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A Resident's Hopes for the Memorial


As the 9/11 memorial jury prepares to sort through design applications for the international memorial competition, I continue think about what I want the memorial to be. While I have no specific physical vision - I leave that to those with the creative ability to turn concepts into reality - I have been contemplating three questions: What are we memorializing? Who is the memorial for? What should the memorial mean for future generations? My answers to these questions are inevitably influenced by my own biases and experiences, which include witnessing the first plane hit the north tower and remaining at my home in Tribeca throughout the aftermath of 9/11.

What are we memorializing?
I believe that we are memorializing a moment in time - a moment when the unthinkable happened; a moment that touched and brought together the entire world community. This transformative moment necessarily and appropriately focuses on those who lost their lives that day and what their sacrifice can teach those of us who survived and those who will come after us.

Who is the memorial for?
9/11 was not a local event: it resonated across borders and cultures and the entire world reached out to help. As horrible as it was, 9/11 demonstrated that we are truly one interconnected and interdependent global community. Thus, the memorial cannot belong to any one individual or group of individuals. The memorial should be a legacy for everyone throughout the world.

What should the memorial mean for future generations?
Whatever is built - or not built - on the World Trade Center site will inevitably acquire meaning and symbolic value. For me, the meaning of the memorial should be community. 9/11 was a shared experience that bound us together in many overlapping and distinct communities. They include those who lost their lives that day, the community of families and friends of those who died, the community of those who lived and worked in lower Manhattan, the city itself, the country, and the entire world.

Those of us who lived below Canal Street and elected not to evacuate after 9/11 discovered a very special sense of community in the weeks immediately following the attacks. We gathered on street corners to hold vigils and sing old songs. Those who had electricity, or phones, or hot water opened their homes to those who did not. We entered into intimate conversations with those who, heretofore, were only nodding acquaintances. The experience of coming together as a community in the aftermath of this horrible tragedy rekindled my belief in the possibility of creating a better world: a world that has learned that violence only begets violence and hate begets hate.

My dream is that the memorial will convey the possibility of this better world and hold it up as an attainable idea. As the memorial mission statements says so well, "May the lives remembered, the deeds recognized, and the spirit reawakened be eternal beacons, which reaffirm respect for life, strengthen our resolve to preserve freedom, and inspire and end to hatred, ignorance and intolerance."

In many ways, the World Trade Center was the center of lower Manhattan before 9/11. Now it is forever our physical and spiritual heart and one that, I believe, can and should be shared with the rest of the world. The memorial can be a place where people come to learn what it means to be part of a world community and gain personal resolve to make the world a better place.

Three criteria could serve as guidelines in creating such a memorial: it needs to be accessible; connected, and integrated.

Accessible
The memorial must be accessible, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. It should go without saying that the memorial needs to be accessible to all regardless of physical or mental abilities. It needs to be hospitable to strangers and those without prior knowledge of 9/11. This being New York City, accessibility necessarily includes being pedestrian friendly and promoting public transportation as the best way to get to and fro. I don't think accessibility necessarily requires bringing the memorial to street level, as some have suggested. Given that Daniel Liebskind's design for the site, with the memorial 30 feet below street level, was chosen, I see that as the starting point and any significant changes should be consistent with the overall intent.

Accessibility also entails enabling those who visit the memorial to get in touch with the emotions of the day and their own heart. And it should be possible for visitors to connect with the larger, spiritual meanings of 9/11 without the distractions of specific religious symbols or practices.

Connected
An effective memorial will connect the past, present, and future and can also serve to bridge differences between individuals and communities. From a very parochial perspective, my hope is that the memorial somehow connects the surrounding neighborhoods, since the World Trade Center site is the hub that connects Battery Park City, South Greenwich, the Financial District and Tribeca.

Even more important, however, is building connections that bridge and promote understanding of cultural, racial, and ethnic differences, which all to frequently lead to suspicion, hate, and violence. To do this, the memorial must provide connections to those who died by telling their stories - their deaths have meaning that must not be forgotten. The most important connection and ultimate indicator of success, however, will be creating the memory links that help future generations understand and make sense of this experience. The memorial needs to build connections to those yet to be born and help them have a direct connection with 9/11.

Integrated
My personal hope is that the memorial becomes an integrated and inspirational part of the neighborhood and the fabric of New York City. Without diminishing the importance of dedicated space for remembrance and contemplation, I think that an effective memorial should be an integral part of daily life, much as the grounds at Trinity Church are. Furthermore, I believe that the entire site - not just the "formal" memorial - should be a tribute to those who perished on 9/11 and to those who lived through the experience. For me, this means creating a vibrant, livable, dynamic, mixed-use community that incorporates the lessons of 9/11 and serves as a model for what it might look like to end hatred and ignorance and promote peace. This community should be a model for sustainable development, have buildings that exceed all current safety standards, and respect the fact that people make a city - and the world - thrive and be successful.

Ultimately, the memorial needs to recognize and reconcile the needs and concerns of everyone involved - those who live and work downtown, those who died on 9/11 and their families, those who come to visit and learn from this tragedy, and the entire global community. Because the World Trade Center site has acquired an important symbolic value to the entire world, the importance of what is done there cannot be overstated. My hope is that both the process and the end product channel our passions in ways that foster community in its true sense, globally and locally. The memorial should provide ways to incorporate the lessons of 9/11 as we discover new ways to live together.

Tim Lannan has lived and worked in Tribeca since 1994 and is an active member of several local organizations, including Manhattan Community Board 1 and Neighbors Against N.O.I.S.E.

My Memorial


Unlike many people who lost someone on 9/11, I have been in a unique position to affect the memorial process from a variety of critical standpoints and to listen to what people have to say. I helped draft the mission statement for the memorial, I am a member of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation's Family Advisory Council, and I am the head of Imagine New York. Last month, Imagine New York engaged 2,800 people in public workshops and on our website, to gather the public's thoughts on the eight memorial designs. At the same time they gave others the chance to explore their reactions to the memorial designs, these workshops helped me with my own personal feelings about a 9/11 memorial.

When I first saw the designs I was overwhelmed, and I was looking forward to hearing what others had to say about them to help me grasp what they meant. Let me just admit that I'm not a person whoÕs crazy about art. My so-called "museum tolerance" is about an hour to an hour-and-a-half. I usually breeze through most exhibits, stopping for a minute at only a handful of pieces. I'm more interested in looking at the people looking at the art. By contrast, my training in urban planning has given me the ability to look at a site plan and understand it in three dimensions. Although these memorials do have a multi-layered quality to them, they also have something else that is difficult for me as an individual to grasp...poetry.

However, through these memorial designs, and the responses to them, I was able to develop some of my own personal thoughts about my own 9/11 experience.

At times I have grappled with an investigatory impulse to try to imagine what my father, Frederick Kuo Jr., was doing in the minutes between the 2nd plane's impact with the South Tower and the tower's collapse 55 minutes later. I know he was alive when the plane crashed into the building. I suspect that he had enough time and a clear enough path to escape. Why didn't he make it out? Was it because there simply wasn't enough time for him to navigate his way down 1,300 some odd feet to safety? Or was it because he stopped to help people along the way, never imagining that those behemoths would fall?

Whatever the case, it doesn't matter. He didn't make it out and now I'm faced with the only thing that I can have any effect on -- how to remember who he was and where he was when he died, and how to share that with people who will never know him but must be able to understand the incomprehensible. My sense of loss can be multiplied out to the thousands of other families who lost loved ones, and the millions of others who lost a part of themselves as well. It is my belief that the memorial should have a plurality of meanings but a universal significance for all those affected. So many people lost, so many lives changed irrevocably and with profound suddenness and without choice.

After my first viewing, my impressions were mixed. I was appreciative of the individual designers efforts and the jury's monumental task of viewing and critiquing them, but I also thought that the designs were lacking things I wanted to see. I also understood that my opinions of these designs would change, perhaps wildly, over the next few days and weeks.

However, I wasn't confused about certain things; in fact, my position on some issues crystallized as a result of the designers bringing them to life. One, my dad lived and died in the South Tower and I did not like designs that treated the tower footprints differently. For example, in Dual Memory, while I appreciate the notion of individual and collective loss expressed in the North and South tower footprints, respectively, I know that I would be drawn to the South Tower footprint. I didn't want to be trying to find the presence of my dad in the South Tower, while others were having a different experience in the North Tower. In these two most sacred of places, the spirituality should be the equal.

Secondly, when I discovered my spiritual connection to the South Tower as opposed to the North Tower, I realized that I felt more connected to those who he was with when he died. The people in the upper floors of the South Tower may have shared each other's company to the end and may have even crossed paths or taken elevators together in happier days, so they seem to belong together in a grouping of names. This was an epiphany for me because I realized that this is all the firefighters are asking for. To be listed among those who were with them in life and in death. Passages of Light: The Memorial Cloud addresses these critical relationships in an amazingly profound way. The ribbon of rescuers moving through and among civilians, grouped together by who they were with when they died has a thousand times more meaning than an alphabetical or age-ordered listing of names.

Thirdly, death and grief are important topics to address in the memorial, but to stop there does nothing to acknowledge what makes this chapter in history unique: how we reacted and what we learned about ourselves and each other in the aftermath of the attacks. I cannot describe to you, the sense of love for this city and its people, that I felt as I went from hospital to hospital looking for my dad or from watching the iron workers, volunteers and rescue workers toiling away at Ground Zero on TV. In my community, neighbors and strangers sent us food, flowers and condolences. I have never seen anything like that in my life. The whole city, the whole region was experiencing this together. As diverse and differentiated we are as individuals, in those days following September 11, we were like a tribe. This must be embodied in the memorial, as a large, open and inviting public space where public gatherings both organized and spontaneous can take place. This space should be located at or close to street level. I do not see this in any one of the designs, though some of them, like Lower Waters, have the potential to do so.

My feeling that the designs lacked something was shared by many, as we found through the workshops and comments on the internet from which we drew the conclusions in our recent report to the jury.

While Imagine New York participants liked particular elements within the designs, none of them possessed an essential message that resonated with the public. This may be a function of the complex plurality of meanings that is currently associated with 9/11. It's probably true that it takes a special kind of person to try to understand what that day will mean in history, only two years and three months after the attacks. People have different ideas about what 9/11 means, and therefore how it should be memorialized. Many people wanted to know why the designs were so pretty, so clean and so pure when this event was so horribly ugly, devastating, disorienting and complex. Some people felt that this was a deliberate attempt to make us forget, in order for business to continue and to keep the machine moving. Others felt that the ugliness and context belonged in the 9/11 Museum, available to those who choose to have more layers to their experience and that whatever is open and in full view of the public should have an element of dignity and peace to it.

While I was pouring over the 15,000 comments that we received it became clear to me that our findings could become a framework for the jury and the LMDC to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each of the eight designs (download Imagine New York's report as a pdf file). This would not only help them to select the memorial with the most potential, but also to understand how that design might be modified in the future in order to help it to complete its message.

If the jury wants to get this right, they will listen to the voices that are outside their own private deliberations, because there are thousands -- if not millions -- of people who have already visited these memorials in their minds. We have some important insights to share.

Mike Kuo is the project manager of Imagine New York. He is also a member of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation's Family Advisory Council and the Mission Statement Drafting Committee. His father, Frederick Kuo Jr., was killed on 9/11.

A Good Work in Progress


The recently released Freedom Tower is a well thought out design, and a lot of issues have been addressed. That said, there are a few things that still need to be developed. Given the early phase of design the building is in, there will be plenty of chances to make these improvements.

There are a lot of things about this building that I like. The idea of creating an open space with cables that resemble the Brooklyn Bridge is a good one, the building relates to the street grid in a way that makes sense, and the glass wall is going to have a texture that will pick up light differently throughout the day, which will mean that the look of the building will vary at different times. One of the clearest messages is that people want a new icon to replace the twin towers, and I think this will do that. At 1,776 feet tall, you’re going to see it from everywhere.

This building is tall enough to be graceful. The problem with modern office buildings is that you need a large floor size, which makes it hard to design an elegant skyscraper. In general, the tenants for “class A” office buildings want a 30,000 – 40,000 square foot floor plate, which results in buildings, even if they’re 40 or 50 stories, that look short and squat. They’re not as graceful as the Chrysler Building or the Empire State Building, which have much smaller floor plates.

The most ambitious aspect of the building is the area containing wind turbines in an open-air frame made of cables. Would you normally build a space like that for wind turbines? I don’t think so. But if you have the space, the idea of putting wind turbines in a place like that is a good one. Technically, it’s not a gamble; cable structures are a proven technology, and wind turbines are a proven technology.

I and many others feel the need to set an example by building a sustainable or green building. The wind turbines provide 20 percent of the buildings energy at peak times, and even more at night. As a symbolic statement about the need to reduce our dependency on oil, it is strong. It is also unusual to have a large section of a building that is basically empty. I think there’s a certain poetry in that. It’s an office building, but there’s also a void in the building that will remind us what we’ve lost.

The design isn’t perfect. I think that the asymmetrical spire on the top isn’t very well integrated into the rest of the building design. I’ve heard David Childs talk about an artist redesigning it, and I think it can be fixed and resolved. But right now it is a weak point.

There are also questions that have not yet been addressed. No one has talked much about the building at street level: What does it look like from the street? How are the entrances arranged? What does it feel like to walk by it? It’s not that I think these elements aren’t going to be good, it’s just that we don’t know.

It is not unusual at this stage of design for there to still be concerns that have not been addressed. In architecture, you typically start at the large scale and work down. There’s a long way to go, meaning that there is plenty of time to answer these unanswered questions. However, the schedule is being compressed, for political reasons, to have the design ready for the cornerstone to be laid by the third anniversary. That doesn’t leave a lot of time.

Mark Ginsberg is the President of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects



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