Arad's design, created with his landscape architect Peter Walker, was chosen out of 5,201 entries in a worldwide, juried competition in 2003, The Dartmouth previously reported.
Arad, the son of an Israeli diplomat, moved around the world, from England to Israel, Mexico and the United States, until his freshman year at Dartmouth in 1987. After his first year at the College, he spent three years in the Israeli army, returning to Dartmouth in the fall of 1991 to finish his undergraduate education and graduating in 1994.
Arad said that becoming an architect was never a decision he made and that his career developed organically from his interests and studies. After majoring in government and minoring in studio art at Dartmouth, Arad attended George Institute of Technology and graduated in 1999 with a masters degree in architecture.
He moved to New York City in 1999 and in 2001 witnessed the World Trade Center attacks and the city's response "first hand."
"I was incredibly struck by both the horror and the encouraging compassion in the wake of the attacks," Arad said. "I was moved by what I saw in my fellow New Yorkers the bravery, compassion and courage was inspiring and it was everywhere in the city, in big, small, loud and quiet ways."
A few of months after 9/11, Arad began imagining a memorial. He spent a year working on his rooftop, drawing and building a Plexiglas model of his design, which originally featured voids in the middle of the Hudson River. When the competition for the memorial design was announced in 2003, Arad returned to working on his project.
Arad said his design is focused on bringing New Yorkers and Americans together in a public space "to find meaning in confronting [the tragedy] together."
"I wanted to integrate the site back into the city by clearing a big open space with multiple uses overlapping," he said.
Arad envisions the site as a place where people will go both to remember the events of 9/11 as well as to stroll with their dogs and children. He said the design is intended to integrate the surrounding urban landscape and includes benches and trees, in addition to the two pools.
"I think [Arad's design] is an extremely powerful statement about loss," studio art professor Karolina Kawiaka said in an email to The Dartmouth. "[It's] a poetic design that will resonate profoundly with everyone who visits."
Designing the memorial challenged Arad with the same constraints and budgetary, scheduling and constructability issues that most projects entail, but with an added element of sensitivity, he said. "Designing this memorial has been very emotionally and politically charged," Arad said. "I have yet to meet someone who doesn't have an opinion about what we're doing."
Arad said his greatest challenge has been keeping his vision clear and on track while realizing his artistic concept.
"Things have changed over time, but my fundamental vision hasn't changed," he said. "My design has been parsed down to the most essential."
Arad's idea has garnered wide acclaim but has also faced criticism and structural concerns from the New York mayor's office.
Determining where and how to inscribe the names of the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 and the Feb. 26, 1993 attacks on the World Trade Center has stirred up widespread dissent, The New York Times reported. Arad originally conceived of "meaningful adjacency," which involved grouping the bronze-engraved names of the victims with the names of their family members, friends or co-workers who were also victims around the base of the reflecting pools. This idea was rejected as being "too difficult," and the concept changed to random arrangements, according to Arad. This initial idea, however, was ultimately brought back and modified so that names were organized "geographically," according to where victims were when they died.
While "material and emotional" constraints have altered Arad's original ideas, some of these issues changed his design for the better, he said. Arad explained that he received a request from the city mayor's office concerning the ability of those with disabilities particularly those confined to wheelchairs to see the bottom of the reflecting pools. In order to alleviate this problem, Arad transformed the 90-degree edges of the pools to 45-degree angles, allowing visitors to observe the pools more easily. Consequently, this structural change allowed the lines of victims' names to circle the pools in a fluid pattern, rather than end at the corners.
"Unexpected constraints that had the potential to diminish the design actually made it stronger, better and more meaningful," Arad said.
Arad said he could not trace his concept for the design back to any one specific moment of inspiration.
"You draw on all of your experiences when you start designing," Arad said. "It's very hard to trace a line of precedent, it is more of a subconscious mix of what you have seen, read, imagined and dreamed that goes into creating a design."
David Williams '79, the project manager for the memorial who gave a lecture at the College regarding the project in 2008, could not be reached for comment by press time.
