hey are pretty.Posted on 11/29/2003 7:02:47 PM PST by NYC GOP Chick
hey are pretty.
Pretty and soothing.
Soothing and smooth.
Smooth and light.
Light and watery.
The eight designs for a memorial at ground zero, gleaming with hanging candles and translucent tubes and reflecting pools and the smiling faces of those killed on 9/11, aim to transcend. And they succeed.
They transcend terror. They have the banality of no evil. They represent the triumph of atmosphere over atrocity, mood over meaning. The designs are more concerned with the play of light on water than the play of darkness on life.
They have taken the heaviest event in modern American history and made the lightest memorials.
As I walked around the Winter Garden of the World Financial Center, looking at the finalists in the competition held by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, it was hard to feel any connection to the grotesque evil that had crashed into innocence right outside these windows two years ago, the evil that still radiates from that huge pit and makes you mutter imprecations against Osama bin Laden.
"The designs are horribly, horribly bland," mourned Eric Gibson in The Wall Street Journal.
The ugliness of Al Qaeda's vicious blow to America is obscured by these prettified designs, which look oddly like spas or fancy malls or aromatherapy centers. It's easy to visualize toned women with yoga mats strolling through these New Age pavilions filled with waterfalls and floating trees and sunken gardens and suspended votives. Mass murder dulled by architectural Musak.
The designs are reflections of our psychobabble culture, exuding that horrible and impossible concept, closure. Our grief and anger have been sentimentalized and stripped of a larger historical and moral purpose.
Even the names of the models sound like books by Deepak Chopra and Marianne Williamson: "Garden of Lights," "Inversion of Light," "Votives in Suspension," "Suspending Memory," "Reflecting Absence," "Passages of Light: The Memorial Cloud." All ambient light and transient emotion — nothing raw or harsh or rough on which the heart and mind can collide.
The spontaneous memorials that sprang up right after 9/11, both near ground zero and at police and fire stations around the city, had more power and raw passion. What's missing from the designs is some trace of what actually happened on this ground. Why not return that twisted metal skeleton cross to the site, the one that made the World Trade Center ruins such a chilling and indelible memory for the thousands of Americans who flocked to ground zero in the months after the attack?
That's what makes other memorials, like Pearl Harbor's sunken Arizona, which still emits oil bubbles almost 62 years later, and the rebuilt Berlin church that retained its bombed spire, so emotionally affecting. They remain witnesses to the evils of modern history.
The fussy 9/11 designs also lack the power of narrative. With its black marble gravitas, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial tells the anguished story of how America got sucked in deeper and deeper, with the death toll rising along with the memorial's V-shape design.
Like the White House, these designs turn away from examining what went wrong and offer no instruction. How were we so vulnerable to attack? Who are our terrorist foes? Why do they hate us? The Holocaust museum in Washington shows that you do not have to choose between reflection and instruction; it offers both.
There's no darkness in these designs, literally or metaphorically. They have taken death and finality out of this pulverized graveyard.
At a debate last year at Columbia with Daniel Libeskind, the architect whose firm submitted the first plan, which failed to garner support, Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, suggested that the site itself has so much power that a flag and a void would suffice.
"Lower Manhattan must not be transformed into a vast mausoleum, obviously," he said, "but neither must it be transformed into a theme park for advanced architectural taste."
The memorial cannot be sunshine-and-light therapy to make current generations feel they have moved beyond grief and shock. It must be witness and guide to future generations so they can understand the darkness of what scarred this earth.
Even a jagged rusting chunk of girder sticking out of a pile of rubble and a list of names would have been better than the Bambified cutsie things proposed.
So9
Anybody you know?
First time I've ever agreed with anything Dowd had to say!
However, she also took the opportunity to bash Bush for not asking why the terrorists hate us....the answer is too basic for Dowdy to comprehend....Mo...they hate us because we are not Muslims!
Indeed, I had never heard her speak before tonight. She is inspidly skanky. If you met her anywhere, you would quickly go the other way. She seems incapable of anything but gossipy trump lines delivered as cattily as possible. The mystery as to how anyone could write such drivel as regularly appears in her columns is now answered. She is a zero and the media and political elite's fascination with her is simply an index of their own shallowness.
What is it with all these reporters constantly patting each other on the back with these stuffy awards? It's making the "stuffed shirt" a new fashion statement.
Or the depth of her orifices...or is that orifi? ;-)
I couldn't believe she started off with the same kind of gag(Oops! wrong script) that Hunt used. A talented writter could have improvised something on the spot to be different, but I guess she couldn't give that Bush bash up, or she's not as talented as she thinks she is.
The designs I've seen resemble video arcades located in swamps - or perhaps a U2 concert located in an Indian sweat lodge. I've never seen anything like them.
Doesn't America have a sculptor or architect capable of doing this work?
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