“We recognized one thing about New York City—it’s a luxury to be horizontal,” Dykers said. Snøhetta gave the Pavilion an intriguing, horizontal profile that would distinguish it from the square memorial pools and nearby towers. Much like a high-tech spider’s web, it is woven from steel and glass. Portions of the exterior are striped with bands of lustrous stainless steel, an effect created by microscopic surface scratches in the steel that catch sunlight as well as indirect light from other buildings. According to the architect, the building “actually grows light.” It recalls the fractured, deconstructed vision that Libeskind had put forward in his original master plan, which had included the Wedge of Light park that would mark the sun’s movement at specific times of day. The comparison to Libeskind doesn’t bother Dykers in the least; in fact, he’s grateful “that we were able to maintain some stability across the generations of people that have worked on the site.”

A drawing of the eastern façade of the original North Tower shows the two tridents (circled with a dotted line) that are now installed in the Pavilion.

The Pavilion plays with the notions of inside and outside by providing views into and out from the interior atrium space. It also functions as a light well, bringing sunlight down into the museum lobby, an effective means of preparing visitors to begin the physical and mental transition from the sunshine of the streets to the dimmer lower levels. To further emphasize the structure’s transitional role, the architects created a broad staircase, which, along with an escalator, brings visitors down a gentle incline into the Davis Brody Bond–designed museum. The stairs are made of different materials—wood on the upper level and cast concrete below—another way of defining what is above ground, what is at ground level, and what is below.

Two seventy-foot (21.3 m) columns, rusted to a warm patina, stand just inside the Pavilion. Called “tridents,” they are two of the eighty-four columns that once were planted in bedrock and that supported the North Tower, rising five stories above the plaza before branching into three prongs, which gave them their name. These jagged façade columns remained standing when all else had fallen. The first of many giant artifacts extracted from Ground Zero that museum visitors encounter, the tridents are powerfully symbolic, recalling both the original towers and the recovery efforts. At the same time, they herald the rebirth of the site. As one descends into the museum, the tridents rise up next to the glass wall on the Pavilion’s northern side, framing a view of One World Trade Center, which, so framed, seems to spring from those tridentine roots and appears even larger than it is.

 

Thirteen massive tridents were recovered from Ground Zero and stored at Kennedy International Airport in Queens until two of them were installed in 2010. They were so large that the Pavilion building had to be built around them.

 

An aerial view shows the Pavilion’s unique structure, which helps visitors locate the memorial. Architect Craig Dykers believes that if the Pavilion weren’t there, “people would gravitate toward one spot in the middle or toward the edges of the pools.” The building also contains a public auditorium, a café, and a second-floor room reserved for the families of 9/11 victims.

Preserving the tridents was suggested by Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in a New York Times op-ed piece shortly after September 11. He described them as the “searing fragment of ruin already so frequently photographed and televised that it has become nearly as familiar to us as the buildings that once stood there.” His proposal, all but forgotten, was resurrected six years later when the National September 11 Memorial & Museum announced that two of the battle-scarred steel girders would be installed at the museum’s entrance.

At first, many didn’t grasp the tridents’ immense size. They looked “manageable on the front page of the New York Times,” said Mark Wagner, the architect who selected many of the artifacts that were salvaged from the rubble, “but anywhere from 80 feet to 175 feet tall [24.4 to 53.3 m], they were a monster to move.” Taking out something that large had two constraints, Wagner said: “the weight (because over a certain tonnage the axles of flatbeds wouldn’t be able to carry it) and also the length. We had to get off the island of Manhattan with a long piece on the truck. Between weight and length, that limited us to about forty tons (36.3 metric tons) of steel and about forty feet (12.2 m) in length. That determined the size of the sections that were cut, removed, and ultimately, reassembled.” Halfway up each trident, you will see the sleeve where each beam was pieced back together, with the bolts deliberately exposed to make the reassembly evident.

The Pavilion’s playful, mirrored form compels people to look inside. Dykers recalled seeing “two or three young people laugh for a moment, bringing a sense of joy to a site that is so tragic.… For a moment you remember that you’re alive.”

The Pavilion is cantilevered across numerous subterranean structures. “We couldn’t control what happened underneath us, so we found two places where we could actually build a foundation and then we bridged the building across it with no columns going down.… It doesn’t have to be supported in between,” Dykers said. That allowed below-grade construction to proceed without interference. It also functions as a symbolic bridge, linking the memorial and the surrounding skyscrapers. “There are these two worlds, the past and the future, and our building is the present,” Dykers observed. It reflects presence—of people, movement, trees, other buildings, and the present moment—rather than the absence expressed by the memorial.

Conceptually, the idea of bridging the past and the present is captured inside when you are descending into the museum via the stairs or escalator. At one point, your eye is flush with the ground, Dykers said, and you can “see the plaza level at eye level.” He said that the firm designs many projects with elements that may or may not be consciously noticed by the public. “Nobody may ever say anything about that, but they will feel it. Your body remembers things that your mind doesn’t.”