Reply With QuoteI don't see a problem with the staircase. I do think that preserving the construction ramp is pointless. But, who cares. If you're in the museum 4-5 years from now and don't care for it, move on to something else.
If I remember, the passionate discussion wasn't so much about incorporating the staircase in the memorial, but about preserving it in place, as some wanted. It was located within the footprint of the new tower 2.
The entire staircase had survived 09/11 almost intact. Its condition that became familiar to visitors was the result of dismantling by workers. The concrete block was left standing because it contained access to the IRT tunnel.
I don't see a problem with the staircase. I do think that preserving the construction ramp is pointless. But, who cares. If you're in the museum 4-5 years from now and don't care for it, move on to something else.
They're preserving the construction ramp too?
Why not throw in some portable toilets from the clean-up time too?
No they are not it was a joke by a previous poster.
lol we wishOriginally Posted by Alonzo-ny
http://www.panynj.gov/wtcprogress/pr...adLine_id=1166
Because of the ramp’s historical significance to the World Trade Center clean-up effort, the rebuilding, and 9/11 anniversary commemorations, the National September 11 Memorial & Museum intends to preserve a section of the ramp as part of the Museum’s permanent collection.
Bloody hell give me break.
I think once the museum opens all these pieces will become cherished artifacts, even if undeservingly so. The stairs will allow visitors to feel a connection to 9/11, even if being a dishonest. Isn't that the importance of the museum anyway? It's only appalling how much it costs to preserve it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/ny...ames.html?_r=1
Display of Names at Trade Center Memorial Is a Painstaking Process
By DAVID W. DUNLAP
Published: March 23, 2009
Each name, slightly more than one-and-a-half inches tall, will carry the most intimate memories. All 2,982 names together, arrayed atop parapets stretching more than 1,500 feet around two great pools, will convey the vastness of the loss.
With such a range of scale and so many emotions attached, it is no wonder that one of the simplest architectural details of the new World Trade Center — the parapets around the memorial pools — has taken so long to design.
Officials with the National September 11 Memorial and Museum hope to unveil the final design of the parapets by summer. “It’s been a great learning process,” said Joseph C. Daniels, the president and chief executive. It has also been a prolonged, exacting and sometimes contentious process.
It has involved full-scale mockups at a Lower Manhattan office, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, at a warehouse in Berkeley, Calif., and a backyard in Richmond Hill, Ontario. It has required endless tinkering with the size, shape and style of letters. It has called for painstaking efforts to harness water so that it will perform just right. It has compelled constant adjustments to the parapets’ perimeters to ensure the best sight lines.
And it has meant confronting a requirement in the New York City Building Code that the parapets be exactly 42 inches high.
Each move threatened to complicate what is intended to be a stark embodiment of absence. “The guiding principle was not to have anything additive or unnecessary,” said the architect Michael Arad. His entry won the memorial design competition in 2003, after he was paired with the landscape architectural firm Peter Walker & Partners of Berkeley.
There have been so many revisions that the designers almost ran out of alphabet. “We ended up at Option Y,” Mr. Arad said.
Mr. Arad’s original notion was to place enormous sunken pools where the twin towers stood. Underground galleries were to surround the pools, with low parapets on which the victims’ names would be inscribed. However, these galleries were eliminated in 2006 to save money. That brought the names display to street level, turning the plaza into the memorial.
Another important change in 2006 occurred when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who is the chairman of the memorial, gave up the idea of displaying names randomly. Instead, they will be arranged to keep co-workers and family members together.
There will be 1,568 names around the north pool, representing 1,475 people who were in or around the north tower, 87 people aboard the jetliner that hit it and 6 victims of the 1993 bombing of the trade center. The 1,414 names around the south pool will include 441 emergency workers — chiefly firefighters and police officers, 690 people from the south tower, 60 from the plane that hit it, 125 at the Pentagon, 59 from the jetliner that hit it and 39 from the jet that crashed in Pennsylvania.
In 2007, the designers explored a creative way to comply with the building code. It involved small peripheral pools at plaza level where water will be stored before falling into the giant pools below. If these upper pools were 42 inches deep, the designers reasoned, they would honor the barrier requirement unobtrusively. The names panels would have been almost flush with the plaza surface, set within the upper pools.
Abstractly speaking, it was elegant. But there were problems. “Having the names on the ground made some individuals feel they weren’t getting the respect they needed,” Mr. Daniels said.
Another concern, he said, was that the absence of any visible barriers might make visitors anxious about approaching the edge of the enormous pools and waterfalls. “It shouldn’t be a scary experience,” Mr. Daniels said. “It should be awe-inspiring and reverential.”
But what finally compelled the designers to raise the name panels roughly to an adult’s waist level — besides the requirement to do so — was the idea that visitors would want to touch the names as well as read them.
“The moment of circumnavigation around the pools is a moment of communion with the dead,” Mr. Arad said, “and the notion of making it felt is very important.”
Thomas H. Rogér, a memorial board member whose daughter, Jean, was a crew member on the plane that hit the north tower, recalled going “back and forth” on such details as whether the letters in the names should be raised or cut out.
In the end, the designers decided that cut-out letters would work best for rubbings and could be effectively back-lit at night. (The typeface they chose, Optima, was designed by Hermann Zapf in 1958.) Raised letters will indicate categories like Flight 11, North Tower or Engine Company 10.
Even an element so minute had a meaningful consequence. “A big part of the whole issue are the rubbings that people will want to take of the names,” Mr. Rogér said. “That was something we never wanted to lose.”
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/200...how_index.html
In his original submission to the 9/11 memorial design competition in 2003, Michael Arad envisioned the victims' names inscribed on low parapets at the base of two pools marking the voids where the twin towers stood. They would be approached through underground galleries isolating the contemplative space from the busy city above.
Two years later, in Richmond Hill, Ontario, a 27-foot mockup was constructed showing one corner of the memorial pool, complete with an enclosed gallery, a low parapet and a waterfall beyond. The mockup occupied the backyard of Dan Euser of Dan Euser Waterarchitecture Inc., a consultant to the memorial project.
During the 2005 trial run in Ontario, full-scale mockups were also made of the name plates themselves, in this case, using the typeface Scala Sans. The designers greatly liked the way the moisture and mist from the waterfall trickled across the names, creating a kind of veil of tears.
In 2006, the underground galleries were eliminated as a cost-cutting measure. That meant that the parapets with the victims' names would now be at plaza level. After more than two years of design exploration, some of the features shown in this early rendering -- like a solid, low barrier wall with name panels floating above -- are likely to be incorporated.
The most significant detour explored by the designers involved an effort to make the horizontal plane of the memorial plaza as uninterrupted by vertical barriers as possible, to emphasize the voids, much as the artist Michael Heizer did in "North, East, South, West," at the Dia:Beacon museum in Beacon, N.Y.
In 2007, a full-scale mockup of the plaza surface and pool edge was constructed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard by Stiegelbauer Associates, which specializes in set design and construction. Mr. Arad is pictured at the site in September.
As part of the Brooklyn mockup, a shallow peripheral pool was constructed that would, in essence, serve as the barrier between visitors and the edge of the great waterfalls beyond. A test panel in bronze showed how raised letters would look if they were slightly submerged, just breaking the water's surface.
Another test panel showed what would happen if the letters were cut out and slightly submerged. The surface tension of the water actually created its own soft form around the letters, which -- like the enormous pools beyond them -- were voids.
At a site tour in June 2007, Mr. Arad and Frank Huerta of Stiegelbauer Associates held a test panel for inspection by, from left, Lou Mendes and Joan Gerner of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, J. Max Bond Jr. of Davis Brody Bond Aedas, Keith Helmetag of C & G Partners, Paul Marantz of Fisher Marantz Stone, Frank Aiello of the memorial, Belinda Len of Davis Brody, William Huerta of Stiegelbauer and Barry Citrin of Fisher Marantz.
During design development, one theme that emerged forcefully was that many visitors would want to be able to make rubbings of the names to take with them as tangible and personal mementos. Memorial officials have given thought to creating kits especially for that purpose.
It turned out that cut-out letters offered the best and clearest form for rubbing -- as anyone would know who has done so in an old cemetery. They can also be illuminated from within so that they glow at night. The capital C is just over an inch and a half high. The typeface is Optima, designed by Hermann Zapf in 1958.
The typeface used for the categories -- Flight 93, North Tower, Engine Company 10 and the like -- is also Optima. But it is raised on almost sculptural ridges, rather than being cut out. The bronze gives it an especially appealing tactile quality. Many hands are sure to pass over it.
I still can't believe they eliminated the underground galleries. It was the only good thing about the memorial design. Most people who liked the design only did because of the underground galleries and allowed the rest only because it was attached. Now we're just left with the rest that no one ever liked in the first place.
Incredibly stupid.
Why were the underground galleries deemed too expensive anyway, from what I can see from construction there are floors under the plaza level anyway, why is it so difficult to open it onto the pools?
I may have a bad memory, but I think the difficulty was water splashback on patrons, esp. on windy days; and the engineers decided against glass barriers as impractical. Also, the task force had to get burgeoning costs under control.
It's too bad. I think the memorial loses a powerful focal point with the names up on the plaza.
To be honest, this is something that always puzzled the heck out of me... how they planned to have openings to the waterfall bases without having the visitors getting soaked, not to mention that it would create a deafening roar echoing through the cave-like museum 24/7. I even thought about glass barriers, but this would result in a perpetual later of water spray collected on the outside of the glass, obscuring any decent viewing. It does kinda suck not having this option, but I'd rather stare out at the pool standing outdoors under the sun with a clear, unobstructed view anyway. So, I can live with this news.
Also, I'm FREAKING ECSTATIC to learn that the names will be placed along the top of the barrier. I hated the idea of them being underground, and even when they relocated them outdoors at plaza level, but underwater near the waterfall's edge, I hated this idea too. Holding someone's name underwater just seemed strange, like holding the person underwater, for eternity. It also would detach visitors (even family members) from "connecting" with the names by being able to touch them. So, I'm thrilled to learn they made the right choice, at least for ONCE.
There's something very poetic about the pools disappearing into the unknown...the idea that at the end of the day there are no clear answers, no visibility of the mechanisms by which life unfolds. It suggests that the cosmic rationale (if any) behind such events is shrouded in mystery. The destination is not accessible, not a place we are allowed to be a part of.
Despite whatever logistical problems there have been, it's wonderful to see such a tremendous, heartfelt effort going forward.
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