25. Jarett Kobek

“Solid rectangle erections of architectural arrogance, total modernist faith in the ability of buildings to shape lives.” – Jarett Kobek

From the time I was a small child, I fetishized, lusted after, modernist architecture and design. I loved clean lines in homes, uncluttered layouts, anything that sniffed of the contemporary. I would go every year, ages 8-12, to our city’s local Homearama—a showcase of houses in a newly created development, every one, as we would say now, perfectly curated to suit a certain type of aspirational taste, its interiors opened to the public for inspection before being put on the market—and wish each one of them were mine. Not that I didn’t have a perfectly comfortable and even luxurious home where I was being raised in an adjacent suburban town, but something about these homes, with their stripped-down floor plans punctuated by a few haute bourgeois luxuries—indoor hotubs!—stirred my preteen imagination and presented a new vision of an utterly snug domesticity.

At this time, I was primarily interested in domestic architecture but I would soon become taken with modernist public structures as well, the skyscrapers and other oversize buildings that form the skyline of most U.S. cities. Upon moving to New York a little over a decade later, I was particularly stuck by buildings, such as the Seagram Building and One Liberty Plaza, that were built in the International Style. The sleek, industrial look of these buildings offered an urban counterpart to the suburban homes of my childhood dreams and reflected some sort of ideal of what a city should look like. In a way, these large-scale constructions were the opposite of their domestic peers, cold and comfortless and not at all homey. But in another sense, they were perhaps not that different after all: the thought of being cozied up in a sleekly appointed office in one of these buildings, safe from the chaos of the city below was, in its way, as reassuring a feeling as lounging quietly in a suburban home. Then, there was the creeping sense that the antiseptic homes in antiseptic communities like those manufactured for Homearama might not be as desirable as I had once thought them to be.

Either of these models, the urban or suburban, though, would certainly be anathema to that hater of modernist architecture and 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta—at least as imagined by Jarett Kobek in his fictionalized take on that man’s life and death. In the short novel simply titled Atta, Kobek, surely one of our most vital writers, makes a particularly audacious move (beyond that initial audacious move of non-judgmentally telling the story of the notorious terrorist, of course): he frames his hero’s worldview in terms of architectural critique. In Kobek’s telling, Atta, a former student of architecture and engineering, holds out a particular hatred for modernist design, which he sees as emblematic of western arrogance with its impulse to dominate the lives of its citizens, and of which his final target, the Twin Towers, is the ultimate exemplar. Modernist buildings represent, as Atta sees it, an inhuman architecture, imposed from on-high, the exact opposite of the natural forms of city planning that have risen up naturally throughout most of recorded history. “Natural, organic growth is smart growth,” Atta writes in an architectural proposal, “informed by the daily routines of the city’s people.”

Throughout the book, Kobek keeps us close to Atta’s thoughts and judgments in chapters that alternate between the first and third person. These chapters—which follow Atta’s thoughts as he prepares for the attack on the Towers and looks back on his life, musing on not only architecture but the larger strains of both traditional Islamic and western culture—put the reader in a challenging position. While many of Atta’s viewpoints are obviously loathsome, some, like those that critique American imperialism, make quite a bit of sense. And for me, among those that most resonate are those very takedowns of modernist architecture so at odds with my youthful enthusiasms. After living in New York for a decade and a half and seeing the endless proliferation of glassy luxury apartment buildings, creating a new skyline of horror in formerly low-rise Brooklyn, the romance of tall, sleek structures has definitively worn off. Similarly, an ill-advised recent stint as an HGTV watcher left me soured on the sameness of what I soon discovered has become a default interior design aesthetic (open floor plans, blond wood floors, and kitchen islands), and which characterizes the design of not only all the suburban homes showcased on that network but also the interiors of every new luxury apartment in Brooklyn and, unfortunately, my childhood dream house as well. Temperamentally, I still prefer an uncluttered home and I’ll never lose my taste for a good brutalist building, but, overall, an aesthetic that once seemed full of possibilities now feels cramped and imaginatively limited, even if it strikes me not so much, as it does Atta, as a symbol of arrogance as instead one of a rather extreme, and thoroughly dispiriting, complacency.