9/11 similarity puts Korean tower plan in doubt

"The Cloud," a design of two Seoul skyscrapers, is seen in this artist's rendering provided Dec. 12, 2011, by Dutch architectural company MVRDV.

/ AP Photo/MVRDV

A fiery blast rocks the south tower of the World Trade Center as hijacked United Airlines Flight 175 from Boston crashes into the building Sept. 11, 2001, in New York City.

/ Getty Images

A Dutch architectural firm might try to find a silver lining in its cloud that critics say resembles a World Trade Center under attack on Sept. 11, 2001.

Special Section: 9/11, Ten Years Later

The firm, MVRDV, apologized on its website Monday after being criticized for the resemblance between the exploding Twin Towers and the "pixelated cloud" designed to bridge two skyscrapers planned to rise above Seoul, South Korea.

"There is nothing finalized about the design," Seo Hee Seok, a spokesman for the project's developer, told Bloomberg News Tuesday.

The Seoul skyscrapers, designed to stretch 57 and 60 stories high, is planned for a development near U.S. Army Garrison Yongsan, the headquarters for U.S. armed forces in the country, which is slated to return to South Korean control by 2016, Bloomberg reported.

In its apology, the firm said it wasn't its intention for the building to resemble the attacks and that no issues were raised about it while designing the structure.

"Don't insult our intelligence," John Feal, a first responder who lost part of his foot after being injured at ground zero, told CBS News station WCBS-TV in New York. "To many, the wound hasn't closed, so when you see pictures like that it keeps that wound open."

But to Washington Post art and architecture critic Phil Kennicott, the controversy appears to be an effort "to use the meaning of the terrorist attack for larger, more overbearing cultural control."

Kennicott writes further: "Even if the Dutch design firm, MVRDV intended a reference to 9/11, there's no reason that reference should be read as mocking or ironic. It might easily be seen as an effort to freeze frame a traumatic event, in architectural form, and neutralize its shock and pain."

[MerchantMmo]

It could have been a mistake. An offending one but a mistake no less. This architecture just tells me how uneducated some people in korea are.

[coolmanmujra]

Korean tower plan

see in between videos
http://t.co/DFa6DNY4

[Jaylah54]

I didn't see the WTC when I saw the photo. I saw two very tall skyscrapers, so tall that they were even above the weather.

But I'll tell you one thing: I would hate to be one of the people that had to work in those cantilevered offices. I'm one of those chicken people that can't bring myself to look out of the "observation" floors of tall buildings.

[hawkeyenick]

talk about a hit piece, jesus

an entire retrospective at the end

real classy of the journalist

[AnnieDanny]

ooohhhh... that was a big OOPS wasn't it. When they compare the two photos side by side especially. Now I can't forget it.

It's a really cool idea for skyscrapers though. If not for 911, everybody would like it.

[thinkdeeply8]

If it wasn't intentional it was probably subconscious. We all have these images deep within our brains, even the Dutch. It's a bad comparison, but do you remember Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where the guy kept building a tower out of things like mashed potatoes? He knew it meant something, but didn't know what.

[erlindab]

"It might easily be seen as an effort to freeze frame a traumatic event, in architectural form, and neutralize its shock and pain." I don't think so, Mr. Kennicott. I am not an art/architecture critic, but before I read anything about this design, I swooned. My response was visceral. The design immediately reminded me of the twin towers. Nothing will ever neutralize the shock and pain of 9/11/2001. Nothing. New design, please.

[gruven13777]

This being the most vital news of the day to CBS sounds about right.

[trosendal]

Don't change anything about the design. It's beautiful. Only Americans can compare everything to 9/11 the rest of the world does not see this.

[Danize]

That design should be nominated for the Architectural Kitch award, for starters. You have no taste or sensitivity to other people's feelings, either. Any person, American or not, exposed to the mass media in the last decade or so will instantly see the two tower resemblance. To pretend otherwise is sheer stupidity.

[enlightenu]

regardless of the similarity, it is an awful design. The architectural language is just ugly on such a large scale as this. A building this size should be more graceful and flowing. It should have harmony in both proportion and scale at the same time. This design is just brutal.