The design chosen to honor those who died at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, lets “absence speak for itself”–the absence of 2,982 victims and the Twin Towers. It’s an eloquent decision.
The process for deciding what will be built on the site of the Twin Towers has been unseemly at times, but it has triumphed with the winning design for the memorial.
“Reflecting Absence,” as it’s called, is the work of New York architect Michael Arad and Berkeley, Calif., landscape architect Peter Walker. In choosing this one out of more than 5,200 entrants, the 13-member jury said that Arad’s design makes “the voids left by the destruction the primary symbols of our loss. By allowing absence to speak for itself, the designers have made the power of these empty footprints the memorial,” anchoring it “deeply in the actual events it commemorates–connecting us to the towers’ destruction and . . . to all the lives lost on that day.”
The memorial features thin curtains of streaming water falling into two reflecting pools that encompass the footprints of the twin towers. At the center of each pool will be a sunken void that further evokes the dead. Etched in stone ribbons surrounding the 30-foot deep pools will be the names of each of the victims who perished that day when hijacked planes crashed into the towers, causing their collapse. The memorial also honors victims of the 1993 WTC bombing.
Ramps bordering each pool will lead down to the memorial spaces where visitors will be “removed from the sights and sounds of the city and immersed in a cool darkness.” On the western edge, a deep fissure will expose the towers’ original slurry wall from the plaza above to the bedrock below. A staircase will lead down to an underground center containing artifacts from the towers’ collapse, including twisted steel beams, a crushed firetruck and personal effects. Also on this level will be a large stone vessel containing unidentified remains, a private space for mourning.
Initially Arad’s design was set in a barren, cobblestone plaza punctuated by 100-foot tall white pine trees–a plaza as barren as the enormous windswept space that once sat between the two towers. But, with input from Walker, the revised design now includes living, growing groves of trees, “traditional affirmations of life and rebirth,” according to the jury.
Jury members made clear they don’t see the selection of this winning design as the end of the process, but rather as “one more stage of memory” that began with candlelight vigils on the night of Sept. 11 and will continue to be refined. It is–as it should be–a work in progress, properly reflecting the will of the living as well as the absence created that terrible day.
