WTC Memorial - by Michael Arad (Architect) and Peter Walker (Landscape)

Originally posted by tonyo.


Q+A - Michael Arad

Like all the finalists in the Ground Zero memorial competition, Michael Arad was a complete unknown until the jury plucked his design-a stark, minimalist scheme called "Reflecting Absence"-out of a pile of 5,201 entries. An assistant architect for the New York City Housing Authority, the Israeli-born Arad, 34, studied at Dartmouth and Georgia Tech and now lives in Manhattan with his wife and baby boy. But inexperience didn't keep him from submitting an entry that blatantly ignored some of the key competition guidelines. Arad's design challenged Daniel Libeskind's master plan by lifting the memorial out of the so-called bathtub and up to street level. It also pushed a pair of cultural buildings to the edges of the site so they wouldn't shadow the Twin Tower footprints, where Arad placed his sunken reflecting pools. As it happened, the judges were looking for just that sort of statement; after suggesting that Arad find an experienced collaborator to help him polish the rough edges of his design-he chose veteran landscape architect Peter Walker-the jury awarded him the commission in January.

http://www.idonline.com/images/qa/arad.jpg

Interview by Christopher Hawthorne. Portrait by Yoko Inoue.

Q: When did you first begin sketching ideas for a memorial?

A: A few months after 9/11. My initial idea was to place a memorial out in the Hudson River, two voids that would be close by but inaccessible. Water would flow in both but they wouldn't ever fill up. By October of 2002 I'd made a basic model of that design. Then, after seeing the master plans for the site begin to emerge, I started imagining a design for the site itself.

Q: Your entry, like a couple of others favored by the jury, defied the basic guidelines of the Libeskind master plan by bringing the memorial out of the bathtub and up to the street.

A: I wanted to connect the memorial to the city, to the life of the city. Keeping the void there seemed to sever the site.

Q: Peter Walker has said that in retrospect maybe he followed the guidelines too closely in his own entry, and that it took a younger, brasher designer to question the master plan as you did.

A: Well, I didn't enter with any expectation of the design going anywhere, so that might explain my willingness to bend the rules. But I also think the differences between our plan and the master plan have been overplayed. Daniel Libeskind's design for that part of the site was one large void. Ours has two smaller voids. And the process of walking down to the bedrock is part of both. There are real similarities in our approaches-they're just not as exciting for the press to talk about.

Q: Where were you when you found out that you'd been named a finalist?

A: I'd changed my cell phone from the one that I'd given the LMDC [Lower Manhattan Development Corporation], and so they called me and didn't get an answer. Then they sent me an email, and because my son was six weeks old at the time I wasn't checking my email all that often. So the news sat in my inbox for about three days. I came across it late one night.

Q: You have been aggressive so far in defending your design. There have even been some news reports that the LMDC had to ask you to stop bringing your lawyer to planning meetings.

A: That hasn't really been portrayed accurately. I believe strongly in the integrity of the design and I want to see it executed. And that's not true of everybody in the process.

Q: There has been a lot of discussion about what to do on the western edge of the site-whether it's worthwhile to spend roughly $1 billion to put several blocks of West Street underground, so there's not heavy traffic rushing right by the memorial.

A: I wish I were in more of a negotiating position on this issue than I am. It involves so many other entities. I think we need to find a way to maintain openness across the site but also keep the memorial protected from all kinds of traffic. What I really want to avoid at all costs is a large barrier between West Street and the site.

Q: How will security be handled at the memorial? Will people have to wait in long lines when the crowds are big, or go through metal detectors?

A: It's a major concern. I'm not really the right person to do that sort of analysis, but we're going to hire an expert and begin working that out with the Port Authority and the LMDC. It's early in the process, but we're very aware of security and how it might affect the experience of visiting the memorial.

Q: Some relatives of 9/11 victims have made a big push to include the relics from the attack-pieces of the towers, crushed fire trucks-in the memorial. Do you think a literal record of the attack will detract from the abstract nature of your design?

A: I was never against the inclusion of them. I just thought putting them above ground wasn't the right way to treat them. The way we've decided to handle those objects, below ground, they'll be protected. These pieces are very fragile. When I went out to the hangar to see them you could see huge flakes of rust falling off.

Q: How tough has it been to reach a compromise about marking the names of uniformed personnel as opposed to other victims?

A: The issue of names is one of the most difficult I've had to deal with. Some of the firefighters want their [peers'] names segregated as a way to mark their sacrifice, that they lost their lives trying to save other lives. But the victims' family members feel that would be putting a higher value on some names. I thought it was important to keep all the names together. But we'll mark the police and firefighters with a small shield or other symbol.

Q: What are the biggest misconceptions about your design? What has the press gotten wrong?

A: I wouldn't say the press has really gotten anything wrong. But it's been hard for people to understand the entirety of the design based on the handful of images that have been released so far. I hope in the coming months we'll be able to share more renderings and models. But in the end, the experience of actually standing there and physically experiencing the magnitude of the space and seeing all the hundreds of names of people who perished there-well, no rendering can convey that.

Christopher Hawthorne is a freelance architecture and design writer based in the Bay Area. He contributes regularly to The New York Times, Metropolis, and Slate.

www.idonline.com/qa

Blueprint of a Life

Architect J. Max Bond Jr. Has Had to Build Bridges to Reach Ground Zero

By Lynne Duke
Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, July 1, 2004; Page C01

NEW YORK

http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-d...869-2004Jul01L
J. Max Bond Jr., who will oversee the completion of the World Trade Center memorial, is one of the few black architects in the country.

He's 68, white-haired and exudes a comfortable-in-my-own-skin kind of dignity. J. Max Bond Jr. is kind of courtly, too, especially wearing an elegant suit and tie as he stands in the cavernous marble and glass lobby of One Liberty Plaza across the street from the World Trade Center site.

Bond is meeting Michael Arad there. The men, both architects, are to be photographed. But when Arad, 34, arrives, he takes one look at Bond and fears a faux pas.

Arad isn't wearing a tie. It seems a small thing. But to Arad, it is wrong. He had spoken respectfully of Bond some days earlier, had called him "accomplished" and a "gentleman." So Arad is quite serious about appearing appropriately attired with his architectural elder. He halts the photo shoot.

"You don't need a tie," Bond tells him reassuringly.

Bond wants to get moving. They've got a whole room filled with architecture and planning officials waiting for them upstairs. But Arad insists.

Pulling a tie from his suit pocket and slinging it around his neck, Arad protests that it's "a sign of respect."

"But we're supposed to reflect the difference: You're young and I'm old," Bond says with a laugh, as Arad turns his back to the camera and struggles with the tie.

Then he turns to Bond for inspection.

"Looks great," Bond says jovially, checking Arad's handiwork. "Very good, very good."

The two men face the camera, offering a portrait that is unprecedented. For the first time in the redevelopment of the trade center site, an African American is a major player.

While Arad is the lead architect on the World Trade Center memorial project, it is Bond's firm that will make Arad's design, "Reflecting Absence," a reality. Davis Brody Bond has been selected by the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. as the associate architects who will flesh out and complete the Arad design. And Bond is leading that team.

The contrasts between the two men begin with experience. In a turn of fate similar to the youthful Maya Lin's emergence in the 1980s as the designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Israeli-born Arad was a virtual unknown in his field, toiling away within a New York City agency. He designed police stations.

Bond's résumé is far more epic. A fellow in the American Institute of Architects (AIA), he's been an architecture educator as well as practitioner.

He's designed a memorial (the Martin Luther King Jr. crypt and memorial in Atlanta, for instance) and office buildings and libraries and university research facilities. He's designed in Ghana and Zimbabwe, too. He and his firm did designs for the old World Trade Center's plazas and concourses. In his early years, while in Paris just after finishing graduate school at Harvard, he worked on buildings designed by the famed Swiss-born French designer Le Corbusier, who conceived the buildings of the United Nations.

And the fact that Bond is black makes him a contrast not only with Arad but with the whole crowd of architects and planners and developers who've been steering the trade center redevelopment process. With the inclusion of Bond (and Richard Franklin, another African American colleague from his firm), the white male club at Ground Zero has been integrated.

It is the story of Bond's life.

A Lecture Ignored

At Harvard, those many years ago (not long after a cross-burning incident outside Bond's dorm), a friendly white professor took him aside to offer some advice: Forget it.

"There have never been any famous, prominent black architects," Bond recalls the professor saying. "You'd be wise to choose another profession."

Even in retelling it for the umpteenth time, Bond looks stunned at the patronizing gall.

"He thought he was being helpful," he says.

It did not matter to the professor, or perhaps he did not know, that a classical architect named Julian Abele, who was black, had designed the main Harvard library. And Bond knew Hilyard Robinson, the low-key modernist whose Langston Terrace Dwellings, built in 1937 on Benning Road in Northeast Washington, would ultimately be put on the National Register of Historic Places.

And had the professor been paying attention to the doings out west, he might have heard of Paul Williams, the flashy Los Angeles architect whose clients included Lucille Ball and Frank Sinatra. (Bond spent a summer working for Williams, even handled the tiling project inside Sinatra's house.)

So Bond knew it was possible to practice architecture. He persevered. He earned both his bachelor's and master's degrees in the field, becoming one of the scant few such men (or women) of color in his profession.

That is why, say observers, his new role in the trade center project is noteworthy, considering that architecture, even today, remains highly exclusive.

Dreck Wilson, a building official for the D.C. government and author of "African American Architects: A Biographical Dictionary, 1865-1945," describes Bond's new role as representative of "the mainstream acceptance of black architects, black designers."

If that is true, the numbers don't reflect it. Only 1 1/2 percent of the nation's licensed architects are black, says Dennis Mann, architecture professor at the University of Cincinnati and co-editor of the online Directory of African American Architects (blackarch.uc.edu). The National Organization of Minority Architects agrees with Mann. The AIA says it does not keep racial statistics.

Building Resentment

Of Davis Brody Bond's 59 architects, about half are minority, says Bond, which makes the firm quite an anomaly in the field.

Mann calls Bond "one of the finest designers in the country."

That hasn't kept him from his share of controversy. Bond's design for an expansion of the Harvard Club in midtown Manhattan caused a firestorm among some Harvard alumni. Traditionalists wanted the expansion to repeat the neo-Georgian style of the main building. Even though a club selection committee had approved the modernist glass building that would bring new meeting rooms, hotel accommodations and a gymnasium, opponents of the Bond design went to court to try to stop it.

Bond says the opposition was so intense that he wondered if there were unspoken undercurrents of race involved. Gender dynamics may also have been at play, he suggests, since part of the project included adding women's restrooms where once there had been none.

The dispute reached a head during a general Harvard Club membership meeting where the design was discussed and debated. It was "the ugliest [meeting] I've ever been to," he says now.

Lonnie Soury, a spokesman for the club, acknowledges the acrimony.

"There was a lot of nastiness out there," Soury says, referring to the dispute. The design became a battleground over the Harvard image.

But the court challenge failed. The new Harvard Club opened last fall.

Looking for a New York industry voice to sum up Bond's reputation, we find Frederic Bell. He's executive director of the AIA's New York chapter. But he's not quite objective, as it turns out. Bond was Bell's professor at Columbia University. Bell considers him a mentor.

"Max has been a hero not just for African American students -- and I'm not one -- but to many others," Bell says. "He's opened people's eyes not only to other people's worlds but also to the interconnection of the real world with the design world."

While teaching at Columbia, Bond sat on the city planning commission and designed in his private practice -- a heavy load for anyone. That is why Bell calls him "a renaissance man. He has excelled at everything he's ever done."

A genial man who is both genteel and informal in his manner, Bond has thrived as an architect, he says, because of "a lot of luck." But it is clear that mediocrity of any kind was unacceptable in the Bond family, where his father, an educator and university president, pushed him hard to achieve.

"We had a funny relationship," Bond says of his late father. "It was a good relationship particularly in terms of these high expectations. . . . But the difficult side is you're always expected to do better."

The Bonds, it seems, had made a tradition of plowing right through obstacles. At a time of deep segregation and racism, J. Max Bond Sr., for instance, earned his doctorate in sociology and economics in 1934 from the University of Southern California. And Bond's mother, Ruth Clement Bond (who turned 100 in May), majored in literature during undergraduate work at Northwestern University in Illinois.

The elder Bonds wanted their son to be a doctor. They even arranged for him to work as a hospital emergency room orderly in Louisville, the family's home town.

"The first time I saw an operation, I virtually fainted," Bond says.

He had found his own passion years earlier, when his parents lived in Tuskegee, Ala., where the elder Bond taught at Tuskegee Institute after a stint as a dean at Dillard University in New Orleans.

Something about campus buildings fascinated the young Bond, who lived in Tuskegee between the ages of 5 and 9. He watched a dormitory being built and wondered how it happened. The architectural bug had caught him.

He became especially enamored of the huge airplane hangars at a military complex next to the institute. That was the training base for the storied black pilots, the Tuskegee airmen.

A Site of Sorrow

Toward the east, a still life of gargantuan rooftop water towers stretches across Manhattan. That's one of the views from the 10th-floor offices of Davis Brody Bond.

To the west, one sees the Hudson River and the skyscrapers of New Jersey. North is the tangle of buildings low and high, old and new, that form an ever-changing, ever-evolving cityscape so thick that at night Bond says his office seems to float in a "bowl of lights."

Looking south is to remember what once stood there, a mile away, and what now is gone. Bond and all the others at his firm can see the absence.

Firm staffers stood at this south-facing window on Sept. 11, 2001, and watched the World Trade Center burn and collapse after the terror attacks.

Bond was up in Harlem that day, attending a meeting about the renovation of the Apollo Theater. Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) was in the same meeting. Bond learned that planes had struck the twin towers when he heard one of Rangel's aides come in and say something like, "Mr. Rangel, you have to get out of here."

One of the architects in Bond's firm lost his wife during the attack. And for months thereafter, Bond says, the firm kept that south-facing window covered so staffers would not have to see the haunting landscape of Lower Manhattan.

Remembering was difficult. What was gone seemed so ever present.

And that, really, is the essence of the memorial design. "Reflecting Absence" includes a vast, austere yet tree-studded plaza (to be designed by landscape architect Peter Walker) that will surround the architectural footprints of the old twin towers. Those footprints are to be preserved 30 feet below ground, where pedestrian visitors will reach them via ramps. In each void, a memorial fountain will flow down the walls and into pools surrounded by stone etched with the names of the dead from the 1993 and 2001 terror attacks.

Bond has worked with water. He has used it to evoke life and continuity. At the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, King's crypt is surrounded by a pool of water.

Bond also has grappled with ways to give space and respect to the site of an iconic tragedy. The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute stands adjacent to the 16th Street Baptist Church, where four little black girls were killed in a 1963 bombing.

He has embraced Arad's design. Its power, he says, is in the serenity it evokes. And he is pleased that a young architect received the commission. With Bond's guidance, Arad says, his design will be "further clarified, as we take it from the broad strokes and work on the details."

Those details are daunting, considering that the memorial fountains are to run year round, meaning freezing has to be avoided; and considering that the treed plaza will dump tons of leaves on the site; and considering that the place will likely be jammed with tourists. The list of challenges goes on.

"There are lots of issues to be resolved," Bond says. "Our role is to take the design and develop it and carry it through. . . . Not to change the design, but to really implement it and make it work."

Rewriting History

The ruins seemed to command the earth. They were Roman and grandiose.

The temples and theaters were stunning to see. Though decayed, they still towered over the Tunisian terrain near the town of Dougga. Some 20 centuries had passed since the Romans conquered the Numidians there, but Bond, visiting in 1960, still could feel ancient Rome's power.

It was, Bond says, the "architecture of conquest," of one culture asserting itself over another. And suddenly Bond was struck by something: Beyond pure aesthetics, architecture is about power, the power to transmit a culture's symbols, its politics.

That is why, he realized, "when one culture dominates another it brings its literature, its language, its religion and its architecture."

He didn't learn this in school. There had been no philosophical talk about power and conquest and architecture's role. In fact, Tunisia made him realize the limits of his formal studies. But what two Harvard degrees had not given him he would pick up on his own during that summer he calls "a great moment in my architectural development."

En route to study in France on a Fulbright scholarship, Bond, then 23, had stopped in Tunisia to visit his parents. After a foreign aid stint in Haiti, and three years as president of the University of Liberia, Bond Sr. by this time was administering overseas education programs for the State Department. The elder Bonds lived near Sidi bou Said, a quaint seaside village whose buildings were a stark contrast to the grand ruins of ancient times.

As he strolled the town's winding cobblestone lanes, Bond marveled at the gentle artistry of the whitewashed and blue-shuttered Arab homes, with their lush courtyards, that climbed the cliffs over the Mediterranean as if hugging the land.

He'd been taught that buildings such as those were only "vernacular" architecture. It was a term he often felt was used to marginalize the architecture of the Third World, which often was more functional than artistic, compared with the architecture of Europe and the United States.

He'd been taught that real architecture had its roots in the structures of the European classical era and that ancient ruins like those at Dougga were the source from which this architectural-cultural dogma grew.

"The European architecture was the only architecture that was 'high art,' and that was just accepted," Bond says of his formal training.

"So in Tunisia, one really begins to see, well, wait a minute: This really is not true."

On his strolls through Sidi bou Said, Bond came to see the lovely white stone houses as a form of high art in their own right. It was there, he says, that his aesthetic sensibility and his architectural philosophy were born.

Help Not Wanted

You can see Tunisia in the King Center -- in the columns and the barrel-vaulted roofs. You can also see the influence of Thomas Jefferson, Bond says, if you know about the curved walls that Jefferson used in his designs.

It is the kind of eclecticism that is Bond's trademark, though he acknowledges that the influence of Jefferson is perhaps odd, considering Jefferson's history on race.

The Africanist aesthetic that infuses Bond's modernism also can be seen in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Its octagonal design evokes the influence of Africa in the earliest buildings built by slaves here in the United States, churches.

After Tunisia, Bond spent time studying Le Corbusier, Auguste Perret and other designers of religious buildings. Then, Le Corbusier's former studio chief, Andre Wogenscky, hired Bond to work on a couple of Le Corbusier's projects. He spoke to the great architect by phone, though he never actually met him.

"You don't get introduced to the big man," he says with a laugh of the year he worked in the famed architect's shadow.

As his time in Paris wound down, Bond sent letters to five architecture firms in the United States, seeking interviews. With his credentials and early experience, he received enthusiastic responses from all five. He made appointments.

At each firm, his arrival -- the black face behind the impressive qualifications -- stirred "this moment of confusion."

"Then somebody would come out and say, 'There must be some mistake. We don't have work.' "

Eventually, he did get work. But he was wiser, even hardened by the rejections, "another one of those rude awakenings."

Three years later, he and his wife, Jean Carey Bond, decided to move to the newly independent West African nation of Ghana, which at that time was filled with promise under President Kwame Nkrumah. Many young professional black Americans saw wide-open opportunities there that they would not find in the United States. And they were swept up in the belief that "we were going to help build a new African state," Bond says.

The Bonds lived there for four years, during which he worked for the national construction company. In effect, he says with a laugh, he became the "palace architect."

"I'd design it, and they'd build it."

The push was primarily for libraries, as part of Nkrumah's campaign to spread literacy throughout Ghana. Bond designed the Bolgatanga Library -- his first major project. And it remains, to this day, his favorite design. It is one story tall, with four separate buildings under an "umbrella"-style roof, with ventilation occurring naturally through the open spaces between roof and walls.

The Bolgatanga, he says, is "the firstborn."

"As an architect, I sort of grew up in Ghana."

Returning to the United States, Bond established the Architect's Renewal Committee of Harlem. He taught at Columbia University and served as dean for a time for the school of architecture at the City University of New York. He also co-founded the firm of Ryder Bond and Associates, which merged in 1990 with the firm of Davis Brody & Associates.

The Best Revenge

His father died in 1991. There was the grief, and there was the taking stock. Bond began to consider his state of mind. He began to ponder bitterness.

His father wasn't the worst example, he says, but many of the African American men he knew in his father's generation were gripped by bitterness because of the limitations that racism had placed on their lives. He saw men being squeezed by their bitterness, almost debilitated by it.

Obviously, racism had impacted his life. And the battle against it was part of the Bond family's daily life. (One of Bond's cousins, by the way, is Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP.)

But the younger Bond did not want to fall into a private hell of "If I were white" and fill in the blanks: The jobs would have opened up; his work would have been published more, causing more work to come. All that may be true, he says, but it gets nowhere to wallow in the hypothetical.

"I would argue that, yes, maybe if I'd been white I'd have done this and that," he says. "But on the other hand, I never wanted to be white. I always felt I was fortunate to be black" and thus have a broader frame of reference on the world.

He has tried to work through his own bitterness, with his wife's help. (He calls her "my best friend." She is a publicist for the Black Radical Congress, a national group of activists and academics.) But a spark of it is there.

He is asked if he holds a grudge against those five unnamed firms that refused even to interview him once they saw he was black. He smiles slyly and dramatically hisses, "Yessss." The sting of those rejections is still there.

Yet he is careful not to name the firms now. He doesn't want to pick a fight or cause a stir. Some of those big names are still prominent. So is Bond. And that, for him, is the victory.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

Very interesting article...thanks. It is the first I've read of Mr. Bond.

NY1

WTC Memorial Designer Feels The Weight Of Responsibility

SEPTEMBER 08TH, 2004

Michael Arad gazes out onto the World Trade Center site, knowing the memorial he's designing will one day be a centerpiece of a rebuilt Lower Manhattan.

“In many ways it's like every other project; you have to work it every day, work the details out,” he says. “In other ways it's an incredibly emotional project.”

A memorial jury chose Arad and landscape architect Peter Walker's vision from among more than 5,200 submissions. It's called “Reflecting Absence,” and includes two reflecting pools and a paved stone field to remember the victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and those killed in the 1993 Trade Center bombing.

Since winning the design competition, a number of other members have been added to the design team.

“What's been incredible in this is that what started in my apartment working alone in one room has snowballed into this huge team, and as we add more and more people it's a real challenge to lead such a team,” says Arad. “But it's been going very well.”

“All of them have been working together and moving the memorial forward on schedule,” says Lower Manhattan Development Corporation President Kevin Rampe. “We are going to have a schematic design for the memorial at the end of this year, which is right on the schedule the governor set forth.”

So now Arad and his team work on a design that each day takes form in greater and greater detail, and try and tackle a myriad of operational issues which appear along the way.

“It seems like a huge site until you realize that there are so many things you want to put in it; underground road networks, train station, subway lines, buildings,” he says. “And we don't even have the designers on board yet, so trying to keep together all of these things going simultaneously is very difficult.”

But Arad says what's even harder is the pressure to somehow make all of the stakeholders in this project happy. His plan left exposed bedrock 70-feet below grade at the tower footprints, allowing access to family members. Yet a family group recently sued the LMDC and Port Authority to stop construction at the site until the agency's meet requirements for preserving it, particularly the footprints.

Arad first dealt with the controversy when deciding how to list the names of victims. In the end, the plan lists names randomly, with rescue workers designated by the insignia of their agency.

“It's always been the most difficult part, dealing with this project, how important and emotional it is,” says the designer. “The family members I've met with, some of them love the design, some of them don't, but all of them have been very supportive and very kind.”

As Rampe puts it, nothing worth doing is easy.

“At the end of the day, we can't forget what this is really all about, which is the 3,000 people we lost on September 11th, the heroism we saw, and building an appropriate and fitting memorial,” he says.

And when Michael Arad looks down onto the site, he can't even imagine how he will feel when the memorial is completed.

“Walking by the site coming down here for this interview, it brings back the importance of this to you,” he says.

The importance of creating a memorial which will provide peace, remembrance, and hope in the midst of a rising downtown.

- Roger Clark

Footprints will be preserved
at World Trade Center


By KEVIN M. RAMPE

In recent weeks, there have been attempts to mislead those who lost loved ones in the attacks on 9/11 that the footprints of the twin towers will not be preserved. Nothing could be further from the truth.
From the very beginning of the planning process for the World Trade Center site, at the direction of Gov. Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg, the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. has been firmly committed to ensuring that the historic nature of the site is not only recognized but preserved.

As a result of the efforts of the LMDC and the Port Authority, the resilient slurry wall will remain exposed, the location of the footprints on the PATH platforms will be designated and the original entrance from the Trade Center to the E subway line and artifacts from the remnants of the parking garage in the northwest corner of the site will be preserved.

Make no mistake, the footprints and the now-exposed box beams that mark the losses of 9/11 also will be preserved in perpetuity. Our commitment is clear - access to and preservation of the footprints will be achieved.

The powerful memorial design by Michael Arad and Peter Walker will not only delineate the outline of the footprints, it will provide meaningful access to both the north and the south footprints at bedrock. All family members will be able to continue to journey to bedrock to remember and reflect.

The governor declared that there will be no building on the sacred footprints, and we will carry out his edict.

We have gone to great lengths to leave the footprint area free of all but the most essential infrastructure. To do so, the entire substructure of the site has been reconfigured so necessary truck ramps will not traverse the footprints underground. The permanent central chiller plant will not disturb the footprints. The only remaining infrastructure in that area will be that which supports the memorial and the restored PATH service, itself a symbol of our resolve to rebuild.

While we continue to work to preserve the site's past, we will continue to work to restore the site to its historic role as a center of commerce, as it was on Sept. 10, 2001.

The rebuilt World Trade Center that we will erect together will always be, first and foremost, a tribute to the heroes we lost that day.

It will also be the legacy we leave for generations to come. That legacy will be one of resiliency, strength and a triumph of the goodness of humankind over evil.

Rampe is president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp.

Originally published on September 16, 2004

I still can't help but thinking that we're making a horrible mistake, here, with the so-called "Freedom Tower," the memorial, and the other stunted and banal structures that will line the site. Quite frankly, the architectural culture of our time is simply not great. And what we're going to get is the result of that mediocrity. The spectacular Twin Towers should have been rebuilt, albeit taller and much stronger. That would have been the finest memorial to the victims, and to the determination of this country to stand firm in the face of vicious murderers. We had an opportunity, here, to correct a mistake in the course of history. Opportunity lost!

I wrote a letter to the NY Daily News in response to the aforementioned article by Kevin Rampe as follows:

To: NY Daily News
voicers@edit.nydailynews.com

Dear Sir/Madam:

The article by Kevin Rampe, “Footprints will be preserved at World Trade Center,” would have us believe that the LMDC and Port Authority have taken all precautions and due diligence with preserving history at the WTC site. It is what Mr. Rampe omits from his congratulatory adulation of these governmental agencies that can point to the real attitude that these public entities have toward the issue of historic preservation at the WTC site.

Not only have historic artifacts been allowed to deteriorate through lack of care at a hangar at JFK airport by the Port Authority, but this same agency has increased the number of tracks that existed prior to 9/11. The Coalition of 9/11 Families is currently suing both of these agencies to prevent an additional platform from being placed on the footprints.

The slurry wall, which was to be exposed to view proudly in the sunlight as required by the memorial competition, now occupies an underground setting. This same memorial design, which relegates all artifacts to the underground, delineates the outline of the footprints not at their true and full measurements but at 15% less than the historical reality due to a lack
of feasibility of this design.

It’s an historical fact that the LMDC considered building a bus garage at the north tower footprint less than a year ago. The LMDC has also reported that "the site's location, setting, feeling and association - not the structural remnants of the World Trade Center - render it historic." These are not words or deeds that are concerned with historic preservation, but with the return of business as usual.

The public cannot rely on the LMDC and Port Authority to preserve the historic importance of the World Trade Center site. It is only through the commitment of individuals outside these agencies that the historic legacy of this site will be safeguarded.

Gotta gripe?

Priceless. But I expected a line stretching from Chinatown.

It was Sunday morning. I'm going to check it out one weekday at lunchtime. Funny, it's aimed at the courthouse.

Staten Island Advance

9/11 kin hire lobbying firm for memorial effort

Tuesday, October 19, 2004
By TERENCE J. KIVLAN

WASHINGTON -- A group of Sept. 11 victims' relatives seeking to have remains of World Trade Center victims removed from the Fresh Kills landfill have hired a lobbying firm here to push for a federal mandate for the plan.

WTC Families for a Proper Burial have retained C.L.A. Group to help secure congressional legislation or a White House executive order requiring New York City to move more than a million tons of fine-dust remains, mixed with cement dust, pulverized glass and ash from the collapsed buildings, from Fresh Kills for interment at the memorial planned for the World Trade Center site.

The city has insisted that all identifiable human remains have been removed from the debris and cites the enormous cost of moving the huge amount of material.

Laurence Socci, C.L.A. executive manager, said he intended to start his lobbying effort by arranging meetings between Sept. 11 relatives and New York and New Jersey lawmakers.

"I think they will be listen," said Socci. "I don't know if anyone can live with fact that a member of their family is buried in a garbage heap for all eternity."

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has rejected removal as too expensive -- estimating the cost at over $400 million -- and promised "proper tribute" at Fresh Kills.

Supporters have accused the mayor of exaggerating the cost. "It is more like $10 million," said Socci.

A number of members of Congress, including Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, have endorsed the removal project. Sens. Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer of New York have also announced their support.

Legislation requiring the removal was introduced in Albany but has not won the backing of Republican Gov. George Pataki.

Terence J. Kivlan is the Washington correspondent for the Advance. He may be reached at terence.kivlan@newhouse.com.

Copyright 2004 SILive.com. All Rights Reserved.

That's one million tons.

Daily News

Hailing chief WTC boosters

BY MICHAEL SAUL
DAILY NEWS CITY HALL BUREAU

Fund-raising for the World Trade Center memorial could get a big boost today, when Gov. Pataki announces that the nation's four living former Presidents are putting their weight behind the project, the Daily News has learned.

Pataki will reveal at a lunch today that former Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George Bush and Bill Clinton have pledged their support for the memorial and agreed to serve as honorary members of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation's board.

"The fact that these four esteemed former leaders of our country have agreed to lend their efforts to the foundation will help propel the creation of a fitting and lasting tribute to those we lost at the World Trade Center," a source familiar with the foundation told The News.

The memorial design was unveiled more than 10 months ago, but officials have had trouble finding a high-powered leader for the gargantuan fund-raising effort.

The foundation needs to raise between $400 million and $600million for the construction of the memorial and two cultural buildings at Ground Zero.

Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg are scheduled to announce who will spearhead the foundation within the next two weeks.

In January, when the memorial design was unveiled, John Whitehead, chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., and others said they expected a formal launch of the board later that month.

In May, Pataki planned to announce that Citigroup Chairman Sandy Weill and mega-developer Jerry Speyer had agreed to serve as co-chairmen. But both men, citing time constraints, ended up turning it down.

More than 20 people - a mix of victims' family members, business leaders and civic leaders - now have agreed to serve on the board.

During today's speech, Pataki is also expected to provide an update on the progress of rebuilding lower Manhattan. He will largely focus on an "aggressive timetable" for building the memorial and the cultural plans for Ground Zero, a source familiar with the speech said.

Originally published on November 22, 2004

November 23, 2004

Pataki Offers Peek at 9/11 Memorial Progress

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/...rebuild.xl.jpg
Gov. George E. Pataki touches the cornerstone for the Freedom Tower on his tour of ground zero. In his report to the Association for a Better New York, Mr. Pataki said work on the tower would begin early next year.

Having been eclipsed for most of this year by other issues at ground zero, the World Trade Center memorial returned to the forefront yesterday as Gov. George E. Pataki offered a preview of the completed design, which he said will be ready next month.

In describing the memorial - "Picture the old foundations of the Louvre in France or the catacombs at the Vatican" - Mr. Pataki said the column remnants of the twin towers would be kept visible, "laying bare the very roots of the towers as visitors absorb the meaning of what took place here."

The governor said that financing of the memorial should be the "first and most important" priority for the $816 million in federal grants that have yet to be allocated by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. He also called for an overall spending plan by March, since demands downtown far exceed the available grants.

Mr. Pataki said former Presidents Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton would serve as honorary members of the memorial foundation, which will raise money for the memorial and the cultural centers. The working members of the board are to be named next week by the governor and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

And Mr. Pataki announced that the underground memorial interpretive center, where artifacts and exhibits will tell the story of the trade center and the 2001 and 1993 attacks, will be designed by the Manhattan firm Davis Brody Bond, which is already associated with Michael Arad and Peter Walker on the memorial itself; the Norwegian firm Snohetta, which is working on the museum complex at the trade center site; and Howard-Revis Design of Washington, which specializes in designing exhibits.

J. Max Bond Jr., a partner in Davis Brody Bond who accompanied Mr. Pataki at ground zero yesterday, said, "Of course we're pleased, if somewhat apprehensive, since the stakes are so high and the projects are important and demanding."

In the governor's fourth progress report on Lower Manhattan, to 420 guests of the Association for a Better New York at the Ritz-Carlton New York in Battery Park City, he was short on big news - when will the damaged Fiterman Hall be razed? what is the status of the West Street bypass? where will an extra $3 billion come from to build a train tunnel from downtown to Long Island? - but long on smaller yet vital details.

For instance, he outlined the early construction schedule of the Freedom Tower. Excavation of 18,000 cubic yards of bedrock for the column footings will begin in February, he said. By April, steel and concrete will arrive. A three-foot-thick concrete liner will be built to reinforce the slurry wall around the trade center foundations. Later in 2005, he said, the floor slabs and tower columns of the skyscraper will start to rise.

Next month, Mr. Pataki said, construction is to begin on the new South Ferry subway station and on two stations that are part of the planned Fulton Street Transit Center on Broadway. Also next month, he said, deconstruction will begin on the damaged, shrouded 40-story Deutsche Bank building across Liberty Street from the trade center site.

After his speech, Mr. Pataki visited the 21st floor of the Deutsche Bank building and then the muddy pit of ground zero, where outlines of the column remnants of 1 World Trade Center have been exposed.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

From Downtown Express
http://www.downtownexpress.com/

Gov Pataki announced:

Memorial architects Michael Arad, Peter Walker and Max Bond in December will unveil the final model for Arad’s “Reflecting Absence” design for two sunken reflecting pools where the Twin Towers once stood. Arad and Bond walked with Pataki in the memorial area Monday. Arad said later that the access to the memorial from Liberty St. will be decided soon, once a decision is made on where to place the ramp for delivery trucks and tour buses.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ZippyTheChimp

Staten Island Advance

9/11 kin hire lobbying firm for memorial effort

Tuesday, October 19, 2004
By TERENCE J. KIVLAN

WASHINGTON --

... to help secure congressional legislation or a White House executive order requiring New York City to move more than a million tons of fine-dust remains, mixed with cement dust, pulverized glass and ash from the collapsed buildings, from Fresh Kills for interment at the memorial planned for the World Trade Center site. ...

Copyright 2004 SILive.com. All Rights Reserved.

---

The Hell they will. Downtowners will never let a few fanatics turn our neighborhood into a giant toxic waste dump.

Damn straight.

New Board Of Directors Chosen For WTC Memorial

DECEMBER 01ST, 2004

NY1

A new board of directors was chosen Wednesday to build, own and operate the World Trade Center memorial.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor George Pataki were on hand for the announcement at 3 World Financial Center.

Among the 31 board members of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation are business leaders, philanthropists and victims’ families. The list includes Disney Chairman Michael Eisner, actor Robert De Niro, broadcaster Barbara Walters, and Monica Iken, who lost her husband Michael in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the WTC.

“I just really feel that Michael is looking down on me now and is honored that I’m here for him and all those who are not here anymore,” said Iken.

The four living former U.S. presidents – Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford - will serve as honorary members of the board.

“Generations from now, people not just from around America but from around the globe will come here, and they will want to have that same feeling of what happened and the ability to appreciate and understand the magnitude of the sacrifice and the loss,” said Pataki.

“There isn't a more noble task before us than to honor the [more than] 2,700 souls who lost their lives on September 11,” said Bloomberg.

It took months to put the board together, and it still doesn't have a leader. Several big names turned down the job, so John Whitehead of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation will be in charge for now.

Officials insist they aren't having problems finding a permanent chair.

“It's not a matter of picking somebody who can raise the most money and is the biggest philanthropist. The key here is the individual who is going to lead this foundation is going to have a real moral responsibility,” said the LMDC’s Kevin Rampe.

The board is responsible for raising $500 million for the memorial and cultural institution at the site. The memorial, called “Reflecting Absence,” will include reflecting pools and sunken voids around the footprints of the twin towers.

The site will also serve as a final resting place for all unidentified remains of those killed in the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and February 26, 1993.

December 2, 2004

31 Named to Raise Funds for Memorial to Sept. 11

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/...emorial_lg.jpg
Before the announcement: from left, Jerry Speyer, Kenneth Chenault, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Michael Eisner and Gov. George Pataki.

The task of raising half a billion dollars to build a World Trade Center memorial, a museum building and a performing arts center will fall to a foundation made up of captains of finance and real estate, cultural leaders, media heavyweights and seven relatives of those killed on 9/11.

After months of searching and one awkward false start last spring when two prospective co-chairmen, Jerry I. Speyer and Sanford I. Weill, backed away from the job, Gov. George E. Pataki and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg were able yesterday to name 31 members of the board of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation.

John C. Whitehead, the chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, will head the foundation until the board members have a chance to meet next month and select a chairman. Until yesterday afternoon, even the designated members did not know whom all their colleagues would be.

Heading the list of boldface names, in one arena or another, are Robert DeNiro, who has been a presence in TriBeCa for many years; Barbara Walters of ABC; David Rockefeller, who was deeply involved in the original development of the World Trade Center; and Michael D. Eisner, the chief executive of the Walt Disney Company.

The roster seems to reflect some geopolitical ticket-splitting, with the chairmen of giant downtown companies like American Express, American International Group and the Bank of New York balanced by Robert Wood Johnson IV, the owner of the New York Jets, who hopes to build a football stadium on the far West Side.

"You probably won't find a board of any higher caliber anywhere in the city," said Mayor Bloomberg, who knows a thing or two about philanthropy. "And that's really exactly what is called for because there isn't a more noble task before us."

The mission of the nonprofit foundation is to oversee and coordinate fund-raising and construction of the memorial and the cultural buildings at the trade center site. It will also own and operate the buildings.

Though the foundation will not formally begin raising money until next year, Mr. Bloomberg all but made the second big pledge as he stood at the lectern in the lobby of the American Express headquarters in the World Financial Center at Battery Park City.

"As the mayor of New York and also as a citizen of New York," he said, "I plan to do my part to ensure these projects reach their full potential."

The first big pledge may be said to have come last week, when Governor Pataki declared in a speech that the highest priority for the remaining $816 million in unallocated federal grants controlled by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation should be "to guarantee that we have the funds necessary to build the memorial." Conceivably, then, the foundation may start its $500 million campaign with several hundred million dollars already available.

Mr. Pataki had already said that four former presidents - Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Gerald R. Ford - would be honorary members. One of the working members will be Brian Mulroney, a former prime minister of Canada, whose presence symbolizes the international importance of the memorial, said Kevin M. Rampe, president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and a foundation board member.

Mr. Speyer, the chairman and chief executive of Tishman Speyer Properties, whose portfolio includes Rockefeller Center and the Chrysler Building, agreed to serve on the board that he would not lead. "I wanted to be helpful but, frankly, it was a matter of time," he said yesterday.

Two jurors in the memorial design competition, Paula Grant Berry and Vartan Gregorian, will have the chance to solicit money for the project whose fate they helped decide. No downtown resident is on the board now, but one will be named in coming weeks as the board reaches full strength, Mr. Rampe said.

Asked about the appropriateness of including Mr. Johnson of the Jets at a time when the team has so much business with the government, Mr. Rampe said he was a leading philanthropist. "Quite frankly," Mr. Rampe said, "it would have an omission not to have him on the board."

The members announced yesterday are:

Paula Grant Berry. Member of the memorial jury, vice chairwoman of the International Freedom Center. Wife of David S. Berry, who died in the south tower.

Sir John Bond. Chairman of HSBC Holdings.

Debra A. Burlingame. Founder of 9/11 Families for America. Sister of Charles Burlingame, captain of American Airlines Flight 77, which hit the Pentagon.

Russell L. Carson. Co-founding partner of Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, a private investment firm.

Kenneth I. Chenault. Chairman and chief executive of American Express.

Robert DeNiro.

Michael D. Eisner. Chief executive of the Walt Disney Company.

Maurice R. Greenberg. Chairman and chief executive of the American International Group.

Vartan Gregorian. President of the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Agnes Gund. President emerita of the Museum of Modern Art.

William B. Harrison Jr. Chairman and chief executive of J. P. Morgan Chase & Company.

Lee Ielpi. Director. Vice president of the September 11th Families Association, which is organizing the Tribute Visitors Center at ground zero. Father of Jonathan Lee Ielpi, a firefighter who died at the trade center.

Monica Iken. Founder of September's Mission, a foundation that supports the development of a memorial park at ground zero, and the wife of Michael Iken, who died in the south tower.

Robert Wood Johnson IV. Owner of the New York Jets.

Thomas S. Johnson. Retired chairman and chief executive of GreenPoint Financial Corporation. Father of Scott Johnson, who died in the south tower.

Anthoula Katsimatides. Assistant vice president for family relations at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. Sister of John Katsimatides, who died in the north tower.

Henry R. Kravis. Founding partner of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, an investment firm.

Ira M. Millstein. Senior partner at the law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges.

Brian Mulroney. Former prime minister of Canada.

Richard D. Parsons. Chairman and chief executive of Time Warner.

Peter G. Peterson. Chairman and co-founder of the Blackstone Group, an investment firm.

Kevin M. Rampe. President of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.

Thomas A. Renyi. Chairman and chief executive of the Bank of New York Company.

David Rockefeller.

Tom Rogér. One of the founders of Families of September 11. Father of Jean Rogér, flight attendant on the hijacked American Airlines Flight 11, which hit the north tower.

E. John Rosenwald Jr. Vice chairman of Bear, Stearns & Company.

Jerry I. Speyer. Chairman and chief executive of Tishman Speyer Properties.

Anne M. Tatlock. Chairman and chief executive of Fiduciary Trust.

Barbara Walters. ABC News correspondent.

John C. Whitehead. Chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.

John E. Zuccotti. Co-chairman of Brookfield Properties Corporation, which owns the World Financial Center.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Out of 31 members, I wish they could have named even one community resident (other than, I suppose, Robert Deniro, who really isn't representative). The Chair of Community Board One, perhaps. After all, the family members may come to visit once a year, but we are the ones who are going to have to live with whatever is built on the site (and, indeed, walk through it twice a day to get to and from the train station).

I think we have gotten more than could have been expected when the memorial selection process began. Raising the site to street level was a major concession to commercial and residential interests.

Robert Deniro is a good choice. He combines celebrity power with a genuine interst in the neighborhood. What sold me is during the debate over narrowing Greenwich St, the restaurant owners who were against the plan because it would eliminate double parking, enlisted DeNiro's aid. Although a restaurant owner himself, he endorsed the plan to narrow the street.

Woody Johnson????
Is that political or what?

The Holcaust Effect on Architecture: We Now Have Countermonuments Instead of Monuments

December 8 2004 at 5:35 PM
Philly

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Before Sept. 11 changed everything, the Holocaust changed everything.
And one thing the Holocaust changed was the function of architecture, especially public monuments, according to James E. Young, an author of several books on remembrance and a juror for the World Trade Center Site Memorial competition, who will speak at Rutgers University on Wednesday.

Since the death of 6 million Jews at the hands of the Nazis during World War II, Young said, monuments have been erected to express not triumph or greatness, but loss.

"It's a negative form, a counterpoint to the traditional phallic monuments with a ball," said James, who chairs the Judaic and Near Eastern Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. "The Holocaust actually seemed to affect architecture's assertions about itself."

Physically, a sense of loss has often been achieved through the use of "negative" space, as in the descending Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., or the rows of empty chairs at the Oklahoma City National Memorial, which James would term "countermonuments."

On Wednesday at 5 p.m., James will be at Rutgers' Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy for a lecture sponsored by the Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life titled, "Memory, Countermemory and the Meaning of Monuments after 9/11."

It is a poignant subject for New Jerseyans, who are left with only the memory of 700 neighbors, friends and family members killed in the 2001 attack.

"We are interested in subjects that engage concerns of social responsibility and public policy," said Professor Jeffrey Shandler, the center's acting director.

Last winter, Young and the 12 other jurors chose a Ground Zero memorial design by Michael Arad, consisting of reflecting pools and waterfalls built over the two square "footprints" of the twin towers. The memorial lets visitors descend to the level of bedrock, and the "box beam" columns that underpinned the towers.

New Jersey will also incorporate negative space in its memorial, just across the Hudson River at Liberty State Park - parallel stainless steel walls open at each end to form a view corridor focused on the empty sky where the towers once stood.

Young said the Ground Zero memorial has a twin goal of commemorating the loss of 2,749 lives in the towers, while celebrating the heroism of rescuers. In a way, Young said, there will be a traditional memorial at the trade center site that will embody the spirit of triumph, in the form of the proposed 1,776-foot Freedom Tower, which would recapture the crown of world's tallest building for the U.S.

"Something big was always going to be rebuilt there to commemorate what was lost and to replace what was lost," Young said of the Freedom Tower. "For many, that will be a kind of memorial."

December 17, 2004

Besides Memories, Memorial Will Preserve Remnants

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/...orial.1841.jpg
A 70-foot-tall, 250-foot-long section of the twin towers’ original slurry wall, shown in a computerized rendering is one of several remnants of the buildings destroyed on Sept. 11 that are to be included in the trade center memorial.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/...rial.184.2.jpg
Gov. George E. Pataki, right, discussing new details of the World Trade Center memorial with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who was flanked by the architects J. Max Bond Jr., left, and Peter Walker.

Video

The World Trade Center memorial will preserve not only the memory of those who died on Sept. 11, 2001, but the remnants - visible and even tangible - of the buildings that died that morning, too.

Severed during the clearing of ground zero, many steel and concrete column footings that still outline the perimeters of the twin towers will be made part of the memorial itself, as will a 70-foot-tall, 250-foot-long section of the original slurry wall.

Yesterday, more than a year after the world saw the earliest renderings of the plan called "Reflecting Absence," three architects guided their listeners -the governor and the mayor among them - on a trip through the schematic design, showing in more detail the spaces that will compose the memorial when it opens in 2009.

Beginning on a plaza forested with some 300 oak trees and a one-and-a-half-acre open area that can double as a civic gathering place for as many as 10,000 people, visitors will make their way down two switchback ramps, each as long as a city block, that will take them 30 feet below ground into the central memorial hall.

Here, both pool-filled voids marking the absent towers will be visible through cascading curtains of water, each ringed with the names of the dead. The pools will be centered within, but slightly smaller than, the tower outlines. Forty feet below, within inches of bedrock itself, unidentified remains will be entombed.

On this level, the north tower's foundations will be exposed in a chamber more than 60 feet high. Visitors will be able to touch the jagged steel and the rough concrete.

"I am looking forward to the day when I will be privileged to set foot and walk down those ramps to the bedrock and, like the family members, bend over and pay my tribute in an appropriate memorial," Gov. George E. Pataki said yesterday.

The schematic design represents an important step between conceptual renderings and the working drawings that will set precise dimensions, specify materials and account for the engineering necessary to make two vast waterfalls function, even in the dead of winter. To that end, a mockup will be built and tested in Toronto.

Kevin M. Rampe, the president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which is overseeing the memorial, described the new elements as "simple acts, knitted together to create a powerful memorial at the heart of the World Trade Center site."

Michael Arad, now a partner in Handel Architects, won the juried competition this year after he was joined in his entry by the landscape architect Peter Walker of Peter Walker & Partners. They were joined, in turn, by J. Max Bond Jr. and his partners at Davis Brody Bond.

At a news conference yesterday at the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, the three men took turns explaining the evolution of the design.

Perhaps the most significant development is the incorporation of the column remnants around the north tower footprint. These hollow steel boxes set in concrete will emerge from the floors of long galleries with 20-foot ceilings. On the west, the column gallery will open into a far taller chamber that will frame a giant section of the slurry wall, illuminated by a skylight.

"These cut-off columns, the foundation slabs, the slurry wall altogether form part of the literal story of survival of that day," Mr. Arad said. "And these are artifacts one can touch and sense the past through them, and through them register the brutality of these events."

The Coalition of 9/11 Families, which has championed the preservation of the column footings, said yesterday that it was encouraged by the new plan, though not wholly satisfied, since it failed to address the south tower footprint. (Mr. Rampe said it would be accessible through the adjoining memorial interpretive center, which is not yet designed.)

"We see our efforts reflected in the access to the bedrock footprints in this latest version of the design," said Patricia Reilly, a coalition board member and the sister of Lorraine Lee, who worked in the trade center and was killed in the attack.

Other aspects of the schematic design include a roughly 60-by-130-foot space known as Memorial Hall, on the intermediate level, where visitors will find directories guiding them to specific names, if they are searching out a particular victim among the randomly arranged displays on the low parapets surrounding the pools. Mr. Bond said that Memorial Hall would also be a "place of contemplation."

Another set of blocklong ramps will take visitors back into the realm of the living, among oak trees trimmed to form a continuous canopy roughly 20 feet high. They will be arranged irregularly when seen from the north and south - "just like walking in the woods," Mr. Walker said - but at the same time, they will form orderly rows from east and west, forming what he called "colonnades very much like a cathedral."

A tremendous challenge was posed by the changing contours around the site. With considerable effort, the designers managed to set the plaza level at an elevation in which it will be no more than three feet higher than the lowest adjoining sidewalk.

Because the plaza will be surrounded by streets, Monica Iken, the founder of September's Mission, said she worried that the memorial might feel like a "beautiful traffic median."

Amid all the talk of design and dimensions, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg recalled that the vastness of the loss was measured in single lives. He noted the presence in the audience of Christine Ferer, a board member of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Her husband, Neil D. Levin, the executive director of the authority, was killed on Sept. 11, 2001.

"We will not forget Neil," the mayor said. "Rest assured."

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/...AL_GRAPHIC.jpg

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Landscape adds a refinement

BY JUSTIN DAVIDSON
STAFF WRITER

December 17, 2004

The World Trade Center memorial nudged a little closer to reality with the unveiling yesterday of its schematic design, the third public draft of architect Michael Arad's plan to heal the world's most famous scar. The core of the $250 million project is still "Reflecting Absence," the proposal selected last year from among 5,201 entries: a pair of vast square pits lined with sheets of water and filled with pools of air.

But Arad's stark concept has been embroidered enough to make these acres seem less like a patch of grief on the city's wound than like a graft of vital new tissue. Landscape architect Peter Walker intends to scatter the four-sided site with about 300 oak trees that will poke through stripes of varied paving stones. What master planner Daniel Libeskind at first envisioned as a sunken lawn, and Arad later raised into a blank plaza, Walker has transformed into an urban grove.

Like New York City itself, the park will be a ruffled grid, at once regular and random. Approached from the north or south, the trees will present themselves as a noble jumble, scattered across the flat plaza. Once inside the bosk, those who turn to face east or west will see the oaks snap into orderly ranks.

The trees themselves will have a military bearing: Trimmed along their trunks so the branches begin to spread only 20 feet above the ground, they will eventually form a canopied arcade of summer greenery. Follow any row, and it will guide you from the transit station toward the Hudson River - from the city's ancient center to its landfill-expanded edge.

Ensconced in this forest is a grassy clearing, which, since everything on this site is inconceivably large, will occupy roughly the area of a football field. On this great lawn, which will hold 5,000 to 10,000 people, the anniversary ceremonies will be conducted every Sept. 11. But it will not primarily be a place of mourning. Inevitably, in greenery-starved downtown, a large patch of grass will teem with vibrantly unmemorial activities: sunbathing, flirting, lunch.

Walker's triumph is to have layered life and death. At street level, where the sounds of traffic will mingle with the rustle of water cascading into the memorial proper, the clotted bustle of lower Manhattan will open up into verdant leisure. But nobody who comes to this new park with an iPod or a sandwich will be able to forget about the gaping holes at its center.

"Because they are so monumental, the oaks' absence in the memorial is monumental, too," said Arad at yesterday's presentation in the Museum of Jewish Heritage. The dimensions of the twin pits, which outline the footprints of the felled towers, become apparent only as you approach them: two full city blocks of void.

They are approached by a ramp midway between them, in the heart of Walker's grove. The descent leads to the subterranean core of Arad's proposal: an enormous Memorial Hall that gives out onto both pits. Walkways lead around the edge of each hole, behind curtains of cascading water.

Whether this space has the feel of a vast warehouse or a sacramental space will depend a lot on the details, which are still being worked out by Arad and his collaborators at the firm of Davis Brody Bond. For now, the underground vault looks brutally plain, an aptly unsentimental but potentially sterile reminder that loss is neither fancy nor picturesque.

There will be reminders everywhere of the sheer might of the towers that once existed here. Visitors will see and touch the scarred foundation slabs, the stumps of the box beams and a 250-foot section of the slurry wall - that thick, bolted membrane of concrete and steel that divides the Hudson from dry land. This visible relic of survival is New York's Western Wall, our archaeological wonder, and it will reach 70 feet from bedrock to the street.

Light will stream down the wall from a glass slit in the paving, so this spare, modernist shrine can be solemn without being grim.

The lowest level of the complex will house the most literal reminders of what happened that morning. The Memorial Center, also accessible directly from a still-undesigned entrance at street level, will shelter the mangled remains of ambulances, firetrucks and other memorabilia. The architect Max Bond of Davis Brody Bond said one gallery would be more than 60 feet high, from the foundation to the oak trees' beds - high enough, that is, to accommodate vertically the colossal sections of the original steel columns salvaged from the site.

Arad, Bond and Walker have ensured that visitors can return from this new Hades without having to burst right away into the profane liveliness of Manhattan. The exit ramp emerges some distance from the entrance, so each descending Orpheus will not have to look returnees in the eye. The grove is a buffer, but a permeable one. No walls separate the memorial island from the street - only a strip of sidewalk, or a few wide, shallow stairs - so visitors can easily accomplish what thousands of people could never do again after the planes hit: get back to normal life.

Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.

Slide Show

http://renewnyc.org/News/MediaResources.asp

Design Group's Statement

Quote:

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Inevitably, in greenery-starved downtown, a large patch of grass will teem with vibrantly unmemorial activities: sunbathing, flirting, lunch.

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A year ago, I posted...

Quote:

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I want to be able to have lunch at the WTC plaza and flirt with the pretty women that walk by.

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Zippy - Simian, Viisionary, Lothario

Your foresight is as impressive as your vocabulary. :)

http://downtownexpress.com/de_84/maj...rmemorial.html

‘Majestic’ oaks for memorial
By Josh Rogers

A forest of oak trees will fill the World Trade Center memorial plaza under new details of the design unveiled Thursday.

Michael Arad, Peter Walker and Max Bond, the memorial’s architects, made adjustments to the design so pedestrians could enter the plaza from all four streets and they left an area where visitors could touch the World Trade Center bedrock and slurry wall and see many of the remnants of the boxbeam columns that supported the Twin Towers, answering a concern of many of the relatives of the victims of the Sept. 11 attack.

The initial reactions to the adjustments from residents who saw the changes were also positive. Jordan Gruzen, an architect and longtime resident of Battery Park City, said he likes that there is no longer a wall on West St. blocking access from his neighborhood. “It softens it with the stairs,” he said.

The Port Authority, owners of the site, agreed to requests from the city and Community Board 1 to move the truck and tour bus access ramp from the north side of Liberty St. to the south making entry to the memorial easier.

Walker, a California based landscape architect, said he chose oaks, because “it’s a majestic tree. It’s also relatively pest-free…. Oaks have a long life span and they are built sturdily. Sycamores tend to move around.”

The oaks will form a canopy with the lowest branches about 20 feet high. The spring green leaves will thicken to provide shade through the summer and on Sept. 11, and will turn to red and brown through the fall before dropping to let in light through the winter.

In April, designers will select about 300 oak samplings and later trim them and grow them in a place in or near New York City to prepare for the climate, Walker said. The trees will grow for three years before being transplanted to the memorial before it’s expected opening on the eighth anniversary of the attack, Sept. 11, 2009, when he hopes the canopy will be about 18 feet high and the tree tops 40 feet. They should grow to be between 50 and 60 feet high. About 15 percent of the trees will be other varieties, although those have not yet been selected, Walker said.

Memorial construction on the Reflecting Absence design of two sunken reflecting pools where the towers stood is expected to begin in 2006.
Walker said the street level forest would surround the reflecting pools and hopefully draw some people who live and work in the neighborhood in addition to relatives and tourists.

It will be “a little more refined, a little more quiet than your average park,” Walker said. “We want people to feel welcome — if you come in to have your lunch, read a book, bring your girlfriend, that’s fine.”

Arad, who conceived the design idea, said, “This plaza belongs both to the memorial and to the city.”

He thinks the most powerful moment for visitors will be when they descend the ramp and see the victims’ names, the falling water and the empty pool and experience — as he described it after the presentation — “the vast magnitude of the destruction, the vastness of the space and the thousands of names.”

His original idea, selected as one of eight finalists by a 13-member jury in a design competition organized by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, included a cultural building along West St. and a small number of trees. Jurors asked Arad to spruce up the design and he turned to Walker to redesign the plaza before it was picked in January.

There was still a wall along West St. to the dismay of some jurors, but Arad and his partners worked with the L.M.D.C. and the Port Authority to make adjustments to compensate for the different street level heights and the infrastructure underground.

One of the models at the presentation showed a tunnel under West St. adjacent to the memorial, but officials said no decision has been made yet on the contentious tunnel question. A spokesperson for the L.M.D.C. interrupted to prevent Arad from saying whether he thought a tunnel was a good idea or not.

Gruzen, the Battery Park City architect, said he disagrees with many of his neighbors and he was glad to see the tunnel in one model.
“I think they’re thinking about construction over the next two, three years,” Gruzen said of neighbors wary of a tunnel. “I don’t think they’re looking at the long-term.”

He said it would make it easier to cross the street near the memorial.
One reason given for the tunnel is it will take some of the traffic effects away from the memorial, the same reason Arad once gave for proposing a cultural building.

John Dellaportas, the leader of a coalition to prevent the tunnel, said the memorial is not a good reason for building the tunnel, pointing out that 9/11 relatives seldom mention it. Even if it makes the area safer right near the memorial, Dellaportas said it would undoubtedly make it less safe near the entrance and exit ramps.

“Whenever we hear from family members, they are never asking for it…. Overall for the community, it will be less safe for Battery Park City residents,” he said.

Family members at the presentation did seem pleased with the adjustments to the memorial.

“These people listened to what we were saying,” said Charles Wolf, whose wife was killed in her office at Marsh & McClennan.

The Coalition of 9/11 Families, which has been much more critical of the memorial, released a statement praising many of the changes, including preserving many of the boxbeam columns and improving the access area to bedrock. The coalition is hoping the design is refined further to expand the access to the south tower, where the PATH train tracks will run. They also are asking for a change away from the proposal to list the names randomly.

There was no mention of the random name listing at the presentation and officials are apparently open to considering other ideas in the future.
Anthony Gardner, a coalition leader whose brother was killed Sept. 11, said Kevin Rampe, L.M.D.C. president and a director on the new memorial foundation, clarified recent comments to Downtown Express about the name listing.

Rampe said on Dec. 1: “They’re negotiating with themselves if they’re negotiating…. I think we put that issue to bed a long time ago.”

According to Gardner and Wolf, who attended the same meeting for family leaders Dec. 15, Rampe indicated that when he said there were no negotiations happening about the names, he meant currently, and that the issue could be discussed in the future.

Wolf said he is not sure if he wants names to be listed with co-workers, as many relatives of firefighters and office workers have proposed, but he does want some sense of order, such as groupings by building, floor and flight number. The names of every victim who died in Pennsylvania, Washington D.C. or at the W.T.C. either in 2001 or in the 1993 bombing will be listed around the falling water.

There will be some sort of name locator in the underground memorial center. Visitors will be able to descend ramps around the falling water or they could take a ramp directly to the bottom of the pool 30 feet below street level and the bedrock area 70 feet below. The slurry wall will be exposed to the sky from bedrock at the northwest corner of the memorial and there will be a clear street level area at the southwest corner near Liberty and West Sts. Standing room will be available for about 10,000 people, or seats for about 5,000 for the public ceremonies every Sept. 11.

Both Gov. George Pataki and Mayor Mike Bloomberg praised the design at the presentation in Battery Park City’s Museum of Jewish Heritage. A 3-dimensional model will be on display at the World Financial Center Winter Garden within a day or two.

Bloomberg said even before Arad’s design was selected it was his favorite. “This is the only one that, to me, stood out,” the mayor said. “I didn’t have a say in the selction, but it was the one that was chosen.”

Has anyone noticed or does anyone care that RA seems to be a rehash of what Libeskind already did in Berlin, a museum with a museum within ,complete with voids pointing to what is absent?
http://www.architectureweek.com/2001/1107/today.html

January 5, 2005

Trade Center Memorial Getting New Muscle

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/...oard.184.2.jpg
John C. Whitehead assembled the board of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation.

Six months ago, the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation had just about everything needed for its board of directors to start a $500 million fund-raising effort. It had a widely acclaimed architectural design, a certificate of incorporation, tax-exempt status, even a logo. Just about everything.

Except a board of directors.

After three powerful New Yorkers turned down the chairmanship last spring, it seemed that the fund-raising goal was so daunting that no one would take on the task. So John C. Whitehead, the very well-connected chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, set about building the board from scratch in early summer.

This afternoon, 28 of its 32 members are expected to convene for the first time, in the American Express Tower across West Street from ground zero. The foundation is destined to become the leading force in the creation of the public realm at the new World Trade Center.

Among the directors' earliest tasks will be to choose a permanent chairwoman or chairman and a president. Kevin M. Rampe, 38, president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and a foundation director, said, "Now, the board is taking control of its own fortune and fate."

The board may also seek to diversify itself. Under the draft bylaws, there can be as many as 50 directors. At the moment, the board has a strongly traditional establishment cast: almost exclusively white (30 directors); preponderantly male (25); decidedly mature (21 directors are 60 or older); and oriented to big business (16 are financial, media or real estate executives). Seven directors lost family members in the attack.

For the time being, the board strongly bears the stamp of Mr. Whitehead. He said his choices were reviewed by many others. "I don't want you to think that I made up the board with a lot of my friends," he said yesterday. "That's not true.

"But if you live long enough, you know a lot of people." Mr. Whitehead is 82.

Incorporated without fanfare in April 2003, the foundation started with an interim three-man board: Mr. Whitehead; Ira M. Millstein, 78, a partner in the law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges, who serves pro bono as counsel to the development corporation board; and Jason R. Lilien, 34, an associate at Weil, Gotshal.

A search committee for a chairman was convened in February 2004. It included Mr. Millstein; Monica Iken, 34, the founder of September's Mission; Paula Grant Berry, 47, a memorial juror and now vice chairwoman of the International Freedom Center; and Richard D. Parsons, 56, the chairman and chief executive of Time Warner.

At the time, Mr. Millstein said he hoped to name a choice in three weeks. But winter turned to spring with no announcement.

Finally, in May, it was acknowledged that Jerry I. Speyer, 64, the president and chief executive of Tishman Speyer Properties; Sanford I. Weill, 71, the chairman of Citigroup; and Henry R. Kravis, 60, a founding partner of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company, had declined to serve as chairman or co-chairman. They all pleaded that they did not have enough time to tackle what could well be a more than full-time job. (Mr. Speyer and Mr. Kravis wound up accepting board memberships but Mr. Weill declined even that, having taken on two new philanthropic commitments.)

Rather than work his way down a list, with new prospects knowing in advance that they were fourth, fifth or sixth choices, Mr. Whitehead decided in early summer to reverse course and create the board first. The idea was that a strong board and staff might persuade reluctant candidates that the chairmanship would not consume them whole.

To build that board, Mr. Whitehead needed a marquee name that would draw other power brokers - "the very people who don't want to start their own club but do want to join an exclusive club," as one director put it, so candidly he asked not to be identified.

In this case, the marquee name was Rockefeller.

David Rockefeller, 89, who was instrumental in the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan during his days as chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, effectively became foundation board member No. 1 in late June.

"If we had to make an announcement that night and we had only one member," Mr. Whitehead said, "that wouldn't be a bad one to have."

A day or two later, Mr. Rockefeller was joined by Agnes Gund, 66, the president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art. She also served on the panel that chose the Norwegian firm Snohetta to design the museum complex on the trade center site.

Mr. Whitehead next tapped the chief executive of a financial corporation. He would not identify the person, partly out of concern about creating a sense of rank among equals.

There was no specific price of admission, Mr. Whitehead said, though directors understood they would be expected to "give to the best of their ability." He said one executive, whom he would not name, "came back with a dollar response larger than any we would ever have asked for."

Among the first executives asked to join were Kenneth I. Chenault, 53, chairman and chief executive of American Express, which lost 11 employees in the attack; Maurice R. Greenberg, 79, chairman and chief executive of American International Group; Mr. Parsons; Peter G. Peterson, 78, chairman and co-founder of the Blackstone Group; E. John Rosenwald Jr., 74, vice chairman of Bear Stearns; and Anne M. Tatlock, 65, chairwoman and chief executive of Fiduciary Trust Company International.

Ms. Tatlock said one reason she accepted was the opportunity to have an impact on the memorial at an early stage. "I also worked at 2 World Trade Center for 15 years," she said, "and many of my closest colleagues and friends died that day."

Ms. Tatlock is one of many board members with a Whitehead connection. He knew her principally through the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, of which he is chairman emeritus and she is chairwoman.

From Mr. Whitehead's days as deputy secretary of state in the Reagan administration, he tapped Brian Mulroney, 65, the former prime minister of Canada.

From Mr. Whitehead's days as chairman of AEA Investors, he tapped Sir John Bond, 63, the group chairman of HSBC Holdings in London, which has invested in an equity fund organized by AEA.

Another longtime acquaintance is Mr. Greenberg, who succeeded Mr. Whitehead in 1996 as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. "We lost two employees and many friends and industry colleagues on Sept. 11," Mr. Greenberg said in an e-mail message, explaining one reason he joined the board.

As a trustee emeritus of the Rockefeller University, Mr. Whitehead reached out to Russell L. Carson, 61, the vice chairman of the university, who is a general partner in the investment firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe.

In the early 90's, Mr. Whitehead served on a board of the real estate giant Olympia & York USA, of which John E. Zuccotti was president. Mr. Zuccotti, 67, is now chairman of Brookfield Properties Corporation, owners of the World Financial Center and 1 Liberty Plaza, where the development corporation has its office. He is also senior counsel at Weil, Gotshal, which is further represented on the board by Mr. Millstein.

Mr. Zuccotti said he accepted membership because of Brookfield's interest in the outcome, because of his interest in planning and above all because it was "a very noble, important effort."

Other executives on the board are William B. Harrison Jr., 61, chairman and chief executive of J. P. Morgan Chase & Company; Robert Wood Johnson IV, 57, owner of the New York Jets; Thomas A. Renyi, 58, chairman and chief executive of the Bank of New York; and Josef Ackermann, 56, chairman of the group executive committee of Deutsche Bank, who is the most recent addition.

Chief executives were not the only ones being sought. The fund-raising campaign will need a lot of publicity, Mr. Whitehead said, which can be generated by board members who are celebrities, like Robert De Niro, 61, and Barbara Walters, 73, of ABC News; or celebrity executives, like Michael D. Eisner, 62, chief of the Walt Disney Company.

Mr. De Niro is a co-founder of the TriBeCa Film Institute, the nonprofit arm of the TriBeCa Film Festival, which received a $3 million grant from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation board last March, after Mr. Whitehead abstained from voting because his grandson, David Earls, works for the institute.

Two jurors in the memorial competition were asked to join the board: Ms. Berry and Vartan Gregorian, 70, the president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, who was the jury chairman. Mr. Whitehead said Dr. Gregorian had "done an excellent job of keeping the jury from splintering." He is also the only foundation head on the board.

Ms. Berry is one of the directors who lost family members in the attack. The others are Ms. Iken; Debra Burlingame, 50; Thomas S. Johnson, 64, a board member of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation; Anthoula Katsimatides, 32, a development corporation assistant vice president; Lee Ielpi, 60, a former firefighter whose planned Tribute Visitors Center opposite ground zero is to be financed in part by the development corporation; and Thomas H. Rogér, 57, a vice president of the Gilbane Building Company. Gilbane is to demolish the Deutsche Bank building for the development corporation, but Mr. Rogér is not involved in that project.

On Dec. 1, in the American Express Tower, Gov. George E. Pataki and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced the composition of the board. Many directors first learned the names of the other members at that news conference.

One person was conspicuously absent. Mr. Whitehead, the architect of the board and its interim chairman, was stuck in Minneapolis because of foul weather at La Guardia Airport. "I feel like a bridegroom who didn't make his own wedding," he said that day.

But his was not the only absence noted. There was, for instance, Michael Iken, who worked as a bond trader on the 84th floor of the south tower. "All I thought about at the press conference was Michael," his widow, Ms. Iken, said, "and how honored I am to be here as his voice."

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/...oard.184.1.jpg
A tree-filled memorial will be part of the rebuilt trade center.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/38305047/medium.jpg


NY POST

GOV REVEALS WTC TREASURE GROVE

By FREDRIC U. DICKER

January 5, 2005 -- ALBANY — Here's the first glimpse of the stunning World Trade Center Memorial Grove, which Gov. Pataki today is announcing will be illuminated every night in a lasting tribute to the victims of the 9/11 attacks.

The glowing grove, details of which Pataki will outline in his State of the State Address to the Legislature, will greet visitors to the plaza level of the memorial once the $500 million tribute is completed.

As the visitors stare down into the two "voids" — which mark the location of what was once the location of the Twin Towers — they'll see a continuous band of light "hovering" just above ground in honor of what was once there, according to a source.

Pataki will also announce a new state income tax check-off to allow New Yorkers to donate some or all of their refunds to construction of the memorial, a source said.

The tax check-off plan will also be proposed on the federal level in legislation sponsored by Rep. Vito Fossella (R-Staten Island), the governor is set to announce.

Pataki's 11th annual State of the State Address is expected to focus on the ongoing efforts to rebuild and revitalize lower Manhattan in the aftermath of 9/11.

The governor also plans to address the state's worsening fiscal situation — and the growing demands for ethics and budget-making reforms at the state Capitol.

"The governor is going to place a good deal of emphasis on 'reform,' there's no question about it," said one senior Pataki aide.


http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/38305045/medium.jpg

While there are a few "stunning" things about this project, I hope most here can tell the difference between what is spun by publicists and objective journalism.

Oh where have all the critics gone?

Architecture: Ground Zero Memorial Becomes Necropolis to Grief

Feb. 15 (Bloomberg) -- When Michael Arad's winning design for a memorial at Ground Zero was first unveiled in January 2004, it won praise for its compelling subtlety. Reminiscent of the simplicity of Maya Lin's Vietnam War Memorial, Arad outlined the footprints of the destroyed twin towers with torrents of water that would vanish into pits.

The design united the idea of a vortex, evoking the devastation of Sept. 11, 2001, with life-giving water that urged contemplation.

A year later, comparisons can no longer be made to Lin's masterpiece. It was inevitable the planned memorial would grow to a disturbingly large size, once it was deemed that the towers' footprints must be entirely preserved -- for political, not design reasons, in response to pleas from some of the victims' family members.

In the past year, the proposed project has expanded into a vast commemorative complex; it threatens to become a grandiose paean to grief.

Arad's original design called for a gallery around each pit, opening to the waterfall. In front, a low wall would bear the engraved names of those lost on Sept. 11. One could accept the lack of specificity in the first design presentation; it was the product of only weeks of work and heavy doctoring by officials behind the scenes.

Empty Grandeur

Just before Christmas, New York Governor George Pataki, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Lower Manhattan Development Corporation officials unveiled an updated design of the Ground Zero memorial. That presentation focused on humanizing refinements to the 4.7-acre memorial plaza by landscape architect Peter Walker, who is working with 34-year-old Arad and the architecture firm Davis Brody Bond.

Unfortunately, officials have disclosed little about the underground spaces, which have expanded hugely without any refinement in design. A grand, 12,000-square-foot hall will link the galleries of the north and south towers, but its only purpose is to house a directory of the deceased.

One level below, at bedrock -- which Arad had reserved for a private mausoleum containing unidentified remains -- a 60-foot- high, 24,000-square-foot hall has been added. It will expose the stubs of the massive exterior columns that held up the north tower and a 70-foot length of the now-famous slurry wall.

Nothing else seems planned for this space, as big as a floor of a standard office tower. In one rendering, visitors stand inches from the slurry wall and stare at it -- presumably transfixed by the air-bubble pattern in its sprayed-concrete surface.

Flushing Sounds

The surfaces below ground are finished in identical grids of cast concrete, suggesting a vast, bland gloominess. There's no intimacy to contrast with the enormity. With all that water pouring down around you, and its noise echoing off all those hard surfaces, the effect could only be of a gigantic lavatory in a perpetual state of flush.

No proportion or detail speaks to the individual in this design, now budgeted at an intimidating $250 million. Architecture only works when in some conscious or subconscious way it registers at a recognizable human scale, tunes itself to physical forces, or to the body. The size of the tower footprints themselves (equal to half of a city block) registers the enormity of the tragedy.

Teddy Bears, Twisted Beams

Imposing as it is, officials no longer regard Arad's design as sufficient commemoration. They have added an underground Memorial Center -- essentially a museum. A report released last year spelled out grand curatorial ambitions. It will display artifacts of the destruction -- the twisted beams and wrecked fire trucks now stored in a hanger at Kennedy Airport -- and emblems of grief such as the teddy bears, origami birds and American flags visitors left at the site. It will tell the life story of each victim.

This $90 million center could, at 70,000 square feet or more, be larger than the underground memorial space. Davis Brody Bond has just embarked on the enormously difficult task of defining a program that does not turn the Memorial Center into a celebration of unending sorrow or a chamber of horrors.

The International Freedom Center -- its scope and cost ($75 million is a safe guess) as yet unformed -- will fill much of the ``cultural'' building at the northeast corner of the memorial plaza. A visitor center is also planned, so that no one need feel that they have to approach the site without being told what to think.

Redemption?

To appreciate the vastness of this project, consider the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor: a simple, 184-foot-long pavilion. Tellingly, it was completed 30 years after the Pearl Harbor attack, long after the story had become a redemptive one - - the nation's darkest hour transformed into a victory against fascism.

Regrettably, the story that began at Ground Zero isn't over yet, and we don't know how it will end. The ``war on terror'' and the lives it takes must inescapably be part of Ground Zero's meaning.

The memorial, its mission statement says, must ``strengthen our resolve to preserve freedom and inspire an end to hatred, ignorance, and intolerance.'' This laudable goal has all but vanished as it has grown into a necropolis essentially dedicated only to the victims.

The visitor a generation or so from now might conclude that the scope of the tragedy was so enormous that the terrorists succeeded in their goals. It's time to slow this juggernaut and take stock.

March 3, 2005

BLOCKS

Concept Meets Reality at Trade Center Memorial

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/t.gifHE design of the World Trade Center memorial has hit a bump.

It is just a few feet high. But it could profoundly affect a visitor's experience by creating the need for a wall running more than 200 feet along the Greenwich Street side of the memorial, marking an abrupt grade change between plaza level and sidewalk.

Between this wall and the museum complex at Fulton Street and a stairway at Liberty Street, there would be only two small areas where one could walk straight into the memorial from Greenwich Street, the approach most visitors will probably take.

To the public, the tough part of designing the memorial may seem to have passed last year with the choice of a concept, the twin voids of "Reflecting Absence," and the selection of architects: Michael Arad, Peter Walker & Partners and Davis Brody Bond.

But new challenges are unfolding, largely out of sight, as planners struggle to reconcile an architectural vision with the physical realities of a complex site. At stake in these negotiations are elements as important as the whole east side of the memorial, which may depend on what may seem like arcane questions of roadway layout.

The bump - really, more of a hump - would occur in Greenwich Street at Dey Street. Here, the surface would be two feet higher than at Fulton Street to the north and six feet higher than at Liberty Street to the south.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the site and will build the streets, said that height would permit the installation of as many utility lines as are needed within the roadbed, directly above the subway tunnel for the Nos. 1 and 9 trains, with sufficient covering over the tunnel to satisfy Metropolitan Transportation Authority standards. The slope would allow water drainage and prevent puddling in the street.

However, it would also mean that Greenwich Street would rise almost five feet higher than the memorial plaza. There is not room enough to accommodate a stairway at this location because the footprint of the south tower - an immovable element in the equation - is too close to the sidewalk.

And the plaza cannot be canted upward to meet Greenwich Street because the voids will have walls of cascading water within, which must be kept absolutely level. Any slope in the plaza would be apparent around the perimeter of the voids.

IF Greenwich Street must rise that high, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation has concluded that a wall will be needed along much of the adjacent part of the memorial. Not only would that wall block physical access but it would also diminish the designers' goal of direct sight lines into the plaza from the surrounding sidewalks.

As an alternative, the corporation has proposed lowering Greenwich Street by four feet. That would permit a level approach to the memorial at Dey Street. (Because of the changing topography around the site, stairways will still be needed to reach the plaza level from the sidewalks at the southeast, southwest and northwest corners.)

"It's absolutely critical that we take the steps necessary to set the grade in a way that achieves the objective we all share of knitting the site back into the community, both physically and visually," Kevin M. Rampe, president of the development corporation, said yesterday.

But the corporation's alternative raises more questions. Where would utility lines go if they could not fit in a shallower Greenwich Street roadbed? Why not raise the entire plaza level a bit? And how appropriate is it for architecture to set street heights, rather than the other way around?

"The construction of Greenwich Street through the World Trade Center site is another of the complex engineering issues that must be carefully studied and resolved as we move forward with the redevelopment," said Kenneth J. Ringler Jr., the executive director of the Port Authority.

As engaging as last season's architectural beauty contests may have been, the real form of the future World Trade Center is being decided now. God is in the details, Mies van der Rohe is often quoted as saying. So is the devil.

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How the Heights Are Measured

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/h.gifow do you measure heights on a site with so many levels above and below ground? Engineers typically rely on a datum, a constant plane from which elevations can be uniformly calculated. Different data are used for different purposes.

The World Trade Center Downtown Restoration Program datum is closely related to that of the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad, now PATH, which was integral to the development of the twin towers in the 1960's. Because the railroad datum was deliberately set very deep - exactly 300 feet below mean sea level at Sandy Hook, N.J. - all measurements from it can be expressed as positive elevations.

The trade center datum is 2.653 feet above the old railroad datum. On this scale, the high point on Greenwich Street is at elevation 316 feet, the memorial plaza at 311.2 feet.

For comparison's sake, the PATH station concourse is at elevation 276 feet, the mezzanine at 264 feet and the passenger platforms at 250 feet. The base of the trade center site is at elevation 243 feet. The lowest point in the PATH system is midway in Tunnel E, the outbound route from the trade center to New Jersey, at elevation 212 feet.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Well, it seems lessons are truly being learned from the old, horrible design of the WTC "plaza". We alse, again, get a glimpse into the failure of Liebskind's Master Plan, which should have taken this, as a matter of site situation and planning into consideration. Most importantly to EVERYONE (I'm sure) is how this affects Liebskind's "wedge of light". ::sarcastic sneer::

Hmmmm.

If Libeskind's master plan was followed, a five-foot wall would not be an issue. It would be 35 ft. :)

Off-topic, but when I was reading the article, a factoid jumped into my head about how the Egyptians might have managed to level the site of the Great Pyramid by digging a ditch around the perimeter and filling it with water.

The need for the plaza to be level, and the closeness of the south tower footprint to Greenwich St are the major source of the problem.

Were I Arad I would tell them to move the utilities.

One of the problems here is the proximity of Greenwich Street- however this is the "new " Greenwich Street which wasn't there on 9/11 as it was subsumed in the WTC plaza. Unfortunately, in the interests of pleasing the whims and desires of urban planning sentimentalist Alexander Garvin, the "old" line of Greenwich Street was restored. Too bad David Childs and Silverstein did not have to observe the setback lines of the restored Greenwich Street- WTC 7 sticks well into it when viewed from the north! If they didn't have to then the memorial certainly shouldn't take back seat to underground utilities.
The victims of 9/11 deserve better.

Does ANYONE really give a damn about the street grid? They could have planned with complex without restoration and the only people upset with that would have been the Urban Planning Utopians.

I do.

It will help speed up development of the area south of Liberty.

What do you have against it?

And what's this Urban Planning Utopians crap?

All this was an entirely foreseeable outcome. For three and a half years, I have seen several dozen of plans and schemes by a collection of high-profile architects and leading urban planners, none of whom bothered to take account of a very basic fact which the simple bureaucrats who worked for the Port Authority in the 1960s and 70s well-understood and smartly took advantage of -- namely, the fact that Greenwich Street is one story higher than West Street. The obvious and best way to handle this shift in elevation would have been to recreate the bi-level plaza that existed in the old WTC. It would have doubled the amount of space for all the competing uses for the site, and allowed smarter, more trouble free pedestrian connections than will now exist. (To cite just one example, workers at the WFC, whose office lobbies all are on the 2d floor, would have been able to access those lobbies with zero grade changes from Greenwich Street.) Now, there were problems with the old WTC set-up, but those could have been corrected without throwing out the proverbial baby with the bath water.

Of course, that is your opinion. The change to a street grid was not forced by outsiders. It was overwhelmingly supported by the community.

It was the removal of the grid that was forced by outsiders. The grid was there for a long time before the WTC plaza, the streets were at the same elevations - and it worked very well.

The memorial layout is the problem, specifically the ST footprint. A fitting memorial did not need to include both footprints, but once the concept that they are sacred ground was accepted, the site plan was locked in.

My main frustration is with the stree grid COMBINED with the footprint site. Site put a straightjacket on creativity at the site. Also, what I mean by Urban Planning Utopians, are groups like the Civic Alliance and New York New Visions. Their brain trust of officials are nothing more than people who have been salivating for years on how to remake Lower Manhattan and look at 9/11 opportunisticly. I don't have anything against making changes to the WTC Site, I just don't like these people who are doing it. BTW, these are also the same groups who initially proposed the West St. Tunnel.

The street grid is not sacrosanct, and the 9/11 memorial should come before all else.
The 2 footprints were early on recognized to be a given- the streets should work around them.

Good planning should come before all else. I personally think the process is intentionally stalled until Pataki is out of the way. He has too deep a connection with the 9/11 event as did Giuliani. They've said lots of things in emotional responses to policy questions and have bound themselves to their words. Until we get someone who has made no promises to anyone, we won't see anything meaningful happen. Pataki has painted himself into a corner.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by TomAuch

My main frustration is with the stree grid COMBINED with the footprint site. Site put a straightjacket on creativity at the site. Also, what I mean by Urban Planning Utopians, are groups like the Civic Alliance and New York New Visions. Their brain trust of officials are nothing more than people who have been salivating for years on how to remake Lower Manhattan and look at 9/11 opportunisticly. I don't have anything against making changes to the WTC Site, I just don't like these people who are doing it. BTW, these are also the same groups who initially proposed the West St. Tunnel.

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First of all, I think you should tone down the dated rebuild the twin towers rhetoric. The rebuilding plans, excluding the WTC site, (Fulton transit, etc) were in discussion before 09/11. There were no visions of restoring the street grid. How would that even have been possibe? The only plans specifically related to the WTC were to open up the plaza to the concourse.

I meant your objection to the street grid itself as a concept. The memorial with the street grid is a technical issue.

I don't know if there is a connection between the tunnel and the grid, but the difference is: the tunnel has not been decided because there is neighborhood opposition. The street grid has been adopted because there was very little opposition. It was not forced on the neighborhood by utopians, fascists, or visionaries.

Wrightfan: Which people are you referring to?

I guess my rhetoric was too harsh, but I still have an unfavorable view of the planners who keep harping "human scale" plans even if some of their ideas may be decent.
BTW, BrooklynRider, how do you think Spitzer will handle the rebuilding process if he's elected? I can't picture Pataki being governor in two years from now.

I think they were rather stupid about the whole footprint thing too.


Sometimes setting up land as sacred is not the best thing to do as a memorial. The whole purpose of the attack was to disrupt us, and in MEMORY of it, we are disrupting any chance of bringing back a better plan.

I think that simply an outline, like a line of tiles or stone, would have been a good way to memorialize the footprints. The outline would have been marked with stones in the grass, different color tile on the walkways, or something else inside any building (lobby) that "encroached" on them.

Sort of an outline telling all where they stood, but not turning it into a sacred burial ground.


The sign of any societies downfall is when they start valuing the dead more than the living.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ninjahedge

I think they were rather stupid about the whole footprint thing too.


Sometimes setting up land as sacred is not the best thing to do as a memorial. The whole purpose of the attack was to disrupt us, and in MEMORY of it, we are disrupting any chance of bringing back a better plan.

I think that simply an outline, like a line of tiles or stone, would have been a good way to memorialize the footprints. The outline would have been marked with stones in the grass, different color tile on the walkways, or something else inside any building (lobby) that "encroached" on them.

Sort of an outline telling all where they stood, but not turning it into a sacred burial ground.


The sign of any societies downfall is when they start valuing the dead more than the living.

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I agree completely.

I think something should be built (not necessarily "rebuild the WTC").

Quote:

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Originally Posted by TomAuch

BTW, BrooklynRider, how do you think Spitzer will handle the rebuilding process if he's elected? I can't picture Pataki being governor in two years from now.

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Tom-

I'm really not sure and haven't given it much thought. Pataki just seems so out of it. He shows up at the photo ops and makes these monotonous speeches, but there's no passion for this at all. I think he is a guy who hasn't an ounce of vision for what he would like to do tomorrow, let alone what the WTC should look like in ten years.

What I'd like to think Spitzer would do differently is admit he's no expert, identify the experts, and pass the ball. I do think consideration should be given to buying out Silverstein's lease, breaking up the site into separate parcels (like the BPC) and moving forward with a plan of competitive designs for each building. Build a neighborhood park - minimize the memorial to something tasteful and less maudlin.

Personally, I think that once Pataki is out, so is Liebskind. The only thing that forced Childs to compromise and work with Liebskind was Pataki and his meddling. I'm not expecting grandeur from Childs, but, after TWC and TST, we know there is a level of creative vision that can milked and molded into something bigger and certainly better.

I disagree with some others on in this thread in my opinion that the true memorial to 9/11 will be the ghastly named "Freedom Tower". Despite the name, it should aspire to be nothing less that an architectural masterpiece, regardless of the long-term economics. The restoration of the skyline is the memorial - "Reflecting Absence" is a gravesite. And, as divisive as that argument is, the reality is that a building can generate more funds than a park - as self-sustainability seems to be the footnote to every new park being built in the city.

Also, our major fundraisers for the Arad memorial, Pres. Bush Sr. and Pres. Clinton are off fundraising for Tsunami Relief. (And Carter is building tract homes somewhere while Rosalyn prepares biscuits and gravy) Fundraising is tedious, boring and no one likes to do it. I am guessing their verve for fundfraising, after returning from Southeast Asia, will dampen their ability or desire to jump into Memorial Fundraising.

Pushed and Pulled, Designer of 9/11 Memorial Focuses on the Goal


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/...rts/10zero.jpg
Peter Walker, left, and Michael Arad at a news conference in January 2004,
showing their revised design for the ground zero memorial.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/...ts/10zero2.jpg
Lower Manhattan Development Corporation/An artist's rendering shows a night view at one of the reflecting pools
in the ground zero memorial; groundbreaking is expected early next year.


By ROBIN POGREBIN
Published: May 10, 2005

Sometime it's hard to believe that Michael Arad is still in the picture.

Bit by bit, elements of his original design for the World Trade Center Memorial have been whittled away, whether because of logistical realities at ground zero (the memorial will be built above PATH train tracks), client demands (the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation is calling the shots), the many other interests involved (the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the site; victims' families; downtown residents) or the assorted architectural cooks (three other firms).

For example, Mr. Arad included no trees in his original design, which was chosen in January 2004 after a competition. The memorial jury expressed a desire to make his design more green, so he teamed up with the landscape architect Peter Walker. Now Mr. Arad is fending off a veritable forest at the site and dealing with how the trees might impinge on the memorial below them.

Mr. Arad originally designed four ramps leading into and out of the memorial. Now there are two.

His reflecting pools were not centered in the footprints of the twin towers. Now they are.

Two considerably more experienced architectural firms are taking part in the process: Peter Walker & Partners and Davis Brody Bond. Handel Architects, is also involved; Mr. Arad, now 35, joined the firm last year to give himself institutional backup.

Some planning and design experts marvel that Mr. Arad has not been completely marginalized or discouraged. "He may be crumbling internally, but I think he's shown surprising maturity for his tender years," said David J. Burney, the commissioner of the New York City Department of Design and Construction and an architect himself.

In a telephone interview yesterday, Mr. Arad was cautious in fielding questions about the current state of his design. (Joanna Rose, the development corporation spokeswoman, was in the room on speakerphone.) Asked whether he was satisfied with the two ramps, Mr. Arad did not respond. (His partner, Gary Edward Handel, piped up, "We're not happy about every decision that's made, but we trust the process.")

Mr. Arad would say only that he was keeping his eye on the finish line. "My role in this is to be the advocate for the memorial," he said. "That is what I do every day in this project."

To be sure, the conflicts over the design of the memorial have not brought the architects to a standoff or the process to a standstill, as occurred when David Childs and Daniel Libeskind fought over the design of the Freedom Tower.

Indeed, even as the Freedom Tower has become a big question mark at ground zero in terms of what it will look like and when it will be finished, the memorial is proceeding apace. Groundbreaking is expected early next year for an opening on Sept. 11, 2009.

The party line is that everyone is working through their differences and that those differences will make for a better final product. "There's a healthy dialogue and differing opinions," said Kevin M. Rampe, president of the development corporation. "I think that's been great. Each brings their unique experience."

Mr. Walker is largely concerned with "how the landscape interacts with the memorial," Mr. Rampe continued, adding that J. Max Bond Jr. of Davis Brody Bond "brings an enormous wealth of practical experience about engineering considerations, and Michael brings the vision."

Despite the varying levels of professional experience, Mr. Rampe said Mr. Arad had managed to hold his own. "Michael has earned a level of respect," he said. "I don't think one feels they can overwhelm the other. They come with different perspectives, different skills, and ultimately they will end up with good results."

The architects largely echoed that assessment. Mr. Bond said, "The design benefits from the interaction of the three different firms and the consultants."

Mr. Walker said, "Sometimes it's heated, sometimes it works very smoothly."

Mr. Arad said: "It's not about this being a harmonious process. It's about it being a productive process."

But some of those involved say Mr. Arad was unprepared for the harsh realities of the process - above all, how much his plan would have to change in light of engineering concerns and competing priorities.

"We viewed the competition as the beginning of the evolution," said Douglas Findlay, a partner in the Walker firm. "He often views it as the end."

Mr. Walker offered, "I'm glad I didn't deal with something of this magnitude at the beginning of my career." He added, "This is the process to end all processes."

Mr. Arad said he was by no means naïve about the logistics involved; in addition to the PATH tracks, a chiller plant lies under the site. "The technical complexity of the site is challenging," he said. "But our team has a thorough grasp of the issues."

At the same time, Mr. Arad said, his vision for the site remains clear. "I know exactly what I want to see here, and it's just a matter of advocating for the memorial," he said. "I think people understand that and appreciate it."

When he won the design competition, Mr. Arad was only 34 and had never done anything nearly so big before, let alone at one of the most scrutinized architectural sites in the city's history.

After earning his master's degree from Georgia Tech's College of Architecture in 1999, Mr. Arad spent three years at Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, where he worked on projects like Espirito Santo Plaza in Miami and Union Station in Hong Kong. Then he joined the New York City Housing Authority, where he was working on two new police stations when his memorial design was selected.

Before becoming an architect, Mr. Arad spent three years in the Israeli Army. And he is no stranger to politics or diplomacy: his father, Moshe, served as Israeli ambassador to the United States from 1987 to 1990 and as the ambassador to Mexico from 1983 to 1987.

The memorial is expected to cost $350 million, including the Memorial Center, a separate area being designed by Davis Brody Bond that is to include artifacts from the Trade Center. The architects are still in the thick of resolving each of the design details that will make up the memorial, from how much noise and splash the waterfalls will give off to how people will find the names of their loved ones inscribed in stone around the two pools.

Most recently, for example, the parties involved have clashed over the number of ramps; the decision to have two instead of four was clearly made over Mr. Arad's objections.

According to Mr. Findlay, the best architects are the ones who "are able to deal with these obstacles and turn them around to make them into something, make them a virtue - not to resist it," and to "keep your eyes open for the great ideas that flow by."

That is not to say that an architect should say yes to everything if he believes it compromises his design, Mr. Findlay said. He cited his own objections to the Port Authority's proposal to place a huge vent in the middle of the park.

Mr. Arad's initial design did not address questions like crowd circulation or security. An information center called Memorial Hall has been added between the two pools.

Mr. Walker said the experience had deepened his respect for Maya Lin, who designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. "I've never had the appreciation for her that I have now," he said. "How she got through it and got something that is really good and still has got her head about her -I think about it all the time."

But Mr. Findlay emphasized that the ground zero memorial raises different challenges. "This site is where the event occurred," he said, adding, "The memorial is essentially people's grave site."

With this in mind, the architects are working on the spiritual aspect of moving through the memorial - going from the bustle of the secular city into the park into the sobering memorial and up again into the living world.

"Imagine walking around a five-acre oak woodland," Mr. Findlay said. "You will be drawn into it. You can see across the plain and see the plain go away. You can hear the waterfalls, and at night it glows. So in all ways the voids have been made very important."

Nonetheless, some of the Sept. 11 families are unhappy with how the memorial is shaping up. Some want the names of the victims listed alphabetically, or by tower, or by police or fire department affiliation. Some even want the remains of the World Trade Center victims to be moved to the site from the Fresh Kills landfill. "You can't call these people heroes and leave their remains in a garbage dump in Staten Island," said Edie Lutnick, executive director of the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund, set up to aid families of victims who worked for the financial services concern at the World Trade Center.

As for creative tensions, some architects say they are to be expected. "You put capable and strong-willed design firms in a room and there is a discussion of options," said Fredric M. Bell, executive director of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects. "That's how it should be."

"I think Michael is a very reasonable and smart and flexible person - not the type to say, 'I'm taking my marbles and going home,' " he said. At the same time, Mr. Bell added: "He does have strong ideas. Winning a competition is incredibly empowering. That's the card that Michael has."


Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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"Imagine walking around a five-acre oak woodland," Mr. Findlay said. "You will be drawn into it. You can see across the plain and see the plain go away. You can hear the waterfalls, and at night it glows. So in all ways the voids have been made very important."

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Imagine a park that looks like an ice skating rink until you get close enough to realize it is a big pool of water that you really can't sit by and is depressing as hell once you are told what it signifies.

Imagine 5 acres of prime real estate trying to compete with the noise from the roads surrounding it, trying to somehow deny the fact that they are in the WORLD TRADE CENTER.

They are trying to go overly artistic instead of acnowledging the area they are in. They are trying to do the "Artistry of contrast" by DENYING the very city they are in the middle of in order to portray some false sense of mystic serenity.


Sometimes the most serene places are the ones you smile at when you walk through/by. Not the ones you cry at.