The two footprints where the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers once stood now hold twin, almost one acre sized square reflecting pools surrounded by cascading 30 foot waterfalls. The names of each of the 2,983 people who died in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 and the truck bomb at the Word Trade Center on February 26, 1993 are inscribed on bronze panels that surround the waterfalls.
The National September 11 Memorial & Museum occupies about half of the sixteen acre World Trade Center site and includes a plaza that, when fully planted, will be home to not only 442 swamp white oak trees, but also the so-called “Survivor Tree,” a callery pear that miraculously survived the attacks, was plucked from the wreckage and nursed back to health at a nursery in the Bronx.
Architect Michael Arad, now 42, won the open international competition to design the memorial in 2004, beating out 5,200 other entries. In a recent interview with the AP at the memorial site, Arad called the reflecting pools “voids” meant to evoke the lives lost in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. He calls his design “Reflecting Absence.”
“These voids that you see behind me — as you approach them as a pedestrian they’re not readily visible,” he said. “And it’s really only when you’re a few feet away from them that all of a sudden the ground opens up in front of you and you see this enormous expanse, these voids which are ringed with these waterfalls and the reflecting pool below them.”
The memorial stands as a respite — a place for deep reflection and remembrance, but also for hope and renewal.
“The falls are just what you would hope. They create a beautiful whisper, a sound envelope that drowns out the sound of the city as you’re standing in front of the names,” said National September 11 Memorial & Museum President Joseph Daniels on NY1.
The opening of the World Trade Center site, which has been closed to the public for the past decade, cloaked in construction fencing, has been a long time coming and is not without its share of controversy, including construction delays, brawls over budgets and politics and much discussion about how to group the names of the victims.
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Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/911-memorial-set-to-open-on-wtc-site-slideshow.html#ixzz1XUpzwzaZ
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