Posted on 11/30/2003 2:07:54 AM PST by Timesink
ne of the eight finalists in the design competition for the World Trade Center memorial wants to incorporate three dozen or so "beautifully tall" Eastern white pines that would recall the intensely vertical spirit of the twin towers. Elegant trees, to be sure, but they are particularly vulnerable to air pollution and tend to break apart in heavy winds or ice, creating a potentially serious hazard.
 Lower Manhattan Development Corporation The Eastern white pines included in Michael Arad's Reflecting Absence design would be vulnerable to pollution and high winds in New York. |
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A third proposal would allow visitors to enter a "secret garden" only in the mornings, from 8:46 to 10:28, which corresponds to the 102 minutes from the first plane's impact to the final collapse. A haunting idea, but with up to 50,000 people expected each day at the memorial, it may prove impractical.
Many questions will be debated as a jury starts to sort through the eight designs that were unveiled on Nov. 19: Which is the most inspiring and evocative? Which most suitably pays tribute to the nearly 3,000 people who died on Sept. 11, 2001, and during the earlier terrorist bombing at the trade center, in 1993?
But running through that debate will be several equally essential issues: Are any of the designs practical in a city as busy and unpredictable as New York? Will the materials hold up? How hard will they be to maintain and protect? And who will pay for all that lasting care, long after the ribbons have been cut?
It may be early in the process to worry about the designs' details, which will be refined and revised. But interviews with people who worry about such things for a living — an arborist, an urban planner, a civil engineer, a structural engineer and others — suggest that some problems are already apparent.
Memorials must answer to stiff demands. They bear heavy traffic and are attractive to vandals, and the public expects them to be pristinely maintained. Above all, they must last for the ages.
"How is it going to endure?" asked Kevin M. Rampe, the president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which is supervising the memorial design competition. "It is an important question for all of us. History is going to judge us by the memorial we select and the memorial we ultimately construct."
The nation is filled with memorials that, despite the best intentions and designs on the drawing board, turned out to have unexpected complications once built.
In Oklahoma City, 18 months were spent evaluating the type of glass used to make the 168 empty chairs that are the centerpiece of the memorial to the victims of the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The detailed engineering studies led to a change in the recipe for the glass, to keep it from cracking in sudden swings of temperature. The glass, so far, has held up. But the grass around it has not. So many people have visited the memorial that ropes have been hung to keep the crowds away from the chairs, contrary to the designer's intent.
In downtown Manhattan, the combination of ramps and stairs around a Foley Square sculpture that commemorates an early African burial ground has created an irresistible playground for skateboarders and trick cyclists, who have damaged the polished black granite, just three years after the sculpture was unveiled. Not far away, the Irish Hunger Memorial, which was dedicated a year and a half ago in Battery Park City, had to be closed for emergency repairs when the replica of an Irish hillside began to melt away.
Engineers and architects hired by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation have already examined the eight memorial proposals, selected by an independent 13-member jury, to determine whether they are even feasible.
"We did not find any fatal flaws," said a spokeswoman for the corporation, Joanna Rose. "But there may be some technical challenges that need to be resolved during the design process."
There are more than a few, according to the interviews with experts. That may be, in part, a reflection of just how complex most of the designs are, incorporating so many distinct elements, including gardens, fountains and complex lighting displays.
Perhaps the most common potential complication in many designs is their proposed use of plant life: gardens, trees, an apple orchard and, in two proposals, a prairie.
The Eastern white pines are a central element of the design titled Reflecting Absence, which also features two submerged reflecting pools built over the footprints of the twin towers. The trees look nice, thrive in the Northeastern climate and grow quickly, said Chris Roddick, staff arborist at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. "But they are not a tree that I would want to invite a lot of people underneath," Mr. Roddick said. "They are very susceptible to wind, snow and ice loading." And academic forestry guides say they do not tolerate air pollution, heat or drought. "Therefore, it is not a good plant for city conditions," according to the University of Maine's guide to trees.
The proposal also envisions an open field of cobblestones with moss and grass growing among them, an arrangement that crowds could turn into stones and mud.
The team behind Dual Memory envisions a garden in the footprint of the south tower and an underground memorial where the north tower once stood. The designers would set aside a space for 92 sugar maples, which are intended to honor the countries where victims of the attack lived or were born. Within a courtyard below these trees would be planters filled with roses.
Both ideas may need rethinking, Mr. Roddick said. Maples are extremely susceptible to attack by the Asian long-horned beetle, a pest that has decimated thousands of trees since it was first spotted in New York City seven years ago. Meanwhile, the roses, while beautiful when in bloom, may not seem so beautiful to many nine months out of the year, after the petals have fallen, Mr. Roddick said.
Another element that turns up in several proposals is running water. While often a powerful component of memorials worldwide, it must be carefully planned to avoid serious damage that can be caused by the constant flow, or problems with mist or fog that can be formed by large bodies of water, said engineers and officials who manage memorials.
Dual Memory calls for "water walls" of glass upon which the images of victims of the attacks would be projected. The proposal named Inversion of Light includes a two-inch-thick glass wall etched with names, and a curtain of water would run behind it. Suspending Memory would have an enormous pool of water surrounding "garden islands" on which individual glass memorial columns to the victims would be built.
Officials from the development corporation said the winning design would be studied in detail to find a way to incorporate the running water or pools without causing damage like that at the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Ala. At that monument, the constant flow of water over a wall engraved with remarks by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. repeatedly ate away at the text's silver paint. (A new, more durable paint has been selected to try to solve this problem, officials at the memorial said.)
Managing the crowds and securing the 4.7-acre memorial site could also be a challenge, given some proposed designs. Thomas R. Sole, a civil engineer who oversees maintenance of nearly 50 memorials, monuments and markers around the world for the American Battle Monuments Commission, said he was amazed at the items that visitors steal, or at least the pieces they try to pry off for mementos. These include model ships and planes that are supposed to be permanently affixed to a ceremonial map at the World War II Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial in England.
"The closer you get to a city, the bigger the problem you have" with vandalism, Mr. Sole said, as well as with visitors who ride skateboards and bikes across areas that are supposed to honor the dead.
The enormous glass surface proposed for Passages of Light: The Memorial Cloud so resembles an outdoor skating rink that Elaine Miller, whose sister, Daphne Pouletsos, was killed in the trade center attack, left a display of the designs this month wondering if a few decades from now the site would become another skateboard playground.
"That obviously would be unacceptable," Ms. Miller said. "It would be like putting a playground in Gettysburg."
The Suspending Memory design has a bridge connecting the two memorial islands that is so narrow as currently conceived that it might become overcrowded, said Paul Buckhurst, who teaches at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and is a practicing urban planner.
"This requires a design with the ability to move people comfortably, so there is adequate space for reflection," Mr. Buckhurst said.
And some planners said they could already foresee confrontations over one aspect of the Garden of Lights design: a "secret garden" where all visitors would have to leave 102 minutes after it opened, when a series of glass doors would automatically seal the area off each morning.
Even the simplest designs sometimes have multiple elements that raise practical questions. Reflecting Absence, with water falling into pits set over the twin tower footprints, leaves much of the rest of the memorial site unadorned, with the exception of the tall white pines. But the design includes a wall-like building, perhaps 12 stories tall, that "shelters the site from the highway," to the west, essentially cutting off a main entrance to Battery Park City.
New Yorkers have battled in the past over structures that pose barriers, most notably "Tilted Arc," the the 120-foot-long steel Richard Serra sculpture that was installed downtown in Federal Plaza in 1981, but removed eight years later.
Several designs also present technical challenges, like the steady flow of fuel for the Votives in Suspension design featuring 3,000 burning lights suspended above a large reflecting pool in two underground memorial sanctuaries. Keeping all these lights burning — each one symbolizing a victim — could prove extremely complicated.
For now, officials from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation said, the designs are at such a preliminary stage that it is too early to start questioning in detail which specific features may or may not work. The jury is expected to choose a winning design by the end of December. Although potential hurdles exist in all the designs, in most cases it is easy to see how modifications could be made without having to scrap the core of each one.
The development corporation has also not figured out how the memorial would be maintained over the coming decades or how much this maintenance would cost. It has also not yet raised the money that would be needed to build and maintain it, although the plan is to do this exclusively through private donations. These critical matters must be addressed before construction can start.
"If you create the most beautiful and evocative memorial that lasts 10 years, you have not truly met your objective," said Kari F. Watkins, executive director of the Oklahoma City National Memorial Trust, which was set up to maintain the memorial. "You must build a memorial that will last through the generations."
why not just put a working fire station and precinct house there as a NYC-type, in-your-face statement that our lives go on and that in their memory and honor we're not to be deterred by anyone.
BTTT - and if it isn't, George W. Bush will be blamed for prosecuting a useless war in <fill in the blank>.
If NYC is nuked, there will be a global 5 year depression that will make the Great Depression look like a wonderful period of prosperity, there will be a World War, and the Constitution will be suspended in the United States permanently.
Geez Quix, that's a bit ... morbid, don't you think? Nuked as in dirty bomb, or a serious honest-to-God mini-Hiroshima?
And the extra floor on each for memorial space, that has been my thoughts all along. As for exactly the same, one major change, LOTS of asbestos all the way up this time and all involved forever shielded from lawsuits.
The only way asbestos would've made a difference in the first disaster is if both buildings were entirely built of asbestos-covered concrete. The fireproofing got blasted off the columns when the planes hit, and a brittle material like asbestos wouldn't have held on no matter how thick it was.
Snidely
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