In 2003, I attended a lecture by the late performance artist and architect Vito Acconci, which ended up being a wide-ranging review of what was then a nearly four-decade-long career. As I recall it, the audience emitted nary a titter while he discussed "Seedbed," the infamous 1972 performance piece in which he ensconced himself under the floorboards of the Sonnabend Gallery on West Broadway and masturbated for eight hours straight. But when Acconci began discussing the conceptual "pre-exploded" building that Acconci Studio had proposed to replace the World Trade Center the year before, he was met with gasps for his irreverence towards such sacred ground. It was, simply, too soon, and Acconci's sense of coping was too abrasive.
Acconci's building was for "A New World Trade Center: Design Proposals," an exhibition of 60 influential architects who convened at the behest of the gallerist Max Protetch and Architectural Record, presented in January 2002. At this point in Acconci's omnivorous career, he was focused on architecture and public space—I recall him also showing plans for the waiting area of a Westchester children's hospital in which a fish tank on the floor would flow like a river under the ailing children's feet, a beautiful concept which only partly came to pass. In those early months after 9/11, he imagined a building that was "terrorist-proof," like a block of Swiss cheese. His idea for a World Trade Center replacement was a hole-ridden 110 stories where "the unnecessary office footage, the extra volume, is blown away," as an accompanying statement read.
While at the time the provocative proposal may have seemed to make light of what had happened—"a display of questionable taste," the Chicago Tribune sniffed—his idea for what actually went on in the holes, which "form the building's public spaces," possessed a kind of raw humanness. "Light streams through the building, like spotlights—it rains and snows through the building," he continued. "The interior of each cone is lined with walkways, ramps, and stairways; these passages are parks (plantings, waterfalls, benches) and plazas and streets (food stands, markets, performance areas)."