Amid conflicts over accessibility, the arrangement of victims' names and the presence of unidentified remains, architect Michael Arad '91 sought to create a "simple and serene experience for visitors" in his plans for the World Trade Center memorial, Arad said in a lecture in Filene Auditorium Tuesday afternoon. The memorial, which will consist of two pools representing the "voids" of the fallen Twin Towers and two large man-made waterfalls, is scheduled to open Sept. 11, 2011, he said.
A jury selected the design submitted by Arad and his landscape architect Peter Walker, "Reflecting Absence," from among 5,201 submissions, according to the Sept. 11 Memorial web site.
At first, Arad said he did not think the site of the fallen Twin Towers would be a fitting place for a memorial. His original sketch was for a memorial situated in the Hudson River near the World Financial Center because he thought it would give people more opportunities for contemplation, he said.
After visiting the World Trade Center for himself, however, Arad said he recognized the need for a memorial there, and set about adapting his original design. Arad took his idea of "fountains within fountains" to design a two-level memorial, he said. His plans included a gallery below ground where people would be able to stand behind "curtains" of water flowing from the fountains and where the names of the victims would be carved into to stone surrounding the base of the waterfalls, he said.
"It was the exploration of this idea that led me to submit this competition entry," Arad said.
Because of various security and budgetary concerns, Arad eventually changed the design to be one level instead of two. He removed the memorial galleries and put the names of the victims on display at the single plaza level, he said.
"I thought, what can I do to make this still a welcoming part of the city without losing the clarity of the design?'" Arad said.
After criticism that the plaza in his original plans was too bleak, Arad said he added trees to the design. The trees will be placed so that they appear to be in rows from one angle but give the impression of a forest from another, according to Arad. Part of Arad's initial design also included a below-ground tomb to hold the unidentified remains of the victims, but this proved infeasible due to the conditions in which those remains must be stored, Arad said.
After much backlash from victims' families and the committee deciding where to display the victims' names, Arad said he chose a design that would display the names on bronze edges surrounding the fountains. This design was not accessible to handicapped visitors, however.
Arad and his team spent the next year redesigning the corners of the fountains so that handicapped visitors would be able to not only reach and touch all the names, but would be able to see into the bottom of the fountain as other visitors could, he said.
"It created a surface for us to inscribe the names at the corners," Arad said. "In my mind this enriched the memorial to have that sense of a closed ring of continuity."
The design of how to arrange and order the names along the bronze edges of the fountain was a "charged" issue, according to Arad.
"My intentions at the beginning of the design was something I called meaningful adjacency,' which means that there would be significance behind why one name was next to another and there would be these kind of hidden connections," Arad said.
Placing victims' names from the group of first responders to the attack posed the toughest challenge, Arad said, because of his desire to maintain requests from those next of kin and the need to include details of the victims' company name.
Members of the organization overseeing construction of the memorial mailed letters to next of kin of the victims, and asked them if they had a preference in whose names they would be placed near, Arad said.
Arad successfully laid out the names in his design, he said, and only two victims' next of kin could not have their adjacency requests fulfilled due to design difficulties.
