Located on eight of the World Trade Center’s sixteen acres (6.5 ha), the National September 11 Memorial & Museum commemorates the losses of September 11, 2001, and February 26, 1993. It consists of three structures—the 9/11 Memorial, the 9/11 Memorial Museum, and an entrance Pavilion—that are physically and symbolically intertwined. Composed of diverse elements, they acknowledge that individual ways of grieving are as unique as fingerprints. Some people want a peaceful setting that encourages contemplation, others seek a work of art that transmutes grief to beauty, and still others need to see an event’s ravaged remains to understand what was endured. The National September 11 Memorial & Museum is the heart of the World Trade Center.
THE 9/11 MEMORIAL
On the morning of September 11, 2011, the 9/11 Memorial was dedicated in a solemn ceremony. Mourners gathered on the plaza amid newly planted oak saplings. Bells tolled and bagpipes keened above the roar of the memorial’s waterfalls. A giant American flag, the largest ever made, rippled across the façade of One World Trade Center under skies as poignantly blue as those ten years earlier. Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, along with other dignitaries, spoke, though no words could strike the chord that the recitation of the names of those lost did. That sad, now familiar litany was broken by six moments of silence—at 8:46, 9:03, 9:37, 9:59, 10:03, and 10:28—marking the attacks in New York; Washington, D.C.; and Pennsylvania.
The 9/11 Memorial features two immense pools on an eight-acre (3.2 ha) granite plaza. The pools, each nearly an acre in size and thirty feet (9.1 m) deep, are set within the footprints of the original towers. These twin voids, clad in dark gray granite, are the memorial’s centerpiece. They contain thundering waterfalls, some of the largest fountains ever made, which cascade into a still lower central pool. Bronze parapets around the pools commemorate the 2,983 victims of the 1993 and 2001 attacks. Their names are cut into the parapet panels, inviting visitors to run their fingers over them, one of the most ancient forms of homage. At night, light shines up through the names, making each one glow. Open and welcoming, the memorial fosters the democratic values of public assembly, values that played a pivotal role in the collective public response to the September 11 attacks.
When the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation announced a competition to design the memorial in 2003, architect Michael Arad was thirty-four, with an international background. A former soldier in the Israeli army and the son of an Israeli diplomat, he was an American-Israeli citizen, had lived in Mexico and London, and attended Dartmouth and Georgia Tech. He had few commissions under his belt. What he did have was a clear vision of what he thought should be built, and enough naïveté to believe that it would be.
Arad’s design, titled “Reflecting Absence,” was selected as one of eight finalists from thousands. His essential concept was that the most fitting response to the loss of so many souls and the skyline itself would be absence rather than presence, a void rather than a solid structure. During the last stage of the competition, he joined forces with landscape architect Peter Walker, a luminary in his field, with more than four decades of international experience. Together, the pair designed the memorial, using a minimal palette and relatively few elements, aspiring to a broad symbolism that could be understood by all. By reducing the plaza’s elements to a handful that do “five or six things” each, they achieved a nuanced, layered effect. “It’s almost entirely spatial. It’s nonobjective,” Walker said. That minimalist approach, combined with the site’s starkly flat plane, gives the memorial precinct the quality of a stage set, with the drama provided by seasonal color and an ever-changing cast of visitors. In time, the plaza would come alive with every sort of person, engaged in every sort of activity, just as Arad and Walker hoped it would.
The memorial provides the victims’ families with a place to mourn their dead, that most human of desires. Ground Zero is all many of them have—there are no identified remains of about forty percent of the victims. While the memorial pools mark the location of the Twin Towers, they do not commemorate the actual resting ground of many of the dead, whose remains were found all over the site and beyond it.
Spontaneous memorials often contain the seeds of permanent memorials. In October 2002, Michael Arad made a temporary installation on his East Village apartment rooftop to express the emptiness as well as the sense of community he felt during the autumn of 2001. The work consisted of two black voids hovering in a ghostly pool of water. Those rooftop seeds of grief and hope, transmuted in Arad’s memorial design of 2004, became the double inverted fountains of the 9/11 Memorial. Although much would change in the coming decade, he conceived the fundamental idea of the memorial soon after the tragedy.
Making a great work of art or architecture requires that you “think longer before you build,” Walker said. “One of the wonderful things about this project is I’ve been able to think about it for years.” The two produced the winning scheme, announced in 2004. A shotgun wedding, intended to soften Arad’s austere proposal with Walker’s landscaping, their relationship was volatile. However, their contract with the LMDC, which Walker describes as a “harness,” stipulated that they would remain partners until the project was completed.
Glistening, musical, ceaseless—the waterfalls are the memorial’s masterstroke, absorbing all other sounds into their song. They bring water, with its proven beneficence, inland from the Hudson River, continuing the work begun more than thirty years ago when a mile-long riverfront esplanade opened nearby at Battery Park City. Each memorial pool holds over 500,000 gallons (1,892,705.9 L) of water, which is pumped, filtered, and recirculated every twenty-two minutes, using sixteen pumps and water from the city water main.
Water has a nearly unlimited capacity for metaphor. It encompasses rather than divides, possesses form but embodies formlessness, and elicits an instinctive response, connecting visitors with larger realities. Recalling the ocean’s horizon, the memorial pool’s broad parapets gleam platinum in the sunlight like the shoreline, inscribed with names that, now indelible, are inured to life’s changing tides. Like the central pools, with their unknowable depths, the surrounding parapets similarly engage the psyche. About waist-high, they create a barrier between the living and the dead, between the present and the future, giving rise to the fragile illusion that there is a distance between the infinite and us.
Fisher Marantz Stone, the lighting wizards that realized Tribute in Light, the beloved, twin-beamed memorial that has been illuminated downtown annually since 2002, orchestrated the lighting of the memorial pools and plaza. Designer Paul Marantz said they knew “from the first minute” that they were going to outline in light the waterfalls where they met the floor of the pool. The challenge was figuring out how to use low-voltage power, required by the city’s building code, and submerge the lights underwater. In a solution that was as technical as it was aesthetic, the designers used LED lights, a gamble given the technology’s newness at the time, and regulated their temperature by sheathing them in watertight pipes. It was critical that the underwater luminaires be placed precisely so that the water would refract their light, which would then travel up inside the waterfall and make each drop sparkle and dance.
A grove of more than four hundred swamp white oaks distinguishes the memorial precinct from the surrounding streets, forming a reverential, protected sanctuary. The tree placement is subtle, Arad said, in an “abacus-like grid” that is at once formal and informal. From some angles, they coalesce into a forest. From others, it is apparent that the trees are placed in grid pattern. Working in collaboration with arborist Paul Cowie, Walker selected the species for its autumnal color, strength, and disease resistance. The oaks are expected to grow to about eighty feet (24.4 m), with leafy canopies that provide shade during the summer, colorful autumnal displays, and patterned tracery in the winter. To ensure their survival, they were planted in an enormous volume of soil—40,000 tons (36,287.4 metric tons)—that is concealed in troughs beneath the plaza. “Every drop of water or snowmelt on the plaza is captured,” Walker said. The water is then channeled into large subterranean holding tanks to be reused.
Granite pavers and cobbles are set in a linear pattern, as are the low granite benches. Interspersed are rectangles of grass and ground coverings of evergreen English ivies and turf grass that soften the plaza’s angularity. The design is sustainable, in terms of performance and maintenance.
Displaying the names of the victims, now forever linked by inclination and happenstance, presented an emotional conundrum and a typographical puzzle. Arad’s initial design placed the victims’ names at the foot of the waterfalls, thirty feet (9.1 m) below grade and reached via four long ramps. The powerful Coalition of 9/11 Families hated the idea of displaying the names underground, a configuration that also complicated the positioning of utilities and train tracks. Also, Davis Brody Bond had centered the pools over the Twin Towers’ actual footprints, a concept that is accepted as obvious today but that was not part of Arad’s original vision. Arad suspected that moving the pools had more to do with Davis Brody Bond’s bid to design a museum on the site (which they won), which would change the underground areas, aligning the pools with the sheared-off box columns and exposed slurry wall that are seen inside the museum. It wasn’t until 2006, when New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg became chairman of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, which took over the project from the LMDC, that the issue of where to display the names would be resolved. Few suspected that their placement would become the memorial’s most profound element.
“We want the names above the ground. We want a safe and secure memorial that’s built under the legal jurisdiction of the New York City building and fire codes. We don’t want this convoluted multimillion- and billion-dollar, really meshuggeneh idea, OK?”
SALLY REGENHARD family member, 2006
In 2006, Pataki and Bloomberg charged developer Frank J. Sciame with finding ways to reduce the memorial’s mounting costs and alleviate security concerns. He recommended eliminating the ramps and below-ground memorial galleries, key elements of Arad’s design, and raising the names of the dead to plaza level. Arad was devastated. “I really felt for him. Here’s a guy who’s at the top of the world, and they’ve taken half of it away,” Walker said. “He learned something. We all learn that way. I was probably a pretty tough kid when I started, too.”
The names on the memorial are organized by “meaningful adjacencies” that reflect where victims died, their work affiliations, and their personal relationships. Poring over long rolls of annotated printouts, such as this one, Arad, his team, and museum staff worked intensely for a year to resolve the name placement. Some groupings are self-contained, such as those who worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, which, with 658 names, is the largest such block; within that block, significant relationships are also acknowledged. Other names are together because the victims were relatives or best friends or strangers who found themselves together at the end.