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Been fielding some interesting responses from people on the WTC charette, including several about the word, “charette.” A couple of people said it’s snooty, a couple complained that it’s architect-y, a couple complained it’s French. As they say in darts, nice grouping. Please feel free to call it a roundtable, a workshop, a klatsch, hell, call it a “freedom cart” if your politics demands. Just call.
Several folks, including me and the aforelinked Jeff Jarvis, have been concerned about how the competition requirements (one 30×40-inch board) may skew against non-architects’ proposals: no slick, no realized, no comprehensive, no chance. This prompted me to track down Maya Lin’s 1982 account of entering the Vietnam Memorial competition, which she only published in 2000 in her book, Boundaries.
Even in my last WTC memorial post, I was unconciously channeling Lin’s essay. I mean, I knew she shows up in my script for Souvenir (November 2001), but still. It was the degree to which the Lutyens memorial at Thiepval influenced her that sets S(N01) in motion. Here’s part of what she says:

To walk past those [75,000] names [on the Thiepval memorial] and realize those lost lives — the effect of that is the strength of the design. This memorial acknowledged those lives without focusing on the war or on creating a political statement of victory or loss. This apolitical approach became the essential aim of my design, — I did not want to civilize war by glorifying it or by forgetting the sacrifices involved. The price of human life in war should always be clearly remembered.
But on a personal level, I wanted to focus on the nature of accepting and coming to terms with a loved one’s death. Simple as it may seem, I remember feeling that accepting a person’s death is the first step in being able to overcome that loss.
I felt that as a culture we were extremely youth-oriented and not willing or able to accept death or dying as a part of life. The rites of mourning, which in more primitive and older cultures were very much a part of life, have been suppressed in our modern times. In the design of the memorial, a fundamental goal was to be honest about death, since we must accept that loss in order to begin to overcome it. The pain of the loss will always be there, it will always hurt, but we must acknowledge the death in order to move on.
What then would bring back the memory of a person? A specific object or image would be limiting. A realistic sculpture would be only one interpretation of that time. I wanted something that all people could relate to on a personal level. At this time I had as yet no form, no specific artistic image.
The use of names was a way to bring back everything someone could remember about a person.

With this powerful realization–which perfectly met the competition requirements of including the names of all 57,000 Vietnam casualties on the memorial–Lin’s submission was so simple, it prompted one judge to react, “He must really know what he is doing to dare to do something so naive.” She submitted “drawings in soft pastels, very mysterious, very painterly, and not at all typical of architectural drawings.” In fact, she spent more time on the one-page essay, which she felt was critical to understanding her idea. (This text is on the official NPS site.) The takeaway from this: Your proposal can be compelling enough to win, if your idea is compelling enough to win.

A couple of people saw some cynicism my last post on the WTC Memorial competition’s designation as “open to all” and “part of the mourning process.” It was partly a reaction to that member of the axis of eager, Jeff Jarvis. And there’s my (not unfounded) skepticism about poorly guided democratic/populist design solutions. But mostly, it was about my own ambivalence about the process itself, what role a memorial there will play, and the use/impact/value of my own response.
I made a film about memorials, which looks at how people and places mark and deal with terrible events. I intended it to be something useful to people–to New York–for dealing with the WTC attacks. It occurred to me that the WTC Memorial competition is precisely when I/it can be of some use. But since it’s not in any way definitive, or authoritative, or even necessarily that influential, the way it can contribute is as one perspective in a discussion among equals. If I am ambivalent-yet-still-interested in proposing a design for the WTC Memorial, there are probably others in the same situation.
For me, and you (if you’re in the same competition boat as me), I’m putting together a WTC Memorial charette.
What’s a charette, you say? In architecture, it’s a quick-fire, problem-solving design exercise. When MoMA held one to select their architect, participants whipped up their ideas, models and sketches and submitted them in a shirt-box. Even though it’s called a charette, this exercise will put more emphasis on discussion and problem-solving and less on specific design. The goal will be to discuss our own real–not hypothetical–questions, ideas, and challenges around making our proposals for the WTC Memorial. Then, after an invigorating, thoughtful, and (hopefully) interesting charette, we’ll all be primed to make our proposals to the competition.
Here’s how I envision it so far:

Don’t think this is at all a proprietary deal, either. If this group fills up, and you want to start another one, be my guest. To participate, or if you have any questions or suggestions, email me at Author gregPosted on May 6, 2003Categories world trade center memorial

A controversy is brewing over Daniel Libeskind’s design for the WTC site, which is moving, rapidly and significantly, from what he’d originally proposed–and won with. The NYTimes‘ Edward Wyatt is on top of things. Yesterday, he reported on a study which showed one of the Libeskind design’s core elements, the Wedge of Light–a zone where unobstructed sunlight shone in between his buildings every Sept. 11th morning–was a physical impossibility. Busted, Libeskind tried to pretend that, all along, the Wedge wasn’t literal but metaphorical. From someone whose design is based on making symbolism and metaphor into the literal and physical, it’s an unconvincing crock.

Today, Wyatt collects some other opinions, including one from “Dream Team” member, Richard Meier (himself no slouch in the not-coming-clean-about-your-WTC-design department), who asks, “How could you not take it literally?” (Remember, a Liberty Wall, symbolizing the Constitution and a 1,776-foot tower are the other major elements of the design.) In addition to the collapsed tower fragment-shaped, tic-tac-toe buildings, the Dream Team proposal included a garden of trees and lights,in the shape of the Twin Towers’ shadows, which would have extended across the World Financial Center and into the Hudson. It was a moving design; I hope they’ll pony up $25 and enter it in the memorial competition.

Other changes Libeskind’s made so far: making room for the MTA’s bus station by shortening his foundation wall from 7 stories to 3 (roughly the depth of the Rockefeller Center skating rink), placing said bus station under the designated Memorial site, encasing said wall in a “glazed screen,” and cantilevering his museum over the footprint of the North Tower. Maybe these were all part of his winning proposal. Why not ask Libeskind about that?

That could be the sub-title of this site, really. I made Souvenir (November 2001), in part, to ask what could New York be like in 80 years, after the generation of us who experienced the attacks are all gone. How would the as-yet unborn people then and there remember us here and now? I should clarify: us=those who experienced (ie, died, survived, rescued, ran, watched, etc.). And already, in less than two years, here and now is becoming then and there.
Now, (tens of? hundreds of?) thousands of designs for the WTC Memorial will start pouring in, invariably affected by the intervening events, mourning, healing, revenge, renewal, bitterness, anger, loss, politics, war, protest, obfuscation, certainties and uncertainties. Although Rules have been set, but not in stone: submitters should feel free to “go where their imaginations, where their mourning needs to take them.” On the LMDC’s registration information site, the only surprise is that they’re not accepting Paypal.
WWI itself changed the memorial game. For the first time, it was not just the generals and heros, but the average soldier–the individual, not an abstracted symbol–was to be memorialized and remembered. Metal dogtags were a standardized response to the sheer numbers of the Missing in WWI. Like the Thiepval Memorial, the object of two New Yorkers’ search in S(N01), the WTC Memorial will also serve as a grave-by-proxy for the hundreds whose remains were never identified.
Due in part to an overly individual-centric reading of the Viet Nam Memorial’s personal/collective experience, the focus of memorial designs in Oklahoma City and the Pentagon is almost wholly on the lost individual and “achieving closure.” And now, the individual is designing the memorial. Maybe if designing is such an effective way to meet our memorializing needs, we should just set up a perpetual workshop on the site. Of course, what would that look like to people 80 years from now?