FROM THE roof of his apartment building in the east village, the architect Michael Arad watched the smoke rise from the north tower of the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001. “Then I saw the second plane fly down the Hudson and turn round and bank into the south tower,” he recounts.
Within months, Arad, who was 32 at the time, began sketching images of a memorial comprised of two black voids where the twin towers stood. “Some people talk to other people; some write in a journal; others draw,” says Arad. “This was a very private and cathartic exercise. For me it was a way of responding.”
An enigmatic image imposed itself on Arad: “The surface of the Hudson river torn open, forming two square voids and water flowing into these voids, and the voids remaining empty despite the flow of water into them.”
The memorial that grew out of that image, Arad’s Reflecting Absence, will be dedicated tomorrow by President Barack Obama and former president George W Bush, in the presence of the families of victims, a host of dignitaries, and Arad. There will be no speeches, only readings of poetry and quotations, and the names of 2,983 people who died in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania on 9/11, and the six who died in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
For much of the past decade, reconstruction of the site and plans for a memorial were trammelled up in arguments between the families, property developers, insurance companies, architects and the government. The original master plan by the Polish architect Daniel Libeskind was dramatically altered. Number One World Trade Center – which Libeskind wanted to call Freedom Tower – has been redesigned four times, its cornerstone laid twice in different places.
Through all the disputes, Arad fought to preserve the integrity of his design, often challenging older, better-known architects. In 2002, long before the competition, he had built two small fountains with a reservoir beneath them, which he photographed against the Manhattan skyline to see how they evoked the missing towers.
Arad’s spare proposal was chosen over 5,200 others. “As a designer I felt my obligation was not to bring my own aesthetics or flourishes to the site,” he says. “It was about letting the history come through.”
In designing the pools and waterfalls bordered by the names of the dead, Arad thought of the river Styx, which separated the living from the dead in Greek mythology, of Orpheus and Eurydice, of “that image of the edge, of not being able to pass that line”.
Arad said Libeskind’s plan to place the memorial 30 feet below street level would have cut it off from the city. Once the rest of the 16-acre site is completed – four skyscrapers and a transportation hub – Arad hopes the memorial plaza will throb with business people, commuters, local residents and tourists. “If this site is a scar, it’s a scar that’s not hidden from view,” he says. “It’s a scar that’s not flaunted, that’s healing. You bring the past into the present and you live with it.”
The National Memorial Museum is being constructed seven storeys under ground, directly beneath Arad’s reflecting pools. It will not open until September 2012. Alice Greenwald, its director, came to the project in 2006, after 19 years as associate director of the Holocaust Museum in Washington.
Greenwald calls Arad’s monument “an exquisite gesture of memory and respect”. Visitors will descend to the museum she is preparing through a pavilion on the memorial plaza. The exhibit beneath the north pool will pay homage to the victims. The exhibit beneath the south pool will recount what happened on the day. To spare the families’ feelings, Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 hijackers will barely appear, in a “Wanted: Dead or Alive” poster and small, identity-format photos.
“The concluding sector [of the museum] looks at the big questions,” says Greenwald: “How do we know what really happened? How do democracies committed to civil liberties provide security in a world where terrorism is a reality? What does a society owe to first responders who worked for months, only to become deathly ill?”
FOR 10 YEARS, unidentified remains of 9/11 victims have been stored in refrigerated vans in a parking lot opposite Bellevue Hospital. They will be moved to a repository in the underground museum, in a section closed to the public. “The medical examiner is committed in perpetuity to trying to make positive identification of these remains, using increasingly precise DNA analysis,” explains Greenwald.
The museum director sees the wall separating the repository from the exhibits as a metaphor for the precarity of human existence. “What divided those people who survived from those who perished was simply where they happened to be,” she says. “If you were above the impact zone, you did not get out of the building. If you were on the airplane that morning, you did not survive. If you were on the 30th floor, you got out.”
The former New York Timesreporter Amy Waldman has just published a novel entitled The Submission, about the backlash when a Muslim-American architect is selected to design the Ground Zero memorial.
Arad has read the novel, but sees no significance in the fact that he, an Israeli-American, was chosen, rather than Waldman’s fictional Muslim-American. “I don’t think either of those labels or descriptors are meaningful when it comes to assessing the validity of a work of art,” he says.
The son of a former Israeli ambassador to Washington, Arad was born in London, served in the Israeli army in Lebanon and the West Bank and studied at Dartmouth and Georgia Tech, where he met his wife Melanie, an Irish-American whose families are “Connollys and Fitpatricks all the way back”.
Asked whether he felt the Arab-Israeli conflict had followed him to New York, Arad says haltingly: “I’d rather not go there. I feel that my role in this project has been to create a memorial that welcomes all, and not to bring my political viewpoint to it.”
The arrangement of the victims’ names was the most difficult issue Arad had to deal with. He did not want an alphabetical list that would dehumanise the victims. In 2004, he suggested “meaningful adjacencies” – positioning names near those of colleagues, relatives or friends – but the development corporation which was then in charge rejected the idea. “I said if there was no mechanism that would sort the names fairly and equitably, then we would have just a random array of names,” Arad recalls.
The families were furious. Arad wept for the only time during the project. For two years, nothing moved forward while the argument over how names would be presented continued. Mayor Michael Bloomberg took over, chaired a two-hour meeting and Arad’s concept of “meaningful adjacencies” was adopted. The names were divided into nine categories: the four hijacked flights, the two towers, the Pentagon, the 1993 bombing victims and first responders. Asked to participate, family members made 1,200 requests. Through a painstaking process combining index cards and a computer programme, Arad’s firm was able to accommodate every request.
“A statistician told us there was no way we were going to be able to do it,” Arad says. “It was amazing. It was meant to happen. It was such a feeling of accomplishment.”
Tomorrow morning, the families of the victims will be able to touch the names engraved on the bronze plaques surrounding Arad’s voids. “A name is not an abstraction,” Arad says. “It’s a person. You don’t need a very well-developed imagination to read this name of a person and understand that the loss of their life meant a lot to very many people, and that it was capricious and violent and brutal, and that we should build a future that does everything it can to prevent moments like that from happening again.”