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Tenemos algunos avionesWriting (Chapter)
“La mayor obra de arte que haya existido”. Entrevista de Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) a Karlheinz Stockhausen
Translation (Annex)
DPR
Translation (Annex)
Tenemos algunos aviones (We have some plains), one of the introductory texts for Destrucción, proposes a reading of September 11, 2001 not as an accident nor as an irrational eruption, but as a projective operation that directly interrogates architecture. Drawing on technical transcripts, aesthetic statements, and an analysis of Mohamed Atta’s architectural education and urban-planning thesis, the text displaces the figure of the “terrorist” toward that of the designer, situating the attack within a radical critique of architectural modernity: the grid, the highway, the skyscraper, and the aerial view. The airplane thus emerges as an expanded architectural device, capable of articulating city, technique, and violence, and of reinscribing 9/11 as an extreme—and perverse—form of architectural critique.
Tenemos algunos aviones includes two key interludes: the first one presents Karlheinz Stockhausen’s controversial post-9/11 interview, in which he characterizes the attacks as “the greatest work of art that has ever existed,” a exchange that probes the fraught boundary between art and crime, casting the extreme event as a rupture of perception, and draws on analogies from his own musical practice, Stockhausen frames art as a violent threshold that unsettles audiences, leaving the interview suspended between aesthetic provocation and ethical collapse; the second interlude is a direct transcription and translations of Mohamed El-Amir Atta’s Masters thesis, in which he presents Aleppo as an organically evolved city whose character emerges from centuries of everyday life. Mohamed El-Amir Atta (later known as the pilot of the first plane to strike the World Trade Center) criticizes elite-driven “Islamic-orientalist” redevelopment that imposes highways and skyscrapers, producing homogenization and social violence comparable to war. In response, they call for dismantling modern impositions and restoring traditional urban forms—markets, mosques, courtyard houses, and irregular streets—arguing that urban planning should serve people by minimizing violence against inherited habits and ways of life.