Ground Zero's Only Hope: Elitism
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: now that everyone agrees that the ground zero memorial finalists are a disappointment, there's only one thing to do.

Throw them all out.

You have the power to do so. Use it. This is in part a memorial to extreme bravery in the face of overwhelming force. Here's a chance to be brave. We know you still haven't presented your winning choice, which will no doubt be modified from the plans we now see. But don't bother. Nothing short of extreme, last-ditch action has a chance of succeeding, because the process has been crucially flawed from the start. Instead of beginning with a firm idea about the meaning of the memorial, we started with a timetable. Instead of guaranteeing that the best artists and architects participated in the process, we pandered to the crowd.

When the finalists were announced, you said the submission of designs by "people from 63 countries and many continents . . . people of different faiths, ethnic, racial and cultural backgrounds" reaffirms "our common humanity and is a testament to the solidarity and shared values of mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, daughters, sons, friends and families from every corner of the world." And so it does. But this does not bear on the quality of the final design. Does anybody today care that the pope did not hold an open competition for the Sistine ceiling? We should insist on salvaging this most important of public projects, as well as our city and the nation, from a legacy of compromise that leads to banality. Let's start again — this time, the right way.

Forget vapid populism. Limit the competition to participants of the jury's expert choosing. Then let the jury select the best plan, if and when there is one. If that's elitism, so be it.

The cost of building an unmemorable memorial would be far more than shabby aesthetics. It would be a moral failure. A distracted and impatient culture gets the memorial it deserves. Is that the message we want to send the world? Hold public hearings. Stage a competition. Pick a winner. Move on. The nation hasn't even begun to grasp the historic meaning of the attacks. But already there is concern about falling behind schedule.

The most charitable reading is that this haste was inspired by the families' need to bury their dead expeditiously, and to grieve on the site where they were incinerated. However else the site may be used, it will clearly be a cemetery. But even as a cemetery it is unlikely to please many mourners. Firefighters have called for a memorial stressing the theme of heroism. Decorative lights, waterfalls and electronic gadgets are clearly not what they had in mind.

In any case, this project must also serve a larger historic purpose. This site is about even more than the thousands of people murdered there (and at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania); it is about what, not just who, was attacked and what, in response, we are fighting to defend. This monument will survive the survivors. It should tell posterity about our cultural values.

The pressures to act now are also commercial and political, of course. Speed benefits the suffering businesses, just as the open competition insulates the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the mayor and governor. If the winner is no good, don't blame them: democratic competitions are only as good as the people who choose to take part in them.

But good art, like science, is not democratic. An open competition can produce a Maya Lin Vietnam memorial once in a generation, maybe, but mostly it results in the generic monuments that are now the universal standard: stereotyped images plagiarizing superficial aspects of serious art, mostly minimalism, for watered-down symbols of mourning and loss.

There is reason to suspect that the jurors themselves have had questions about the process as a whole and perhaps also about the choices they were left with and have left us. For one thing, several of the plans they selected ignore aspects of Daniel Libeskind's overall scheme for the site. Mr. Libeskind had proposed a cultural building, for example, which he suggested might cantilever over one of the tower footprints. "Reflecting Absence," a popular choice in online polls, was just one of the designs in which that building is significantly redrawn.

The jurors released a statement that said: "While the eight final designs we have chosen all address the guidelines of the memorial competition, we recognize that they are still in development, and that even the final version of the winning design will require additional refinements, including how the names of each of the victims should be recognized, how to respect the tower footprints and keep them unencumbered, how to provide access to bedrock, and what the relationship of the memorial will be to the site's interpretive museum.

"The jury feels," the statement adds, "that if the memorial alone cannot address all the issues put forth in the mission statement, then together with the planned interpretive museum, all parts of the mission statement can be realized over time." Put simply, the ground zero competition is not the last word in a memorial but the first.

This may be true. A memorial can only do so much. But the memorial here should do more. There's still a chance to heed the call of public service. The jurors should put together a group of the most serious artists and architects, so many of whom declined to participate in the original omnium gatherum, and see where their specialized talents could lead us.

That would be antipopulist — and perhaps a political fiasco. But it would be the right thing to do. Saarinen's arch in St. Louis was a commission. It is a great national landmark of universal symbolic power. It is the sort of inventive icon of soaring vision that we deserve at ground zero.

The disappointment with these ground zero plans is that instead of invention they offer novelty: theatricality, gadgets, spectacle, the stuff of entertainment and shallow pleasure, tricked up by treacly titles, the antithesis of what a memorial should provide. Novelty is familiar and commonplace. It is what bad art offers everyday.

These eight designs are pastiches of different media and styles — the definition of postmodern, in keeping with so much contemporary mixed-media art. But memorials should seem to exist outside time. They should alter our sense of the clock, slow things down, give us a larger sense of history. While we are experiencing them, we should feel that we leave the present to consider the past and future. Perception and recollection should become synonymous, so we simultaneously sublimate death and exult in being alive. Our sense of time is the key. It cannot be rushed.

Making a decision at ground zero on the basis of expediency and politics should be morally intolerable. It shouldn't happen now. In building this crucial monument to democracy and to our great culture, let's give the populist experiment a rest. Let's champion another American ideal: excellence.

 Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | Help | Back to Top

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Honor those who gave all
Brooklyn: Some people feel that the uniformed services shouldn't be recognized on the World Trade Center memorial. "They were just doing their job," or "No one should be singled out" are some of the reasons given. Some of the firefighters were off-duty. A police officer was filing retirement papers when the towers were struck. They couldn't be simply doing their job if they weren't working.
An FDNY lieutenant who was in Brooklyn, disabled due to line-of-duty injuries, went to the WTC. Members of the NYPD escorted victims out, saving themselves in the process, only to go back to help more. It's quite clear how their sacrifice is evidence of going above and beyond what anyone could expect.

Showing how rescuers gave their lives will not diminish a civilian's sacrifice. Let future generations know about the group that went to help. And let's not forget them today.


Joseph Walz, Firefighter, Ladder 166
 Daily News
Originally published on December 7, 2003
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NY DAILY NEWS
Back to basics
 
By Jack Lynch and Lee Ielpi
 
Now that the eight designs released by the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. have been viewed and perceived by many as mediocre, sterile and lacking great architectural creativity, it may be wise to again go back to the drawing board as we did after the original boxlike designs for Ground Zero were panned.
Gov. Pataki and the LMDC should come up with a better way to build America's memorial. The creation of a sacred precinct could be a solution. A sacred precinct is an accepted, established architectural designation that sets an area aside for the creation of a memorial while construction continues in the surrounding area.

This would prevent another unfortunate fiasco like the one that began with the original designs for rebuilding the World Trade Center. From the rejection of the first set of site designs to the selection of the Daniel Libeskind plan, the powers at the Port Authority, Silverstein Properties and other powerful money interests have been calling the shots. The memorial should not suffer the same fate as the Libeskind plan, which was renamed a "work in progress" and chopped up behind the scenes like chicken liver.

Setting aside the area of the footprints - the bedrock, which is so important to us, and an area above it, say 28 feet - as a sacred precinct would not be meant as a criticism of the designers. The reason the designs failed to spark a more positive reaction was the LMDC's restrictive guidelines. Limiting the designers to an area that began only 30 feet below street level precluded them from including bedrock, leading to the creation of artificial footprints in midair.

So how does the LMDC, the governor, and all involved in the memorial design process save face? How do we resolve the conflicts that divide those who want to proceed quickly with rebuilding and those who want to preserve sacred ground and the historical artifacts within those sacred spaces?

The sacred precinct. The additional PATH track and station would have to be scrapped or moved for this proposal to become a reality. The repository for the unidentified and unclaimed remains could be located on either footprint, and this sacred precinct would remain untouched until we have had time to contemplate what best memorializes those who perished. The only infrastructure allowed would be steel columns required to support construction above the ceiling. Build above the bedrock, just not on it.

This would allow Pataki to keep the promise he made to the grieving families at the Javits Center in June 2002: "We will never build where the towers stood.... Where the towers stood is hallowed ground."

Lynch and Ielpi both lost sons in the World Trade Center attack.

Originally published on December 7, 2003
 
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NY NEWSDAY
Troubled Tribute to Victims of 9/11

By Susan Jacoby
December 5, 2003


Nearly everyone is unhappy with the elaborate, well-meaning designs for a memorial on the site of the obliterated World Trade Center.

The proposals, with their cathedral-like vaults, votive lights, reflecting pools and waterfalls - everything but pieces of wreckage attesting to the destruction of that day - have been attacked on grounds that they are too high-maintenance, too pretty, too pastoral, too bland, too...something.

These surface objections do not begin to explain the depth of the reaction. The failure of the designs is also rooted in a profound cultural confusion that, in the past two decades, has erased the distinction between victims and heroes. One of the unstated aims of this memorial - all the more powerful for being unstated - is the transformation of victims into heroes, thereby investing senseless evil with a positive moral meaning. It can't be done.

The dictionary defines a victim as a "person or thing injured, sacrificed, destroyed." A hero, by contrast, is "a person noted or admired for nobility, courage or outstanding achievement." Some victims behave heroically and some do not. Some heroes become victims and some do not. For the most part, victims - whether individual or en masse - are simply people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. There is no shame in that but there is no glory either.

Yet the belief that tragedy confers - must confer - nobility on victims has become pervasive in American culture. Pfc. Jessica Lynch should be commended for going against the grain and declaring that she was not a hero but was merely doing her job - in the wrong place at the wrong time. That of course was true of everyone unlucky enough to be doing his or her job at the WTC on Sept. 11, 2001.

There are many explanations for the American stigmatization of victimhood, not least our historic and exaggerated belief in the capacity of individuals to control their own fates. Witness the widespread popular belief that certain negative personality traits cause cancer. Rape victims are invariably called survivors by women's advocacy groups, as if banishing a word could also banish the memory of the utter helplessness that is the essence of being raped - the essence of all victimhood. "Stop playing the victim" has become a psychobabble cliché.

Changing American perceptions of the Holocaust have also made a major impact on American attitudes toward victims. In the 1950s and '60s, the base and stupid accusation leveled at Jewish Holocaust victims (often by Jews themselves) was that they had allowed the Nazis to lead them "like sheep to the slaughter."

Holocaust victims were then re-labeled "survivors" - reasonable enough as a distinction between the living and the dead. But that re-labeling was accompanied by a concerted search for heroes among both the living and the dead. "They Died with Honor" was a slogan frequently used to commemorate participants in the Warsaw ghetto uprising. One survivor, quoted by Dorothy Rabinowitz in "New Lives," said pointedly, "I thought all the Jews died with honor."

The desire to create heroes and heroic memories is most intense when the meaning of an event is least comprehensible. That is as true of the planning for a memorial to the victims of 9/11 as it was throughout the decades of debate over the proper memorialization of Holocaust victims.

The Holocaust, because it was a complex series of events that unfolded for years before ending in genocide, lends itself to the kind of memorial that educates rather than enshrines. Indeed, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington offers a wide variety of stories - of rescuers and of "perpetrators, victims, bystanders," in the words of the historian Raul Hilberg. In the end, after decades of controversy within the Jewish community, the museum planners came down on the side of complicated truth rather than hagiography of victims.

The terrorist attack on the WTC was, by contrast, a discrete event. Everyone who died, including rescue workers, was gone within two hours. This type of event does not lend itself to an "educational" memorial. How can lessons be drawn from the melding of fanatical religion and politics that persuaded four young men to turn airplanes into weapons and take the lives of thousands?

What remains is hagiography. This process began almost immediately after the terrorist attacks, with the widely read individual portraits of victims in Newsday and The New York Times.

These often-moving pieces portrayed loving spouses and parents, wonderful neighbors and dedicated volunteers at community libraries and soup kitchens. Logic tells us that when thousands die, some must have been troubled workaholics (especially given the fact that so many worked in notoriously high-pressure financial jobs), absentee parents and cheating spouses.

This is not to say that the press should speak ill of those whose lives have been taken so tragically. But to insist on the nobility of victims is to miss the deeper point that the lost deserve to be mourned not because they were heroes but simply because they were human beings.

Many critics have expressed particular surprise that none of the memorial designs incorporates pieces of the WTC wreckage. Yet the omission is entirely consistent with the dreamy hero-worship that surrounds this entire enterprise. Twisted steel is not a metaphor but physical evidence of what actually happened on that terrible day. New York should go back to the drawing board and create a memorial that speaks of flawed humanity and does not try to cover up the scar in the ground, the scar in the heart.
 
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc. |  Article licensing and reprint options
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NY DAILY NEWS
WTC memorial designs not set in stone
 
By MAGGIE HABERMAN
DAILY NEWS CITY HALL BUREAU
 
The final World Trade Center memorial could be far different from the eight finalists unveiled two weeks ago, a top rebuilding official said yesterday.
Kevin Rampe, president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., made the remark when asked whether the jury selecting the winning tribute could pick and choose elements from different proposals.

"I'm sure they'll suggest refinements and changes, and there's probably a high chance that the ultimately selected memorial will be different from any of the eight," Rampe said at a Crain's New York Business breakfast at the Grand Hyatt hotel in midtown.

Later, Rampe said that the 13-member memorial jury has met with each design team, and that the jurors may have more meetings with the designers in the coming weeks.

Officials said the designers are being asked to make some adjustments based on panelists' concerns.

Rampe's comments came after criticism of the proposals gained momentum in the past week.

Several members of the planning and architecture community have said the designs, unveiled Nov. 19 at the Winter Garden in lower Manhattan, are lackluster and none gives a sense of the destruction of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Initially, the proposals were met largely with praise.

An unscientific Internet survey conducted by the civic group Imagine New York, in partnership with the Daily News, revealed that while respondents liked certain elements of each design, no consensus has emerged for any of the eight contenders.

The timetable calls for the memorial jury to pick the winning design by the end of the month. Rampe hedged when asked whether the jury could simply decide not to choose a winner, saying that the panel's work is ongoing and needs to be allowed to continue.

Originally published on December 3, 2003
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NY TIMES:AP
WTC Memorial Jury Talks of Design Changes
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: December 2, 2003

NEW YORK (AP) -- The jury choosing a memorial for the World Trade Center site is discussing changes with the eight design finalists that could lead to a completely different proposal, the head of the agency overseeing the rebuilding project said Tuesday.

Design professionals and other New Yorkers have said the eight proposals that emerged from the design competition do not do enough to tell the story of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that destroyed the twin towers and killed nearly 3,000 people.

 Advertisement
 
 
``I'm sure they'll suggest refinements and changes and there's probably a high chance that the ultimately selected memorial will be different from any of the eight'' final proposals, Lower Manhattan Development Corp. president Kevin Rampe said.

The 13-member jury is expected to settle on a final design by the end of the year.

On the Net:

Development Corp.: http://www.renewnyc.com
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NY POST
12 2 03

ARCHITECTS GIVE MEMORIAL PLANS A 'ZERO'

By WILLIAM NEUMAN
 
December 2, 2003 -- Pressure increased yesterday on the Ground Zero memorial jury as a prominent group of architects issued an open letter criticizing the eight design finalists and suggesting the panel go back and reconsider some of the thousands of proposals they previously rejected.
"The overwhelming sense . . . is that the memorial plans presented to the public . . . are lacking in emotion and variety," said the letter from New York New Visions, a group of architects that has frequently advised the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., which is running the memorial competition.

"None of the memorial designs have achieved the level of artistic significance expected."

The letter went on to "urge the jury to review the designs that it has received and its analysis."

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NY POST

WHEN GRIEF DESTROYS

By MARK CUNNINGHAM

December 2, 2003 -- EXPLAINING the wrongness of the Ground Zero memorials on the table means talking about some very awful things. I'll start with a story I can only tell sparsely, the tale of a mother and the murder of her daughter.
She was a strong woman, sparkling and tough. After kicking the old man out of the house for the last time, she raised five kids on her own - and did it well, in a time and place before such moms gained what little honor we grant them today.

She also built a good career - and when that was cut off, another respectable one. As needful, too, she swallowed a stiff pride to take charity. Throughout, she kept on sharing joy and wisdom, and even finding the energy to do good works beyond the family.

She was 65 when her oldest daughter was killed - a horrible crime whose details I will not share.

It took years for the other children to see how deeply this broke their mother. It was hard on them all, of course - but what can match the pain of a mother when a life she'd carried beneath her heart for nine months, and in that heart forever more, is violently torn away?

What the children only slowly came to understand was how the hideous event chewed away at their mother's identity. The loss; the pain; the rage, grief and horror . . . became the center of her life.

Manic, she would begin "activist" projects, centered somehow on her daughter's murder. She would brandish the killing with total strangers, even giving those details that I will not. When this brought no solace, the depression came: She shut down, to zombie levels, for weeks . . . until she could summon the will to try again. With each cycle, the swings grew worse - for each ate at her core.


Years later, the children - mainly her surviving daughter - finally understood enough to find a way to help. But a decade's damage to her psyche was far too much to heal; her ability to truly touch another, and be touched, soul to soul, was nearly gone.

She still shared some joy, with what she had left, before her own passing. No small victory, but nothing to undo the decline.

For at least one of her children, the saddest thing was that the way in which she had harmed herself all those years was something she had taught him not to do by her example in all the years before: No one else's thoughts or actions can define you - it's your answers, how you hold yourself, that builds the future you.

THIS mother had special vulnerabilities. Hers is surely not the inevitable path of all who feel a kindred pain in the wake of 9/11. And no, denial is no answer. More: Some true callings surely arose in the wake of that bestial act. I truly do not mean to question any specific person's conduct here.

Yet this is what I see: Collectively, those hurting people who are presented as "the 9/11 families" are making the same awful mistake as that mother. And insofar as we as a city continue on our present road to a memorial, so too are all New Yorkers.

Consider: For most of the 3,000 killed on 9/11, that death had nothing to do with their lives. The only major link is the one the terrorists made. To make that the core of a permanent memorial is to choose to focus our memories on something that had nothing important to do with them.

The message to the ages is not about the love that the bereft feel, but about their grief.

About their pain, not about those they lost.

This is not what I want my loved ones to keep of me when I am gone.

This, too, must be said: Putting grief at the core - together with the cowardliness of some politicians, and the ego of others - has led to a rank dishonor to those for whom the place and manner of death did speak of their lives, and heroically so: the firefighters, cops and others whose lives were lost in the line of duty.

YES, others were heroes on that day, and the fact the "civilians" too spent their last minutes there does in some way link them to that spot. But how does it diminish any of the departed to properly honor what is particular to just a specific few?

It doesn't - unless we see the memorial as being about the bereft - for it is wrong to set one person's grief above another's, at Ground Zero or anywhere.

One great issue remains: the honest sense of many, 9/11-bereft or not, that the site is a hallowed burial ground.

In part this speaks to a pain most are spared, but any can imagine: The agony of being told there is no body. How much harder, then, to ever truly know a beloved life is ended. Even with a "normal" death, the whole original wellspring of grief can storm over you out of the blue years and decades later; to endure also that nagging wisp of uncertainly . . . words fail.

There is a sectarian barrier to full understanding, too - for our various traditions see the corpse in different ways. The family of the murdered daughter, for one, cremates: It was and is their understanding that, once emptied of its soul, the mortal shell is nothing more than that. A fitting focus, yes, for grieving - though as events fell out, they had no body at that wake, and saw how very much some missed it.

Let us acknowledge that, insofar as we rebuild anything commercial at Ground Zero - offices or stores - we tread hard on genuine feeling.

Yet rebuild we will, for other needs for that site and its future are more compelling: The need to forge an answer of life.

Tragedy aplenty played out at the World Trade Center on 9/11, yet the event was no tragedy, but a monstrous act of evil. And the nation and the city must deny that evil its triumph - by fighting its authors and rooting out its causes, but also by answering their destruction with creation, at that very place.

By reviving the symbol they set out to destroy, honoring the good of commerce - a good that was a central part of so many of the lives snuffed out that day.

Yes, we must remember, and memorialize, at that spot. But we, as anything like a united whole, cannot yet do so. I agree on very little with the artist Ted Spiegelman; perhaps only these few words of his on our current memorial course: "Whatever we try to make of this event right now will be distorted by the deep fissure in our political life in America."

A MEDIOCRE memorial would be a crime. But for me, the worst thing about putting the memorial first is that it is choosing as the site's core identity - as a definition of our city, our collective self - the loss and grief.

That is, to set down a road of destroying everything else about who they were, and who we are.

Mark Cunningham is The Post's op-ed editor. E-mail: cunningham@nypost.com
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NY POST
THE UN-FIX WAS IN

By STEVE CUOZZO

December 2, 2003 -- LESS than two weeks from today, we'll get to see the design for Ground Zero's Freedom Tower, the world's tallest building (until somebody in Shanghai or Ouagadougou tops it).
Whatever the David Childs-Daniel Libeskind collaboration brings forth, we may count on two things: Gov. Pataki will hail it as a crowning glory of Western civilization. And - good, bad or mediocre - it will beat the memorial designs recently unveiled.

If you're still wondering why they are so atrocious, start with a glance at the diagram on the opposite page. It is Exhibit A of the institutional incompetence that continues to sandbag the World Trade Center site's reclamation.

The zone in which the designers were asked to "create a memorial of any type, shape, height or concept" seems to have been sketched by a drunk. No wonder the memorial designs, although well-meant, are the grimmest news out of Ground Zero in a long time.

Their vocabulary of vacancy - pits, mordant waterfalls, funereal landscaping, "voids" and subterranean vaults - recalls the empty plazas of a Giorgio DeChirico painting. All that's missing are hollow human figures chased by shadows.

WHOM do we have to thank? Once again, Gov. Pataki, whose politically motivated micromanagement of Ground Zero continues to shackle it with unsustainable, irreconcilable constraints.

The tightest shackle is the Libeskind master plan, which Pataki embraced less for its aesthetics than out of political expediency.

Libeskind shrewdly devoted the World Trade Center site's largest quadrant - bigger than the hated WTC plaza - to the memorial. But where the old plaza opened onto bustling Church Street, the memorial is relegated to the rear, where it faces pedestrian-unfriendly West Street. Don't believe plans to make West Street a throbbing "Champs Elysee." And don't hold your breath for grand extensions of Fulton and Greenwich Streets; the real ones will likely be as wide as cowpaths.

The truth is that the new office buildings and shopping mall, arrayed in an L along Church and Vesey streets, will wall off the memorial from the rest of Lower Manhattan - which is why the LMDC's widely-published renderings of Libeskind's plan show it only from the west or southwest, with the memorial in the foreground. An image from the east or southeast - Downtown's heart - would show a procession of giant towers with no hint of the sunken memorial site behind them.

THE beauty of Libeskind's scheme is that it allows Pataki to say that the memorial quadrant is the largest of the four into which Ground Zero is divided, while appeasing the Port Authority by massing the office buildings where they need to be.

But it has fatal consequences for the memorial that no creative genius could likely surmount. Libeskind, ever self-indulgent, shaped the site so peculiarly that Michelangelo could not tame it. And Pataki, perhaps to make up for the memorial ground's obvious backyard status, caved to the victims' families on most of its details.

The LMDC's official "memorial site boundaries plan" reveals a cockamamie, 11-sided figure - into which the acute angle of "September 11 Place" juts like an icebreaker's prow.

THE intrusion of this knife-edged salient, combined with Pataki's nutty rules for the Twin Tower footprints, reduces the usable space to considerably less than the memorial site's advertised 4.7 acres. So while the memorial site takes up too much of Ground Zero, its effective shrinkage and crazy-quilt parameters make it too small - depriving the designers of a grandly proportioned, rationally drawn playing field.

Denied the liberating potential of elbow room and rectilinearity, the participants were made instead to focus their creative energies on Pataki's requirement to "make visible" the tower footprints without building on them - a dictum even zanier than it sounds, because Libeskind was permitted to cantilever buildings over the footprints without quite touching them. The north-tower footprint lies mainly in their shadow, leaving designers the merry task of "defining" an acre of land mostly hidden from view.

The memorial site's sunken setting (30 feet below grade) - another Libeskind brainstorm - combined with Pataki's rules, all but required the participants to think small and low. How else to define the footprints other than by planting on them or by digging even deeper into the already depressed earth?

UNDER such constraints, the mausoleum imagery of Norman Lee and Michael Lewis' bleak "Votives in Suspension" - in which the footprints, outlined by parapet walls, form the roofs of underground "sacred sanctuaries" - almost make perfect sense.

And while the designers needed to be thinking upward, the LMDC bogged them down with requirements for a batch of underground features - including separate spaces for "quiet visitation" by victims' loved ones, for unidentified remains and for access to 70-foot-deep bedrock in a narrow sliver alongside the slurry wall at the site's extreme northwest corner.

The requirement to "recognize each individual" killed in the attacks could only yield such literal - and banal - solutions as pictures of every victim (in Brian Strawn's and Karla Sierralta's "Dual Memories") and a garden with little glass monuments that look disturbingly like Twin Towers replicas (in Joseph Karadin and Ksin-Yi Wu's "Suspending Memory").

Pataki - and many others - had it wrong when they vowed to make the memorial their "priority." Although creating a cathartic memorial is more important to us spiritually than restoring commercial space or the skyline, it is much more difficult.

BUILDING even the most sophisticated office buildings, a shopping mall and a new hotel is relatively easy. Far more challenging in the same small parcel of land to simultaneously honor the victims of 9/11, console their loved ones, and inspire all who come to pay tribute.

With the memory of our loss so fresh, it may be years before we know the answer. Let us find the patience - and time - to learn.

And perhaps our first look in two weeks' time at the cloud-busting Freedom Tower will give everyone - maybe even the governor - second thoughts about sunken pits and voids.

E-mail: scuozzo@nypost.com

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Are Memorial Designs Too Complex to Last?
By JULIE V. IOVINE

Published: November 22, 2003 NY TIMES


Apart from Daniel Libeskind standing in a swarm of camera lights, there were relatively few architects present on Wednesday when the eight finalist designs in the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition officially went on view downtown at the Winter Garden.

But they were paying close attention elsewhere. They were logging onto a Lower Manhattan Development Corporation Web site (www.wtcsitememorial.org) from home and office, from airports and hotels around the world, and looking with practiced eyes at the plans. Shimmering pools of eternal reflected light, cathedral-size expanses underground: the details prompted both professional responses and emotional reactions among two-dozen American architects reached for comment. They discussed aesthetics and the relative youth of the finalists and wondered how the memorials would endure over time.

Margaret Helfand, the 2001 president of the American Institute of Architects, considered the designs too timid, saying they bore only a fragile connection to the rest of the site, the neighborhood and city. "This memorial cannot be cordoned off," she said in a telephone interview from Amsterdam, adding that she had expected to see more design features at street level rather than below ground. "This will be a piece of New York that has to be knitted into the fabric of the city, not just on a profound level but at the street level."

Wendy Evans Joseph, president of the Architectural League, who worked with James Ingo Freed on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and who recently designed a Holocaust garden in Salt Lake City, said the program requirement to recognize the two footprints of the original trade towers had led to overly complicated memorial concepts.

"Most of the designers used one footprint for one thing and the second for another and then joining the two becomes a third event," Ms. Joseph said. "Treating each as separate is hurting the designs."

No one was surprised, given the ages of the finalists, that minimalism was the universal vocabulary of the submissions. It is a post-Maya Lin generation, noted Michael Manfredi, whose firm Weiss/Manfredi designed the women's memorial at Arlington Cemetery and was a finalist for the World War II memorial competition in Washington.

"A reductive minimalist sensibility is very much what we see in memorials at this cultural moment," Mr. Manfredi said. Society today, he said, is too diverse as well as too inclusive to allow for a more figurative or symbolic language for memorials. "You just can't do the statues of 30 years ago, because who are you going to show?" The burden of conveying the weight of reality now falls on lists of names, which in its own way undermines the ability to create resonant simplicity, he said.

Too much depends on language, rather than the shaping of space, said Annabelle Selldorf, a Manhattan architect. "Everything is about language and conceptual thinking these days," she said. "Sculpture and architecture are physical. They provide an experience of space that should let you think as you may."

Many of the architects had practical questions: What happens to all those water features in case of drought? Can such vast spaces underground be free of columns? How many people can cross a narrow bridge at one time?

"I always worry about programs dependent on technology. L.M.D.C. can't exist forever, so who is going to maintain it all for all the ages?" said Hugh Hardy, the architect who oversaw the restoration of Radio City Music Hall. "When light bulbs don't work and the water gets scuzzy, what have you got?"

Mr. Hardy attended the Winter Garden opening and, that afternoon, convened with 25 architects, landscape designers, engineers and lawyers to review the plans for New York New Visions, a group that also prepared a 20-page document last spring analyzing the submissions for the master plan of the site. They intend to submit a similar analysis of the memorial plans to the development corporation by Tuesday.

There was no euphoria in the room where the design professionals met, Mr. Hardy said. "There was no sense of `You've done it!,' " he added. The reaction was more "even-tempered, like the nature of the designs themselves." A key issue that emerged was maintenance. Several designs rely on high-tech solutions. The fuel that would light "Votives in Suspension" drips down cords cut to lengths that vary according to the victims' ages. Keeping them all lighted could require constant vigilance. "Look at the poor Irish potato famine memorial," Mr. Hardy said. "It's so successful after one year, it started falling apart, and they already have had to put it back together."

The dependence on artificial light and large underground spaces will call for sophisticated climate control and the most advanced engineering. "It's all going to be phenomenally expensive," said Alex Gorlin, a Manhattan architect who is now designing a mausoleum for 2,000 in an Olmsted-designed cemetery in Oakland, Calif. "They are all loaded with a ton of intricate programmatic elements.

"All the designs treated 200-foot open spaces as if that's all in a day's work. Where are the support columns? Cathedrals of space under tilted planes of earth make a great image, but there doesn't seem to be an understanding of structural practicality and cost. Even water is expensive."

Complicated as the designs appear to be, the architects interviewed saw no reason to think that any were too difficult to build, although at a cost. They warned, however, that the seductive images of renewal and peace now on display in videos, models and renderings at the Winter Garden would be hard to translate into the reality of a heavily trafficked space. They asked how the memorial would hold up as a ruin.

"I yearn for something simple with no moving parts, like a Mayan pyramid," Ms. Helfand said. "What did they understand that somehow we don't?"

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NY POST  11 23 03
NONE OF THE MEMORIALS SHOWS THE SPIRIT OF THE WTC

November 23, 2003 -- Where have we gone in this country ("8 grand plans for memorial," Nov. 20), from the majestic and thrilling Marine Corps/Mt. Suribachi Memorial in Arlington to 3,000 votive lights "suspended in the air"?
9/11 was the worst day in New York's long history, but it was in so many ways also its finest hour. It's sad to see the proposed memorials are all about the destruction of the flame, with nary a mention of the righteously angry phoenix that rose from it.
Brendan Stewart
Nyack

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The Twin Towers as buildings were pretty simple designs, so why should the memorials be any of these eight confused and complex designs?

It's bad enough that we will have to deal with the even more confusing Libeskind buildings.
Jesse James Schroeder
East Setauket

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I don't see eight WTC memorial designs. What I see are designs for 21st century churches, holocaust museums and a floating cemetery.
Arthur Harris
Manhattan

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Is a memorial's purpose to honor the dead or mollify the living?

If it is to honor the dead, the towers should be rebuilt as they were with a modest, tasteful marker listing the victims.

If it is to mollify the living, one of eight cloyingly absurd finalists will do.
Paul Romaldini
Manhattan

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