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Obstructed Vision

The first duty of reconstruction is remembrance. Whatever design is chosen for the World Trade Center memorial, it will frame the meaning of the events of September 11 in its depiction of loss and its mnemonics of memory: what is built will convey to future generations both what happened and to whom. The second duty is healing. This must include both balm for the sufferings of the bereaved and dressing of the wound to New York. The jury for the memorial competition faces very serious issues, both in the artistic specifics of its choice and in balancing the potentially conflicting claims of these two obligations.

There has already been a de facto decision to conflate healing with restoration, to make urbanism a surrogate for lives lost. In the months since the tragedy, the idea that the appropriate response is to revive the character and uses of the site before the attack has been fixed. In the current master plan, this means both the literal replacement or enlargement of what was destroyed—huge skyscrapers, vast amounts of shopping, transit hub, and so on—and the repair of the urban damage done by the World Trade Center itself through the reconnection of several cross-site streets severed during its construction.

The thirteen-member competition jury (which includes designers Maya Lin, Enrique Norten, and Michael Van Valkenburgh) is already bridling at its constraints. Shortly after being tapped, several jurors declared their willingness to “break the rules” by entertaining submissions that ignore the announced requirements. Even the brief for the competition hedges its bets by stating that “design concepts that propose to exceed the illustrated memorial site boundaries may be considered by the jury if, in collaboration with the [LMDC], they are deemed feasible and consistent with the site plan objectives.” Juror James Young put it most strongly: “Anything [competitors] might have in mind, any response, will be considered here.”

It is easy to understand the jury’s unease, given the constraining character of Daniel Libeskind’s master plan. His scheme is not simply a proposal for the organization and reconstruction of the site, but a large-scale assimilation of the grammar of memory. Clearly the master plan is itself intended as the primary memorial, and thus dramatically deforms the scope and possibilities of this competition, much as the two rounds of architectural consultation were themselves hemmed by a program that brooked no variation on the commercial character of the project. For those trying to produce the memorial-within-the-memorial, the constricting influence of the master plan will be felt in two registers. First, the memorial site is located 30 (or perhaps 70) feet below grade and surrounded by the bloated Libeskindian apparatus of train station windows, neatly glazed bathtub, dancing waters (the wall that held back the Hudson now apparently needs protection from the rain), giant waterfall, ramps, cantilevered cultural facilities, and gigantic towers that will certainly influence the mood of the place. Indeed, the insistence on descent has already aroused strong opposition from people who live and work in the area. A recent poll shows that 70 percent of those in the neighborhood want the memorial to be approached from street level.

But it isn’t simply that the one instance of sanctioned public participation must speak from a pit; it’s the command of aura that offers the biggest challenge to free imaginative access. Libeskind’s elaborate iconographic agenda is a straightjacket for meaning. Its most prominent component is that 1,776-foot tower, an Ayn Randian totem of patriotism as machismo. This decision to Americanize the event assures that we accept al-Qaeda’s intended meaning for the attack. Never mind that hundreds of people from ninety-two countries other than the US were murdered, the object of the attack—and of its commemoration—is reduced by this mock-patriotic metonymy with its banal association with the Statue of Liberty, her torch replaced with TV antennae.

On June 12, Governor George Pataki, at a meeting with representatives of 9/11 survivors, declared his opposition to current plans to construct a bus garage beneath the memorial site. The statement refined his earlier insistence that the footprints of the World Trade Center towers were consecrated ground and the central armature for commemoration. While this strategy seemed straightforward, a parsing process had begun months ago, prompted in part by the fact that the idea of the footprints was largely conceptual, all evidence of their presence having been cleared from the site. How deep were the new prints to be? How high? Could they be moved? And what might appropriately occur in and near them without infringing on their aura?

After selecting the Libeskind master plan in February, the LMDC demanded the addition of a garage below the memorial, and the architect quickly obliged by raising the level of his commemorative pit by forty feet. But now the governor, responding to widespread public sentiment, has insisted that the footprints descend to bedrock, and has dramatically changed the terms of the current memorial competition.

If ever a commemorated event was site-specific, it is here: we are marking a killing field, a crime scene. Given the coincidence of marker and event, what special qualities are implied? This is not a commemoration at a distance, like the Vietnam memorial. That somber wall responds to the geometries and meanings of the Mall and, in its modest descent into the earth and its simple foregrounding of the names of the dead, aptly commemorates a still ambiguous but unquestionably tragic event without the usual triumphalism of war memorials. It was our first memorial to a lost war and it rightly focuses on sacrifice. Libeskind’s project, by contrast—with its bellicose iconography of strength, its giganticism, and its emphasis on heroism—seems to commemorate victory.

As evidenced by Gettysburg, the USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor, and Babi Yar in the Ukraine—which are commemorated in situ—the symbolic finds its most pregnant source in the particulars of place. The topography of the massive gathering of armies, the submerged hull, and the painful ravine, all supply an infusion of both forms and ghosts. Like that sunken battleship, the World Trade Center footprints are a kind of readymade. And the dust of the victims abides in place. How to mark this conjunction?

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, a highly aestheticized discourse arose. Forced to use familiar categories to assimilate an unfathomable event, many of us lapsed into the language of the sublime. Typical was the widespread call for the careful conservation of the twisted facade of the south tower as a memorial. And it was hard to resist finding it “beautiful”—a resonant icon for the event. But the domination of the debate by aesthetic categories distracted us from broader questions. The conspiracy buff in me, for example, thinks the LMDC set up Beyer Blinder Belle for its rejection on artistic grounds, enabling Libeskind to return several months later with almost exactly the same project, now wrapped in ziggy-zaggy signifiers of “architecture.”

Libeskind has been widely criticized for his own favored (and seemingly universal) iconography—that of things shattered, wounded, twisted, slashed—and the objection has merit. We revere not just what we make beautiful but also the forms we inscribe in memory to stand for the events themselves. There is a difference (not to mention a choice) in remembering the spectacular mushroom cloud over Hiroshima or the muscular hardware of the Enola Gay instead of the incinerated bodies and the lingering cancers.

How to find the grounds of remembrance at Ground Zero? Thinking hard about this issue these past twenty months, I have come to believe very strongly that all of Ground Zero should remain as open, public space. Just as New York’s premier expression of private property is the skyscraper, our best public spaces are our parks. It seems to me this should be the frame for a memorial, with private interests relegated to the abundant opportunities available at and beyond Ground Zero’s physical periphery. Just as Central Park forms an attractor for the cultural institutions around it, so this site might be a distributor for public use and space. Passing the site several times a week, I am increasingly struck by its power and coherence as a space. No building will ever achieve the eloquence of this void in speaking of the event. We do not hallow this ground simply by filling it with buildings.

2003