Pentagram Papers 41: WTC
Starting in 1978, Judith Turner began photographing the twin towers of the recently completed World Trade Center. Turner, whose iconic images helped to establish the reputations of the generation of postwar modernist architects that included Richard Meier, Charles Gwathmey and Peter Eisenman, was taken with the structural simplicity and abstract beauty of architect Minoru Yamasaki’s masterwork. Turner returned to the World Trade Center repeatedly over the next decade, conducting a personal project to document the towers’ elemental forms against the sky and in the surface reflections of surrounding buildings.
To mark the tenth anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center, 23 of these images have been published for the first time in Pentagram Papers 41: WTC. The suite of images is accompanied by a preface by legendary tightrope artist Philippe Petit. (On August 7, 1974, Petit walked a high wire illegally stretched between the twin towers, a feat chronicled in his book To Reach the Clouds, the basis of the 2008 Academy Award-winning documentary Man on Wire, as well as an upcoming feature film, The Walk.)
The Pentagram Papers series has been privately published since 1974 for the firm’s friends and colleagues. For this special edition, a limited number of copies are available for $20 each, with all proceeds to be donated to the National September 11 Memorial and Museum. Contact info@pentagram.com for details.
All photographs copyright © Judith Turner 2011.
Project Team: Michael Bierut, partner-in-charge and designer; Katie Barcelona, designer. Photographs by Judith Turner.