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WHEN ARCHITECTS Peter Walker and Michael Arad set about the daunting task of coming up with a promising design to memorialize the site of the World Trade Center towers in New York City, they grappled with the sheer immensity of the work. There was, of course, the crushing sense of grief that descends like a fog on anyone attempting to dwell on the dastardly inhumanity that unleashed its cruel wrath that fateful day. But there was also the ambitious goal to resurrect from the rubble a sense of redemption; to somehow breathe life into a place associated in our collective memory with tragic death. "We wanted not just a formal experience, but one in which you have a procession and a recession," Walker told an enraptured audience of students, faculty and community residents during the 2004 O.C. Tanner Symposium in November. "We were possessed by this Jungian idea that you could leave the world of life and go down into the netherworld, where you could receive a boon - to go back up to life. On your return, you could tell people not what's down there, but that they can go down too." Walker and Arad proposed what New York Magazine architecture critic Joseph Giovanni called a "bold and dignified design." Bold enough to clinch them the commission, beating out 5,201 entrants from 63 countries. The architects christened their design "Reflective Absence," as a poignant reminder of the buildings that once filled the city's skyline. The memorial will be located in a field of trees that is interrupted by two large voids containing recessed pools. The pools and the ramps that surround them encompass the footprints of the twin towers. Sheets of water pour continuously down the interior façades of each basin. But the most stunningly significant detail of all: The plaza's rows of deciduous trees, with their annual cycle of rebirth, give it the kiss of life, metaphorically transforming the memorial into an emblem not of death, but of hope. "It's very complicated physically," Walker admits of his design. "But it's the spiritual problems I spend most of my time thinking about." more
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