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"Reflecting Absence" selected for memorial at WTC site
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After 5,201 submissions were narrowed to eight finalists and then three front-runners, a single design for a memorial at the World Trade Center site was announced Tuesday: "Reflecting Absence" by architect Michael Arad and landscape architect Peter Walker.
The 13-member jury charged with making the decision deliberated for 12 hours Monday before selecting the winning design. "Reflecting Absence" was chosen over "Garden of Lights" and "Passages of Light: The Memorial Cloud," also considered front-runners.
In a statement on behalf of the jury, jury chair Vartan Gregorian called the selected design "a memorial that expresses both the incalculable loss of life and its regeneration." Gregorian praised "Reflecting Absence" for the ways in which it preserves the footprints of the towers, recognizes individual victims, provides access to bedrock, and "wonderfully reconnects this site to the fabric of its urban community."
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| This rendering does not necessarily reflect changes made to the design, to be unveiled next week. |
In the selected design, water cascades down walls that mark the location of the towers' footprints and flows into a pair of reflecting pools submerged thirty feet below street level. The surface of each pool is then itself broken by large voids. The voids, wrote Arad in a statement issued when his design was selected as a finalist in November, "can be read as containers of loss, being close by, yet inaccessible." And the pools, too, "are large voids, open and visible reminders of the absence."
Gregorian stressed that the winning design has undergone significant changes since it was revealed to the public last month and that it "will evolve still over time." Details of the plan incorporating the changes that have been made will be unveiled in a public presentation next week, he said.
Honored and overwhelmed to learn that the jury had selected his design, Arad pledged: "I will do my best to rise to the enormity of the task at hand. It is with great humility that I regard the challenges that lie ahead -- and it is with great hope that I will find the strength and ability to meet them."
For information about the selected design and biographical information about the designer, please click here. Please note: The renderings, animations, and descriptions do not reflect significant changes made to the design, which will be unveiled next week.
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