From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS
Four Don'ts for Ground Zero
How to avoid a 9/11 memorial disaster.
The drawings are in, the judging begins. At last month's deadline, some 5,200 designs for the 9/11 memorial cascaded into the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., submitted by architects, artists and amateurs alike. The proposals are now being pared down by the jury--a distinguished panel that includes Maya Lin, architect of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, and Vartan Gregorian, former head of the New York Public Library. They'll have their work cut out for them.
The program for the competition is of baffling complexity. The winning entry must "enhance the sacred quality" of the ravaged World Trade Center site; it must "recognize each individual who was a victim of the attacks," including those in Washington and Pennsylvania; it should "convey historical authenticity" by preserving physical evidence of the buildings; and it must offer a final resting place for unidentified human remains. Moreover, the memorial should not be static but be able to "evolve over time." Has a design ever been asked to do so much? But then again, has a design ever had so many constituencies to satisfy?
Each of these requirements is worthy, even noble, but in their totality they should be cause for alarm. The World Trade Memorial requires a transcendent clarity. A monument that tries to do too many things, and provide too many features, is not a monument but a theme park. To avoid such an outcome, the jury will do well to observe the following four cardinal principles:
• No violence. The memorial must not perpetuate the violence of the attacks, nor imply it by fractured form. It must heal the wounds, not pick at the scab. Most of us experienced 9/11 on television and have a storehouse of visual horror to draw on. As vivid as those visual images were, they have no place in this design.
• No swagger. The memorial must not be a showplace of artistic ego. It should not be tainted by the self-conscious novelty that the architectural historian Richard A. Etlin has termed "zoot-suit architecture." Instead, its forms should have a collective and timeless character, so that they will not become dated. This is not the place for a Tilted Arc sort of public monument, one that expresses nothing but the personal creativity of its maker.
• No clutter. The memorial must not disperse its power across a distracting range of attractions and diversions. It should be simple and spacious, with a clear focus of attention. The sublime Vietnam memorial on the Mall in Washington provides such a focus; the nearby FDR memorial, with its rambling sequence of sculptural vignettes, does not.
• No despair. The memorial must balance sorrow with resolve, fortitude and hope. It must be a place of mourning and solace, not an abyss.
These principles will be difficult to apply, for while the site commands a grand sweep of space, it has already been overprogrammed. The program insists on preserving the footprints of the two absent towers, which stand at an awkward relationship to one another, like the move of a knight in chess. They will not easily be brought together in a harmonious relationship. Even more cumbersome are the features that site architect Daniel Libeskind has crowded around its perimeter: an exposed slurry wall to the west, a waterfall to the east, and a "Wedge of Light" to the north. (This last element now seems likely to be removed.)
This is simply too much visual clutter for a site that should be treated with restrained dignity. For this reason, the jurors ought to look for those designs with the courage to defy the program. The distractions that encumber the site should be removed. In particular, the museum that Mr. Libeskind has proposed to suspend above the site of the north tower injects a note of restlessness where there should be serenity and clarity.
Even more important, competitors should have the boldness to reject the exposed slurry wall. The focus needs to be on those we lost, not the specificity of their violent deaths. A true memorial must address the imagination and not merely present an assortment of ghoulish curiosities.
Perhaps the greatest threat to the memorial is that it will be too laden with visual imagery: the slurry wall, the sunken pit, even twisted shards of the buildings themselves. The site should be allowed to speak for itself. It should be enclosed in such a way that its immense scale can be grasped in its totality, giving the visitor an abstract impression of the magnitude of the attacks and of the tragedy. It should be a solemn enclave, screened from the bustle of the city--perhaps through an arcade, which defines space without blocking it.
Above all, the World Trade Center Memorial must be lapidary, a useful term that literally means the terseness appropriate to carving on stone. It would be wrong to communicate anything other than the simplest of declaratives: We mourn, we persevere, we continue.
It may be that we cannot take the true measure of 9/11 until a generation has passed. After all, the monuments to Lincoln, Washington and Jefferson on the Mall came at least a half century after the deaths of their subjects. We should not be bullied by well-meaning intentions into something we will regret. In that case, it would be better not to build at all.
But if we are to build, we should agree on first principles. We cannot go too far wrong if we pledge ourselves to no violence, no swagger, no clutter, no despair.
Mr. Lewis is chairman of the art department at Williams College.
