Posted on 09/11/2006 7:01:37 AM PDT by Incorrigible
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Commentary
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Not long after the World Trade Center Memorial competition was announced, architect Michael Arad went to Bed, Bath & Beyond to buy one of those decorative desktop water fountains. He took the little water pump out of the fountain and installed it in a tub on the roof of his East Village apartment building, so he could photograph his idea for the Sept. 11 Memorial against the high-rises of the midtown skyline: A reflecting pool punctuated by two dark, square holes, punched right into a smooth silver mirror of water.
He called it "Reflecting Absence."
Since he won the competition, Arad has elaborated on that simple idea, proposing two square holes be opened in World Trade Center plaza the exact size of the tower footprints (each side 200 feet in length) with waterfalls on every side falling 30 feet to a quiet reflecting pool that would itself be punctured by another, smaller, square hole. Four long staircases would lead down under the plaza to a large room with views through the falling water to the reflecting pool, with the names of all those who died in the attacks incised randomly into a stone wall in front of the falling sheets of water. The stairs would then continue down to the bedrock, below the hole in the reflecting pool, where a second large space would hold a stone repository for unidentified remains of people killed that day.
Looking back now, you can almost understand why the judges loved this idea: It was Minimalist in style, like the towers themselves had been, pure Euclidean geometry echoing their missing shapes. Probably the most popular modern memorial, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., is also Minimalist in design, a simple black V cut into the Mall and inscribed with the names of all the Americans killed in that war. Maya Lin, who designed it while she was still in architecture school at Yale, was one of the World Trade Center judges, and she pushed hard for the 34-year-old Arad. He is an immigrant, after all (his father was the Israeli ambassador to Mexico, as Joe Hagan reported in an excellent story on the memorial controversy in the June issue of New York magazine).
And besides, Arad's concept was just so cool -- two holes in water! Nobody had ever made anything even remotely like it.
As it turns out, there's a reason for that. Actually, a lot of reasons. Scale does matter, and just because something works as a desktop fountain does not mean it can be made to work when it's the size of a city block.
Let's take the most obvious problem: If the builders aren't going to face the entire memorial with basalt or granite or some other impermeable and expensive stone, it will erode quickly, springing leaks and spreading damp, because reinforced concrete (of which most of New York is built) is itself a dissolvable, semi-liquid slurry. And even if a cheap flashing for the acres of concrete could be devised, there would likely be frequent shut-downs of the complicated plumbing system due to unforeseen mechanical problems. Without water, the Memorial will look like a municipal swimming pool in off-season.
Oh, yeah, the wintertime. When engineers built a mock-up of "Reflecting Absence" in Toronto last fall, they discovered that there is no practicable way to keep eight 30-foot-tall waterfalls from freezing solid when it gets cold. They suggested shutting off the falls during winter months, but Memorial officials were greeted with such howls of derision when they announced this possibility that they quickly promised to keep the water heated and running year round.
So let's say they keep the hot water coming, just for the sake of argument: That means the two footprints will exhale vast condensing clouds of water vapor whenever the air temperature dips below freezing, coating the surrounding garden, sidewalks and building facades with ice crystals. Not to mention that every frosty morning, Ground Zero would look like a couple of smoking craters all over again.
Then there's the problem of the reflecting pool. To reflect, a pool must be still, particularly if it is going to be an even spill of water over the edges of the small inner square hole (this is the part of the memorial inspired by the Bed, Bath & Beyond executive toy). But how will this flat sheet of water be kept still if on every side it is met by a 30-foot cataract of splashing water? Won't there have to be some sort of splash gap, at least 15 feet or so, to catch the waterfalls, prevent stray drops from stirring the reflecting pool, and collect the water into a reservoir for pumping back up to the plaza level? What is that going to look like?
The truth of the matter is, "Reflecting Absence" is about as Minimalist as a mission to Mars -- it is actually Baroque, a needlessly complex exercise in research and development that will cost a fortune to realize. Every one of the problems its design raises is just like the freezing falls mess: a daunting conceptual flaw for which officials promise awesomely expensive technical solutions that ultimately undercut the memorial's intended effect. The analogy to the Iraq mission, which was also recklessly joined and has turned out to be much more difficult and expensive to complete than ever imagined, is downright creepy.
New York Gov. George Pataki, who signed on to Arad's plan with enthusiasm two years ago, talked openly about building a Rolls Royce of national memorials, an unforgettable theatrical experience. He pegged its cost at maybe $350 million. Imagine how he felt when the design team told him that the cost, including the heating system, a "Freedom Center" museum and staff operating budgets, would be more like $972 million -- and that the Lower Manhattan Development Commission, which was responsible for raising the money, had collected just $131.4 million before donations dried up last year.
Even after Mayor Michael Bloomberg blew the whistle and insisted on cutting the memorial's budget Solomonically in half, to a neat $500 million, it would still be by far the most expensive public monument ever conceived. The World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., completed two years ago and dedicated to the 292,000 Americans killed in that war, only cost $188 million. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which lists some 57,000 dead, cost just $3 million and change, back in 1982. But do we need to spend half a billion dollars -- and if you believe this price tag, I'd like to interest you in a waterfall called Niagara that never freezes -- to commemorate the 2,973 people who died on 9/11?
It's not as if the people who chose Arad's design were unaware of the fact that water freezes in New York in the winter. They also know that many of the families of the victims hate "Reflecting Absence." The survivors have said they don't want to go to Ground Zero, where their loved ones died, to make their way down a concrete-faced stairway to a damp, exposed-concrete room that is dark except for safety lights and an underwater lighting system (which will cost $26 million). The concept is like an ancient descent to Hades, a long, dank and possibly dangerous journey taken to commune with the dead: The hint of danger is supplied by Bloomberg's thrifty decision to build just two long staircases, one down and one up, which some police officials think might make the site more inviting to terrorists.
The Coalition of 9/11 Families officially opposes both Arad's design and the Freedom Center, which is intended to tell the story of "man's struggle for freedom." The coalition wants a simple, eloquent memorial, preferably above ground, in the sunshine.
What the people who chose this design do know is that this particular memorial has a purpose, one that is only incidentally connected to commemorating those turned to dust that day in sight of us all. We need to spend so much to memorialize the deaths of so few not because the citizens of New York and New Jersey are the whiniest people on Earth, but to underline a political point that the leaders of the 9/11 project desperately want us to accept: That the attacks on 9/11 were a turning point, a paradigm shift, which has transformed America into a rampaging avenger forevermore.
Freedom Tower, Freedom Center, Operation Iraqi Freedom, freedom fries -- the nomenclature alone gives away the essentially political nature of this memorial. As if to underline that fact, the man who has been put in charge of the Freedom Center and its mission to detail our various freedom kampfs through history is Tom Bernstein, George W. Bush's business partner in the Texas Rangers baseball stadium deal, which made Bush a millionaire and set up his run for governor of Texas.
Do you think the Freedom Center will host exhibits on, say, Comanche chief Quanah Parker's desperate struggle for survival against the Texas Rangers in the 1870s? Doubtful; but there could be exhibits about the Middle East, maybe even the Iraq war (it never hurts to suggest cause and effect), and Bernstein has already spoken about mounting exhibits on the Holocaust.
The coalition thinks the Holocaust has nothing to do with what happened here five years ago. But the gray, rusticated concrete walls and endless, dizzying perspectives created by the vast underground rooms and long connecting hallways in the World Trade Center Memorial do bring one aspect of the Holocaust to mind -- specifically, architect Daniel Libeskind's design for a Holocaust Museum in Berlin, which is also constructed of reinforced concrete and features long, aimless corridors and vertiginous overlooks. The point of that museum is to make you feel the clammy hand of the fascist state, to sense its deadening power, and to come out at the end with a sad and angry "Never again" on your lips.
Well, after you have walked down Michael Arad's staircases, heard the thunder of eight waterfalls in a concrete box and seen the rough sarcophagus filled with body fragments sitting on the bedrock, how do you think you will feel when you emerge once more into the thin blue light of Lower Manhattan?
Lock 'n' load, little buddy.
Perhaps the nearest sentimental approximation of "Reflecting Absence" is a monument already up and running in Tehran called the "Fountain of Martyrs." It's a big, black, layer-cake-type fountain that pulses water dyed bright red 24 hours a day, symbolizing the blood shed by Shiite fanatics for the Islamic Republic. Is that who we are now?
Not really. In fact, thousands of Americans mourned the collapse of the two towers spontaneously and naturally with impromptu sidewalk shrines in the weeks and months after they fell. They constructed them out of Polaroid snapshots, flowers, teddy bears and lists of their favorite things jotted onto poster board with Magic Marker. These shrines have become all but automatic at American tragedies, nearly always asserting the supremacy of the private and individual over the random and official. The Oklahoma bombing memorial includes a span of chain link fence for folks who want to keep adding to their pop shrine; the World Trade Center folks have set aside a small, windowless room on the first underground level if anyone wants to leave something behind.
"Reflecting Absence" is supposed to remind us of the hole in our hearts left by the 9/11 attacks. But what will it really remind us of if it ever gets built? The hole in our wallets poked by Baroque Modernism at the beginning of the 21st century? The hole in our national defense poked by an irresponsible war in Iraq? Or the hole in our collective head, which we need as much as we need "Reflecting Absence"?
Sept. 10, 2006
(Dan Bischoff covers visual and fine arts for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. He can be contacted at dbischoff@starledger.com.)
Not for commercial use. For educational and discussion purposes only.
Dan Bischoff is such a jerk but I have to agree about the impracticality of the Reflecting Absence design.
Image from this thread: World Trade Center Memorial Design - Sciame Report Released
You all know how I feel about this, so I won't belabor the point any further.
When I first saw the design I thought it was acceptable, until I heard about the problems in winter and how it would make them look like smoking holes.
It's one of the better ones done for 9-11 that I've seen:
'Absense' and 'void' seem like good concepts on paper, but the translation into a hole in the ground just doesn't work. That's why cemeteries aren't just fields of human-shaped holes in the ground, and why people don't say "Oh, look how nicely that building fills out its foundation walls!"
I say, go with the plan suggested by "The Donald" (Trump). Use that space to build the new U.N. with a simple plate in the front that reads something like:
"September 11, 2001.
They died not in vain."
And OTOH tear down the old U.N. and turn the space into stratospherically expensive shops and condos. According to the Donald, the price(s) they could get for this real estate would go a long, long way to cover the cost of the new U.N. building, perhaps even the entire cost.
I like that monument as well but apparently we're in the minority since it got shifted around a bit before landing in Bayonne.
The only problem with the monument in Bayonne is that nobody except longshoremen and cruise passengers will see it. It annoys me that MOTBY got turned into a gated community (well, not yet community I suppose) and that you can't get to the monument unless you go through a gatehouse and take a shuttle. And I don't know how often these shuttles run.
I would have replaced the Katyn monument at Exchange Place in Jersey City with this monument but that probably would have been difficult politically.
Pharmboy, have you heard about this?
I think they should leave it a hole
What is the Katyn monument?
The scale in this photo is deceiving though. This is a very large statue.
Jersey City Katyn Monument commemorating when Russians attacked the Poles during the Nazi invasion. It was considered being moved after 9/11. However it was left and a 911 plaque was added at the bottom.
Well said.
Freedom Tower, Freedom Center, Operation Iraqi Freedom, freedom fries -- the nomenclature alone gives away the essentially political nature of this memorial.
Freedom is a gauche Republican bumper sticker that offends his effete sensibilites. ... Reminds me of just how lucky I am to be a rube from Flyoverland.
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