One World Trade Center

Craig Dykers, the Pavilion’s lead designer, is a cofounder of Snøhetta, an architectural practice that opened in Norway in 1989 and maintains offices in Oslo and Manhattan. Their acclaimed design for a new library in Alexandria, Egypt, was followed by a wide spectrum of projects, including the Norwegian National Opera in Oslo; the redevelopment of Times Square in New York City; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art expansion; the Museo de Ciencias Ambientales in Guadalajara, Mexico; the Lascaux IV Caves Museum in France; and the Väven Cultural Centre in Umeå, Sweden.

The firm was tapped in 2004 to design a World Trade Center cultural center that was to house two tenants, the Drawing Center and the International Freedom Center, but both institutions opted out by 2005 in the face of ideological and political hurdles. There were fears that a human rights museum might project anti-American sentiments, while an art museum might show the “wrong” kind of art. “I think something needs to be a little bit rough and not perfect to make the place authentic, and that’s why I fought hard to keep our building there,” Dykers said. He eventually convinced Governor Pataki of the need for a venue that was flexible enough to support a variety of activities. Pataki earmarked $80 million for the project, which assured Snøhetta’s continuing involvement and eventually yielded the Pavilion design.

Dykers is an American who has lived in Europe for most of his life. The son of a United States veteran of three wars, he brought a broad perspective that was both American and non-American. He understood that people who spent as much time in the military as his father did had a different perspective on war than those who haven’t. “They’re very, very realistic. They are not interested in going to war,” he said. “Usually, when tragic things happen, the people that most quickly want to go to war are those who know nothing about it.… What happens in conflict is never clearly good or bad, and a real soldier knows that.” At meetings to discuss the rebuilding of the World Trade Center, he often felt his was “a voice from another place.”

His understanding of space and psychology was shaped by his older brother, once a brilliant structural engineer who suffered a brain aneurysm in his thirties and lost his short-term memory. “Most of us live with the luxury of memory, which is also baggage that we carry around with us. When we move through a place or when we go anywhere, even here now, you’ll remember sort of where you came in and you’ll instinctively go back to where you were when you leave,” Dykers said. Lacking this ability, his brother is always looking for psychological tools to navigate space, a “living experiment of who we are with all the stuff taken away.” Dykers’s fraternal observations make him keenly aware of how people move in public spaces and their need for landmarks that will orient them, an understanding that his Pavilion design makes plain.

Watch how people respond to the Pavilion. You’ll see that they will put their noses right up to the glass to look in. Peering inside, they’ll see the tridents; those inside see faces pressed to the glass looking back at them. It’s in this moment, Dykers said, that one realizes that “you’re part of a society. That’s very different than looking into the emptiness of the pools and the infinity of the skyscrapers.” The Pavilion delivers a shared, human experience, one that prepares visitors for their journey down into the museum while encouraging them to exult in the simple joys of being alive.

THE 9/11 MEMORIAL MUSEUM

As one descends into the 9/11 Memorial Museum, there is a moment of revelation that is easily missed. It occurs along the great ramp that leads down to the exhibits, at the place where you almost can touch the shimmering aluminum underside of one of the memorial pools. There, you sense the museum’s enormous scale and experience a wave of memories. “It’s where you realize that you can look down and see that the pools are authentically aligned with the footprints,” Steven M. Davis of Davis Brody Bond, the museum’s architect, said. These two footprints, the square foundations of the original towers, are marked above ground by the deeply recessed memorial pools and below by the museum. While the exhibits recount the events of 1993 and 2001 through monumental artifacts, personal objects, and multimedia displays, it is the space itself—a memorial within and beneath a memorial—that speaks most eloquently.

Because the site, rather than the museum or its collection, was the icon, Davis Brody Bond had to invert design formulas that shape more traditional museums. Few interpretive museums are located at the places that they commemorate, much less inside them. The museum’s location and symbiotic relationship with the memorial endows it with palpable authenticity, as does its design, which references the dimensions of the original towers and incorporates structural remnants from Ground Zero. “Nothing is varnished in terms of the scale. The scale of the event, the scale of the Trade Center, the scale of the emotional impact, the scale of all of it is preserved. It is presented at the size that it was, and people instinctively know that,” Davis said.

Early on, Davis realized that “in a hundred years, there wasn’t going to be anyone left alive who experienced September 11. There had to be a narrative built into the architecture so that the story would tell itself.” Accordingly, his firm conceived of a narrative framework that would stand on its own, relying on four principles—memory, authenticity, scale, and emotion—to guide their design. In large part, that framework arose from the requirement to preserve the structural artifacts that remained—specifically, the box columns that once formed the perimeters of the Twin Towers, the slurry wall, and the Vesey Street staircase—and were protected under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. Section 106 is “probably the reason that the museum survived in any form,” Davis said.

During the museum’s dedication ceremony on May 15, 2014, President Barack Obama said, “No act of terror can match the strength or the character of our country. Like the great wall and bedrock that embrace us today, nothing can ever break us.” Following a six-day period when the museum was open twenty-four hours daily to 9/11 families, survivors, rescue and recovery workers, and others, it opened to the general public on May 21.

Traveling from the sun-filled Pavilion to the dim subterranean galleries requires crossing a series of structural and emotional thresholds. “You go from the light into a much more subdued visual environment. It’s much quieter, it’s darker, your emotions transition. You gather yourself, you adjust to the light, you adjust to the sound, all in this concourse,” Davis said. Lighting designer Paul Marantz guided the passage from light to darkness, saying the secret of good museum design is not to “let anybody in too fast, because you would like them to hang around in a middle-light zone long enough for their eyes to adapt to lower light levels.”

Lighting a space that is entirely underground presented a challenge. “You have to think about the fact that there’s not going to be any daylight down there, but on the other hand, you don’t want it to be miserable, dark, and gloomy,” Marantz said. To add light, Davis Brody Bond sheathed the undersides of the memorial pools in aluminum, a material that also was used on the façades of the original towers, which once glowed in the afternoon sun. Here, however, they used foamed aluminum, which evokes both a tabernacle’s sacred luxe and the rippled patterns made by the falling water of the memorial pools. In a brilliant conceptual move, the light reflected off the twin pools’ undersides is the interior’s primary light source; it also pays homage to the Twin Towers. “There’s a memory of them down at the bottom, underneath the memorial fountains,” Marantz said. “There’s a coherent idea that what was there and what is there are related.”

Descent to bedrock is via a wide ramp, recalling the one that recovery and construction workers used for years while clearing and rebuilding the site. The ramp is also a practical means of moving large numbers of people and, with its gentle slope, is ADA-compliant.

From the start, the museum staff worked with trauma psychologists “who said that the most important thing you can give to your visitor is choice. Empower them with the ability to decide what they will see, what they’re ready to see,” said Alice Greenwald, who became the museum’s director in 2006 after serving as the associate director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The exhibits had to meet the expectations of the families of the victims, those who were in the city that day, and those who weren’t or were too young to understand, while keeping audiences of the future in mind. Another consideration was the different ways in which people absorb content. “Visitors typically fall into three categories: skimmers, strollers, and those who want to dive deeply into the exhibits. By taking a layered approach, designers can speak to all three,” said Ann Farrington, who consulted on the exhibition design.

The two primary exhibits include In Memoriam, a memorial that pays tribute to the 2,983 men, women, and children who died because of the attacks on February 26, 1993, and September 11, 2001. Its design was a direct response to something a family member said during one of the many planning meetings that the museum held, which was, “‘I’d like to have a sanctum within a sanctum within a sanctum,’” said Tom Hennes of Thinc Design, the lead exhibition designer, who worked with Local Projects, a media design and production firm. September 11, 2001, the historical exhibition, consists of three parts: one part concerns events that took place on September 11, 2001, and incorporates artifacts, imagery, testimony, and real-time recordings; a second section circles back to events that led to the attacks; and a third gallery explores the attacks’ immediate and ongoing ramifications. Designed by Layman Design, the galleries are dense with physical and digital artifacts that represent only a fraction of the museum’s collection. There are too many to take in. Perhaps that multiplicity is the point, conjuring both the enormity of the event and the proliferation of shrines that blanketed the city in the fall of 2001.

“We felt that the trope of this museum was about witness. It was about the shared, collective witness of this event. For that reason, we began our historical exhibition at 8:46, the impact moment of the first hijacked plane into the North Tower. Because that was the point at which most people entered the story,” Greenwald said. Bearing witness to the unimaginable, she said, “is the only way to imagine a way beyond it.” Ultimately, the goal was to provide “a range of experiences that enable people to regulate the intensity of their own journey and to come as near to the event or stay as distant from it as they need to,” Hennes said. “When we feel held or sheltered, the experience is contained; we can open to new things because we’re less vulnerable emotionally. The whole museum is what I would term a holding environment, a safe space to explore the edges of our experience.” Entering the second segment of the historical galleries, visitors encounter a 7.5-foot (2.3 m) scale model of the Twin Towers, now writ small. As with everything else in the museum, its placement is deliberate. “As soon as you come out of that experience, we present you with a miniature that’s whole again,” Hennes said. “The goal of that was not only to take a step back and ask why this happened; experientially, the goal was to say, ‘You’re out of that now. Regroup. You’re big, it’s small, you’re safe.’”