“An emotionally safe encounter with difficult history, experienced through the lens of memory, can inspire and change the way people see the world and the possibility of their own lives.”
ALICE GREENWALD National September 11 Memorial Museum Director
“It’s a sacred place by virtue of where we are. That’s a given.”
ALICE GREENWALD National September 11 Memorial Museum Director
The museum’s spaces compress and expand, a time-tested architectural means of moving people forward. However, here that spatiality has a secondary resonance. Most of the 9/11 story is about compression, or collapse. The towers’ collapse is the obvious one, but there were other, symbolic collapses of perception in the aftermath—of the United States’ invulnerability, of social discourse, of rationality. Countering this was a simultaneous “uncollapse of people working to reinvigorate narrative, reinvigorate dialogue, and reinvigorate the site,” as Hennes described it. In Foundation Hall, the museum’s culminating space, that sense of expansion reaches its zenith, reinforcing the absence of what was once there. At the same time, the majestic hall inspires pride that is felt to the bones, along with optimism—about recovery, continuity, and the future. 
Visitors begin their journey at the We Remember exhibit, a darkened corridor in which recorded voices and visual projections convey people’s thoughts upon learning of the 9/11 attacks.
Massive artifacts recovered from Ground Zero, such as this FDNY Ladder Company 3 fire truck, testify to the scale of destruction and to the vastness of the museum’s 110,000-square-foot (10,219 m2) interior. Eleven firefighters from that company died inside the North Tower. The truck’s front cab was shorn off in the collapse. A message painted on the truck, “Jeff We Will Not Forget You,” honors Jeffrey John Giordano, a member of Ladder Company 3. The truck and other oversized artifacts were lowered into the museum via a large hatch on the west side of the north pool.
From an overlook in the concourse lobby, one sees the ethereal aluminum underside of the South Memorial pool. On the far wall is a mangled piece of impact steel from the North Tower with a graceful form that recalls the sculpture Winged Victory of Samothrace. Embedded in the floor are the remnants of the square box columns that once formed the perimeter of the South Tower.
Descending to bedrock, visitors walk parallel to the Survivors’ Stairs, the remnant of a staircase that was originally on Vesey Street at the Trade Center’s northern edge, which hundreds used to escape on 9/11. Preserved inside the museum, the stairs allow visitors to experience the same path of travel, albeit under vastly different circumstances. On the back repository wall is a Virgil quote, its letters forged from remnant World Trade Center steel by Tom Joyce, which reads, “No day shall erase you from the memory of time.”