Free Republic

I wept, but about what precisely I cannot say. Much to my amazement, after having done everything possible to shut out the ubiquitous maudlin press coverage that engulfed the tenth anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks, I visited Michael Arad’s National September 11 Memorial in New York City—which was dedicated exactly a decade after the disaster—to find that it impressed me at once as a sobering, disturbing, heartbreaking, and overwhelming masterpiece. Arad’s inexorably powerful, enigmatically abstract pair of abyss-like pools, which demarcate the foundations of the lost Twin Towers, comes as a surprise to those of us who doubted that...

When the then-34-year-old architect won the ground-zero-memorial competition, he looked like the Maya Lin of 9/11—a bright, shining star out of nowhere who would build a breathtaking new landmark. Two years later, all we’ve got is a pile of dirt, a price estimate nearing $1 billion, and a nasty, behind-the-scenes war of wills. When Michael Arad unveiled his winning design for the World Trade Center Memorial, the last person New York wanted to hear from was another architect. It was January 2004, by which point the ground-zero rebuilding effort had devolved into a grating public spectacle of political bullying and...

NEW YORK - Two pools of water with pine trees and a paved stone field has been chosen as the design for the World Trade Center memorial, capping an eight-month international contest that drew more than 5,000 submissions, The Associated Press has learned. "Reflecting Absence" created by city designer Michael Arad, was chosen by a 13-member jury of artists, architects, civic and cultural leaders after months of intense deliberation that culminated in a marathon 12-hour-long meeting this week. The decision was to be announced publicly later Tuesday.