Better than Starting Over
Imagine if nothing ever gets done at the WTC site. What if it remains a negative space that people point to and gawk at. Now
that's a resonant memorial.
Blocks: Seeking the Sublime in the Simple to Mark 9/11By the corporation's own checklist, every finalist met the program. Though the plans "have technical challenges that would need to be resolved during the normal design process," the corporation reported, none were "fatal flaws."
Yet the plans seem to have left people hungering for something else.
"There is a remarkable sameness to these designs," said the New York metropolitan chapter of the American Planning Association.
"None provide a well-designed urban public gathering space, none make use of the artifacts from the World Trade Center buildings and none convey the urban and international texture of the place that made it a target for attack.
"There is nothing that evokes the experience of those further away watching the second plane hit and the towers coming down. There is nothing about those who labored in the pit or those who ministered to the rescue workers. Most glaring, the designs as they stand do little to recall the actual horror of the destruction of the towers or the void left at ground zero."
In general, said Michael Kuo of the Municipal Art Society, the public feels the designs "did not communicate really what happened here, at this place" and "did not go beyond the victims to reflect the sense of community that held us together after our city and our lives were torn apart." Mr. Kuo is the planner of the Imagine New York program, which has gathered the views of more than 300 people at public meetings and more than 2,600 people through an online survey.
Most of the missing elements cited by critics were not required by the guidelines. And it is hard to imagine that the designs would have turned out appreciably better with a 10- or 15-point program. Instead, it seems likelier that the plans would have grown even more diffuse.
By contrast, the 9/11 memorials that have touched the public have been unplanned, straightforward and simple. Kevin M. Rampe, the president of the development corporation, recalled them last week when he introduced the finalists. "It began with the first flower laid gently on the steps of Trinity Church," he said, "the first candle to flicker in Union Square Park, the first heartfelt message inscribed on the viewing platform overlooking ground zero."
It continued with the installation in Battery Park of the damaged "Sphere for Plaza Fountain" sculpture by Fritz Koenig, salvaged from the ruins of the trade center. And with "Out of the Dust," an exhibition at St. Paul's Chapel about its ground zero ministry, which has drawn 854,000 visitors.
It continues in the "missing" fliers still posted outside St. Vincent's Manhattan Hospital, at Seventh Avenue and 11th Street. It continues at Broadway and Isham Street in Inwood, where a dented steel cruciform salvaged from the trade center site stands outside the Roman Catholic Church of the Good Shepherd.
More than anywhere, it continues at ground zero.
The opening this week of the new PATH station has created vantages that the public has never had before, from within the foundations of the trade center. The walls of the open-air station are patterned on the viewing fence along Church Street, said Robert I. Davidson, chief architect of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. People have responded by gravitating to the edges of the station to catch a glimpse of the site.
The extraordinary number of visitors who circulate around the site every day suggests that a memorial already exists. And while a permanent remembrance at the trade center site must be more than exposed structural ganglia in a 70-foot pit, it also suggests that the competition might have yielded a more resonant result by being simpler and more centered on the place itself.
That would not have satisfied all the demands, unless one were to start thinking of the memorial collectively - the sphere, the pit, the chapel, the wall, the cross, each and every firehouse and all the other unplanned shrines where 9/11 has already been marked. Because in some respects, while the city has been planning a memorial, the memorial has already been built.
The process is already the memorial.
* Ray, 11/27/2003 09:57:43 AM
