Two massive square voids sited within the
footprints of the towers, it digs down — almost as if the collapse of
the towers had pounded out a space to deposit feelings about that whole
wretched day.
Over the past ten years there have been any
number of disappointing developments at the Trade Center site (more on
that later), but the memorial has not turned out to be one of them.
The organizers of the memorial competition told applicants to respect Libeskind's plan, which would have placed the entire memorial plaza far below street level.
But scale has a power all its own, and by its very size — each of the voids is about an acre in size — the completed memorial still evokes the immensity of 9/11. Its right-angled geometry notwithstanding, it appears before you as a vast abstract of nature, of cliffs, waterfalls and chasms.
In a stiff wind, when the water whips and lashes the walls, it even has an unruliness of its own, like that restive, riderless horse in the funeral procession for John F. Kennedy.
But all the while that those deep, dark voids express a sense of loss and grief — and reach into your feelings about the grave — the falling water exerts its ancient power to console.
As those descend they combine into a unified sheet of water, a mingling that speaks of the many lives joined by the vast event that was 9/11.
At the center of each tank the pooled waters drain into a square opening — like one of Arad's imagined holes in the surface of the Hudson — and out of sight.
In all there are 2,983, including everyone (other than the terrorists) who died at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and in the crash of United Airlines Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pa., as well as the six who died in the truck bomb attack on the Twin Towers in 1993.
For so long as the rest of Ground Zero remains a construction site there will only be one entry point to the memorial plaza, and visitors will require advance tickets.
You might say that the final architects of the 9/11 memorial will be the people who pass through it every day.
