new towns” (such as the “new towns” of eighteenth century Edinburgh or Turin). The engineers tasked with the plans for the reconstructed Lisbon quite explicitly mentioned both London and Turin as examples they wished to avoid. In other words, their solution was to rebuild a new city over the old in the same location, but with a completely new design and function. Lisbon today still reflects this remarkable eighteenth-century urban reinvention.

The question for New York at Ground Zero is in many respects whether the reconstruction will follow the London or the Lisbon model. As Joyce Purnick noted in the New York Times on February 4, 2002:

Here it is, the most widely whispered line of the month: “We need a Moses.” “We” is New York City; Moses is Robert, the domineering master builder from a less democratic era in the city’s history.

Mr. Moses comes to mind increasingly as New Yorkers look to the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site and wonder how it will ever be accomplished, given clashing agendas and a large and ever-growing cast of characters, not one of them a leader with the kind of power and authority it will take to bring order to fragmentation, vision to necessity.