Category: world trade center memorial

For some reason, I can’t get my idea for the memorial at the World Trade Center out of my head. I’ll read about the intensifying folly that’s engulfing redevelopment plans for the site; the dilution of the “winning” memorial design; the inexorable contortions the site plans undergo to meet the Port Authority’s political and commercial objectives–those invisibly sacrosanct elements of the rebuilding process which were never open to question, as if what the terrorists really hated was our 10 million square foot program–and I see the people who were killed going missing all over again. And I feel a quixotic [or is it sisyphean?] obligation to do something about it.

Continue reading “On The Memorial At The World Trade Center Site. Still.”

Very little pun intended.
The LMDC and its architects released details of the latest incarnation of the World Trade Center Memorial. Salient changes/evolutions: the giant waterfall voids seem reduced in size and scale. The space for the names of those killed, which is where visitors encounter the waterfalls, is rather low, almost intimate-looking. Conversely, the lower chamber, where footings of the (North) tower columns, at least, will be visible, seems much loftier. The skylit bathtub wall–resurfaced several times since it was exposed in the debris removal process–will loom over the space.
It’s an interesting (and a major) shift for Arad, who acknowledged as recently as September that “Bedrock is something that wasn’t too important to me at the beginning of design.”
What else: there’s a wall along West Street where the road slopes down and the plaza/park elevation stays level. Remember how the West St entrances of the North Tower and the hotel were a big story below the plaza level? Same thing.
Also, with the interpretive center/artifact space on the south side, it’s not clear where “memorial” begins and “center” ends. A mixed program reminds me of the Kennedy Center lobby, which happens to house a JFK Memorial, but who knew? I think/fear “memorial” in this case will be a highly programmed experience.
Renderings of the park/plaza level read as very unassuming, even conventional, while those of the memorial spaces–or the approaches to the memorial, actually, are almost exaggeratedly austere. The slate is still blank.
Memorial will preserve Twin Towers’ remnants [NYT, David Dunlap]
LMDC Press Release [renewnyc.com]
Curbed totally rocks on the WTC site posts, btw [curbed.com]
No Lack of Rhetoric at WTC Designers’ Panel [metropolismag]

Has he shrunk out of sight? Daniel Libeskind was notably absent from David Dunlap’s NYT report of architects vying for the commission to design the cultural buildings at the World Trade Center Site. Maybe he’s automatically in the running. After all, the museum images we all refer to right now are the cantilevered crystalline forms in Libeskind’s original proposal.
But, in what is by now standard operating procedure for the Port Authority- and LMDC-run rebuilding effort, flaws and shortcomings are being found in yet another element of the master plan. Dunlap’s article looks at options and challenges for moving the museums, now that obstructing a promenade between Calatrava’s train hub and the Winter Garden, and looming 15 stories over the Memorial entrance doesn’t seem like that great an idea.
Plan May Be Too Much of A Good Thing [NYT]

Took a 3-hour tour, a 3-hour tour to Hiroshima yesterday for the anniversary of the US dropping The Bomb on them. While I’m sure it was much hotter in 1945, the wide-open, stone-paved memorial park seems designed to recreate the inferno-like aftermath of that oh-so terrible morning; there’s not a shade tree in sight, and the most-sought-after Anniversary souvenir is a fan.
A memorial to a violent incident apparently needs a focal point, something concrete enough for visitors to connect with, latch onto. With the World Trade Center, it is (wrongly, I believe) the footprints of the buildings; with Hiroshima–and Oklahoma City in its wake–it is the moment of impact. A wristwatch, stopped at 8:15AM, holds pride of place in the Memorial Museum, and I overheard several people throughout our visit asking directions to “the watch.”
As I was leaving the first floor of the exhibition area, I saw a distinguished man with a posse of expensively-but-poorly suited minions, talking through a translator with a Japanese guy. A couple of reporters hovered around, not asking questions, just taking notes. Turned out to be the Pakistani Ambassador to Japan.
Pakistan? Seeing as how they’re next, he’s got a lot of nerve coming to Hiroshima on the anniversary of the bomb, I said to one reporter, who nodded grimly. I stood and eavesdropped for a while, as the Ambassador ran through platitudes of defensive deterrents (nationalist pride-infused inferiority complex), developing country unable to afford a war (yet able to divert money from education and economic development to the bomb; offsetting costs with wholesale exports of nuclear technology), &c. Finally, when he talked about praying for the souls of those killed, I couldn’t take it anymore.
As the group turned, I said, “Excuse me, but how can you talk about sorrow when, if the world sees another bomb used–whether by your military, Islamic terrorists, or North Korea–it’ll have ‘made in Pakistan’ on it?” He didn’t register at first, but a couple in the posse were surprised, and the Japanese guy froze. The ambassador stumbled for a bit, muttered no, no, and, looking toward a minion who was gesturing toward the elevator, gave me an ignoring nod and moved away quickly. A reporter trailing asked me my name and where I was from, and then I went to give the kid her bottle.
Just like when you think of the funniest comeback later that night, I spent the rest of the afternoon and my hydrofoil back to Shikoku thinking of what I should have said. And wishing I’d shaved, so I didn’t look so much like a peacenik bum, peddling my way across southeast Asia.
Sure, you can speak truth to power, but more than likely, power will ignore your over-emotional, impulsive, sorry-looking ass.

Due to a work-related trip out of the country, I will miss the Republican Convention when it comes to town. If I were here, I would protest. I would not use signs, or puppets, or chants; I would protest by reenacting the shocked, dusty exodus from lower Manhattan on the morning of September 11th.
Here’s how I would do it:
– start downtown, maybe even below Canal street
– wear expendable business attire.
– set up a step ladder on the street and,
– using a mesh tray like they use for goldpanning or a handsifter, even, I would have a friend cover me with dust.
– It would be chalk dust, or line chalk from a football field, rosin, baby powder, or some other fine, whitish, grayish non-toxic dust.
– I would cover my mouth with a handkerchief while doing this, snd keep it with me to wipe my sweaty, dusty face.
– I would offer to cover as many thousands of my fellow protestors in the same manner.
– Then, I would start walking north.
– Or I would start walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, en masse.
– I would let verisimilitude and photogenics dictate my route more than proximity to Madison Square Garden.
– I would be eerily, even unsettlingly, quiet and orderly.
I would take seriously my responsibility as a New Yorker who lived through that horrible day, and take its symbolism back from the politicians who ignored the warnings, did nothing to prepare, sat or flailed wildly when it happened, sowed fear with it ever since, used it to falsely justify a war of misplaced vengeance, put us all in even greater danger than we were before, and who are now coming to town to usurp the most widely shared monument to their failure.
But maybe that’s just me.

David Dunlap has a nice story about the typeface used for the inscription on the Freedom Tower cornerstone. Inspired by the sign on the Port Authority bus terminal, the typeface was designed by Brooklyn native Tobias Frere-Jones, whose name for the font, Gotham, was not just serendipity. [Read an interview with TF-J where he cites the WTC destruction as an inspirational facet of the design.]
It’s part of a larger Frere-Jones family conspiracy–watch out Jake and Jen!!— to totally own any creative endeavor with a city-related name.
Meanwhile, Curbed (safe. for now.) reports on the best/only way to actually catch a glimpse of the cornerstone.

They’d cover it up for now so it doesn’t distract from the event, then they’d rip it out once everyone’s gone. They’d also make a few arbitrary, unreviewed, undiscussed decisions about other stuff they’d keep.

Most guests arriving at the ceremony were probably unaware that they were crossing the line of the north facade of the north tower, since the column bases had been covered in gravel. Officials of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the site, said the gravel was spread to create a smoother grade and to protect the remnants.
During the impending dismantling of the parking garage that was under 6 World Trade Center, some architectural elements will be preserved, including a smoke-scarred column, a column on which the paint was blistered by heat into a marbleized pattern and a section of smoke-stained wall with the words, “Yellow Parking B2.”

– “Rebirth Marked by Cornerstone at Ground Zero,” by David Dunlap, NYT

At panoramas.dk, Hans Nyberg has posted a remarkable QTVR by Jook Leung, taken from the center of the media scrum at yesterday’s Freedom Tower groundbreaking ceremony.
Pataki Schmataki, check out the full extent of the Bathtub wall, with its uneven concrete facing and steel cable tiebacks. Once the centerpiece of Libeskind’s own sunken memorial plan, the raw wall’s going to be refaced, and ultimately, only a small section–if any of it–of it will be visible through a glass curtain wall when all’s said and done.

A hapless British journalist was jumped and his article about the rebuilding at the WTC site was hijacked by a band of Rebuild The Towers soundbite whores during a recent visit to New York City. James Westcott published his account of the incident in the Guardian, but it appears he has no idea what happened to him.
The number of guerillas is not known. Activist groups such as Team Twin Towers and Make New York New York Again claim wide “populist” support, but most attacks can be traced back to one man, John Hakala. Hakala’s tactic of delivering seductively glib quotes that have no basis in reality is now well known to veteran reporters on the WTC beat.
Westcott’s story on unresolved issues and conflict over development efforts at the WTC site was turned into a disturbing manifesto for rebuilding the Twin Towers that betrays the faulty reasoning, impractical banality, and logical inconsistencies of the guerillas’ position. One “architectural activist” seeking “restoration” of the Towers criticizes the Freedom Tower: “We are replacing a symbol of world peace and human cooperation with a self-absorbed salute to America,” says an “architectural activist”. Yes, echos another, “They [the Towers] were us: stark capitalism, power and beauty without explanation or apology.”
And Hakala points out the fatal flaw of the Childs/Libeskind-designed Freedom Tower: “You don’t see it on a single mug, T-shirt, postcard or pin around the city.”
Observers who wonder how a seasoned journalist like Westcott could be so vulnerable suggest he let his guard down after reading a cryptic outburst of support for rebuilding by controversial Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp. Meanwhile, guerillas may have interpreted Muschamp’s reference to “Mnemosyne” as a secret code to trigger the attack. Muschamp has since been relieved of his criticking duties.

There was a day when a story like “Architectural Team Is Chosen for Trade Center Memorial” would be frontpage news.
And there was a day when an LMDC statement like “[Building the memorial]’ would also likely require removal of some remnants of the former W.T.C.'” would set off alarm bells all over, seeing as how there are very few actual remnants left.
And there was a day when a lengthy article in the Times castigating Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum as a theme park of facile, emotionally manipulative kitsch–and a functional failure as a museum–would ignite a firestorm of debate.
That day is not today.
[Michael Kimmelman casts his critique as a cautionary tale for New York; but like belated credulous investigative journalism about WMD claims, this stuff would’ve been nice to hear before we got lured into Libeskind’s quagmire.]

David Dunlap reports in the NYT that the city’s powers that be are moving in on the WTC Memorial site: Some of the biggest development-savvy architecture firms are vying for the role of associate architect on the WTC Memorial. [Gothamist has links to the firms’ corporate sites.]
Meanwhile, the LMDC announced a 24-person advisory committee for the Memorial Center, the 65,000SF underground space which will house artifacts from the attacks. Included on the committee is Lowery Stokes Sims of the Studio Museum in Harlem, a Memorial juror; the head of the Landmarks Commission; Tom Eccles, head of the Public Arts Fund; and Raymond Gastil, of the Van Alen Institute.

[via Archinect] WTC Memorial designer Michael Arad discusses his original idea, design process, and experience in a too-brief interview for Architectrual Record Magazine.

Arad’s reworked proposal (with Peter Walker) attempts a return to his original vision, in which very clear, stark voids pierce the horizontal plane of the plaza. More and more, the experience sounds similar to Michael Heizer’s Nort, East, South, West installation at Dia Beacon.