Daniel Kinkead

WTC Independent Study
Research framework proposal

Modern capitalist societies, their symbols and consequences have been analyzed in detail throughout the twentieth century.  Given the recent terrorist events in the United States these past analyses may shed light on the contemporary and future condition of the relation between the signifiers and those things signified within the modern capitalist society.

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, two terrorist attacks were brought to bear upon the United States.  The targets were at once people (predominantly American), the World Trade Center Towers, and The Pentagon (potentially the White House and / or Capital Building).  Many people say that the attacks of September 11 were not only attacks against those immediate targets, but against the entire United States, and ultimately the American way of life that they represent.  Some have gone further however, and declared that this is not just an attack on America, but on all ‘freedom-loving peoples.’

These declarations or assumptions incite certain questions.

The goal here, within the context of architecture, urbanism and particularly the World Trade Center, is to utilize the analyses and theories of capitalism and semiotics put forth by Marxists, neo-Marxists, semiologists and social geographers to determine what relation the World Trade Center towers have/had to the modern capitalist society and how that society’s economy, within a fully industrial-developed country, relates to the undeveloped world.

Some questions to consider:
In exactly what way were the trade center towers so representative of the United States - or more largely capitalism - that it would render them the ideal target of an aggressor?  This then asks, is capitalism the primary representative of the American way of life?

Or, more pointedly, why not attack American symbols such as CNN, Walt Disneyworld, or the Statue of Liberty… has capitalism or commerce in general, trumped freedom as the symbol of America?

Is it fair to consider this an issue of the modern capitalist society – or even state – or would the more accurate focus be on the modern democratic capitalist state?

We understand through various critiques of capitalism that the system itself, within the metropolis at least, has the ability to not only commodify most things, including those cultural, but to also reify people.  With those conditions in mind, what might the penultimate symbol of capitalism be? 

If modern thought can be directly linked to capitalism, how does the WTC fit into architectural history and in which ways is it inextricable from modernism and postmodernism?

If modern capitalism had no relation to the third or undeveloped world, would the WTC still be a valid symbol of that economy to both small trans-national groups and nation-states in the undeveloped world? 

It is essential that the scope of this research be focused as to allow adequate immersion in the subject matter.  Put quite simply, one could write several books about the goal as described above, not to mention the relative questions also listed above. In consideration of that given, more subtractive frames and methods of research will be deployed to ensure a timely completion of the project.  While one would be remiss not to include certain issues of American foreign-policy, the research emphasis described thus far must maintain a rigorous examination of the relation between symbols and modern capitalist society vis-a-vis the terrorist attacks of September 11th and the World Trade Center.  To preempt any distraction of focus, foreign policy and militaristic considerations around the strike against the Pentagon will be forgone.  This is no way intended to belittle what has happened; to the contrary it is intended to allow for more in-depth and thorough research and analysis.
Mitch Joachim

Doing the Glee:
The Fantasy After the Missiles Are All Cleaned Up


A Clairvoyant approach to why this project worked:
What if Tomorrow arrived a day or so early for a brief second and revealed an awfully tidy account of our prospering future?

Ladies and gentleman the drama unfolds:
Hundreds upon hundreds of leather faced vagabond terrorists belly upped.  Out of Bis! No more does the world fear the cultural melee between Third world activism and capitalisms’ dominating homogeneity.  We can stand knee high in a perfunctory political swill that dispels notions of inequality at the kick of a Nike. 

Our howling halls of Americanism report incredible dispositions of glee from the world’s representative forums.   Unite!  They scream before reticent masses, Unite! In Americas grand ballet -the ugly ducking!
Returning from a tele-epistemological field study our reigning president has indicated all bets are on.  The world is united, that is more correctly stated the world of man, as we know it is united.  All other recognizable species to do not readily partake in the drama of the human will and therefore have been subsequently sidelined.

We owe our new found interdependency not to undermining theories of connection or ecology but to a single pharaodian project.  The New World Trade Center encapsulates the very pulse of our nations enduring constitution.  A marvel of all creation it easily separates man from his maker in a very “Planet of the Apes” like sensibility.  This colossal form embodies perfection fused with a lucid programming where the inside is outside and third worlds problems devolve into smoking anywhere at frozen yogurt shops playing 80’s hits.  
Tomorrow has brought a new symbol of freedom and liberty to the forefront, an impeccable image of the not to shabby American capitalism. 

Those responsible for this grand ignoble achievement have been deservedly honored.  Trappings of suspect design citations adorn their respective studio walls.  Circles of Ivy League faculty pat each other on the back knowing that accomplishment is “oh so easy.”  Organizations such as the Unscrupulous Institute of Munificent Vacuous Art herald the projects lucid vision. Critics applaud the undergriding stratagem of building with plastic buckets and damp Afghanistan sand.  However the salient feature of our new center is the memorial.   A massive reminder of the wrongs man has done to man.  Picture a kind of blackened seething primordial soup of corruption and war turned into an abstract bouquet of flowering doves.  It single handedly deploys a sense of closure while sustaining a posture of dignity for those innocents who perished.  It also diligently recounts via electronic compunction the blind tribunals of justice brought on terrorists and their harboring homelands. 

Injected at the base of this universally accepted project, a mosaic tile encompasses the poetry of an eleven-year boy form Paterson, New Jersey.  As the first place winner of a Nation wide contest, his scripted words of naiveté fossilize the turn of the millennium.
Sebastian Schmaling




It is understandable that the destruction of the World Trade Center has triggered the human impulse to immediately come up with concrete, physical proposals for an instant remedy against the literal vacuum in the heart of America’s most important city.  But the mass media’s trivial reduction of this exercise to a “to-build-or-not-to-build” question has become a sad statement of the banality of today’s architectural circus whose contemporary protagonists are frighteningly eager to formulate their respective positions in empty five-line paragraphs. 
I am less interested in the future of that particular piece of valuable real estate in the middle of the financial epicenter of the world; my pessimistic nature doesn’t allow me to believe that there is an alternative to the highest economic use of this property: for the developer, a token memorial will do.  Instead, I am more interested in the long-term consequences of this tragedy for the future of American cities, their relationship to the rest of the United States, and the resulting effects on the physical and spatial evolution of the entire country.   I am considering two broad themes (which will be combined into one topic):

1.   Was the attack an assault on inherently American symbols, an attack on values, or simply a strike against an American city?  If it was an attack on symbols, why do we find what is perceived as inherently American, in the city and not in the countryside, or even better, within the vast fabric of that mythical yet innately American “middle landscape”?  If America’s strongest symbols are located in the large economic centers of the United States, does it make the metropolis a dangerous place to be?  Consequently, do terrorist attacks have the power to re-introduce, to substantiate the anti-urban sentiments deeply rooted not only in the intellectual history of the United States, but also in America’s popular psyche?  Have the attacks demonstrated the vulnerability of cities from outside forces, thus adding a significant element of fear to urban life’s already existing self-inflicted unpredictability and inherent instability?  Then again, is the perceived security of suburbia a legitimate alternative?  Consider that the alleged terrorists all took advantage of the anonymity of the suburban void; ironically, but maybe not coincidentally, they studied, lived, and spent the last hours of their lives in the conformist environment of the American Dream.
Finally, what will come after today’s presumably fragile solidarity pact between city and country evaporates, after the miraculous spiritual unity of town and country, making one temporarily forget about the great mutual resentments (or ambivalent feelings at best) between the urban and the non-urban America, dissolves?  In the long run, will America be gentler in her judgment of the big city - or could the attacks, instead, destroy forever the magic lure of the metropolis?  After all, is it possible to argue that the reactionary antipathy of Middle America toward the metropolis as a den of iniquity is closer to Islamic fundamentalists’ resentments of western society at large than to the values of the big city?  The story of

Karen Hawley Juday, as told in one of The New York Time’s daily “The Victims” section, only starts to suggests the fantastic complexity and the personal implications of people’s attitude towards urban life:

It might be an unfair question, but an unavoidable one nevertheless:  Was it worth to leave the bad life in a mediocre town with a population smaller than the Twin Towers’ workforce, for the promise of a better life in the big city, only to ultimately die there?  You can hear the locals whisper:  “We told her…”

2.   The ultimate question, then, is not so much if there is a safe alternative to urban life, but if there is a demand for an alternative to the urban life as we know it.  The end of the economic boom of the last decade might have already weakened our belief in the perpetual power of America’s urban renaissance, but I would like to argue that there was an equally important phenomenon that triggered the new interest of Americans in their cities: the end of the Cold War.  It is interesting that the supposed rebirth of America’s cities coincided with the collapse of the East Block.  While the past economic boom was an important tool in reclaiming the metropolis, it wasn’t the empty nester’s artificially inflated stock portfolio that paved the way back into the (gentrified) heart of the city; instead, it was the sudden loss of anxiety that enabled a generation, which grew up with the fear of an immediate nuclear attack, to experience the myth of urbanity that until then had been forbidden territory.  Conversely, it would be interesting to examine if and to what extent the post-war mass-suburbanization was not only a result of federal loan programs, the construction of a vast network of freeways, and all the other usual suspects we are so eager to blame today, but also a direct response to the global political environment of the Cold War: was the urge to live in the country side measurably influenced by the desire to live as far away from the potential targets of a nuclear attack as possible? 
If the thesis that the nuclear threat of the post-war era played an important role in the tragic fate of urban America, what consequences will today’s terrorist threats have?  It would be interesting to review the notion of “city” within the rhetoric and political discourse of the 1950’s and 60’s and to speculate about recent and future parallels.
Walter Meyer

WTC Regeneration
Contextual Speculations

After the Yamasaki Twin Tower catastrophe, one can imagine a void eclipsing the site, and on the periphery of this void are the frayed ends of an urban fabric.  This contextual fabric is a measure of both physical element and intangible forces.  It is this context dangling on the edges of the site, an abyss of frayed infrastructure, lost souls and anti-semiotics; that will influence any future intervention.
Immediately following September 11 there were many solutions proposed, “build higher,” “build shorter,” “don’t build at all;” "erase the erasure.” In speculating an approach to researching the World Trade Center Project one must first ask the right questions and understand that there is an existing framework to explore and identify, as well as possible new civic opportunities that arise from the dislocation of large scale structure.  A Research initiative, that if asks the right questions, can establish a reference for someone embarking on a thesis, or actual site implementation. 
Subsequent to the demolition of damaged buildings, the waterfront will play a more significant role on the site via an open an axis to the Hudson River. Possible intangible parameters for context exploration include: Ecologic systems like littoral and tidal flows, macro and micro climate, migration patterns of local species, bathymetry and topography. 
Cultural relationships like demographics, population, heritage, users, and commerce.
Considering one of the many disconnects, there is an opportunity for correlation with the adjacent Battery Park grid, complementing interaction with the water in the next project.  Some potential physical parameters for context analysis include: parcelization, rights of way, circulation, infrastructure, program, land use, density, and site history.
BACK
Frank Ruchala Jr.

Disaster and the Grand City Plan

The debate on the rebuilding of the World Trade Center has split into two camps based on scale. On one end, there is the site-scale debate which deals with issues of monument vs. building, taller towers vs. contextualism and issues of safety on the 16-acre site. On the other, there is the debate on what I would call “the grand city plan”. In effect, this group deals with the issue of how to create an opportunity for the improvement of the New York City region out of the disaster while taking precautions against further calamity. As an urban planner, I tend to gravitate to this larger scale.

As such, it is interesting to me that much of the energy going into rebuilding New York is being spent outside of the 16-acre site of the World Trade Center on a vision for all of New York in a time in planning’s history when the idea or the very need of the grand city plan is seriously questioned.

My topic of study is the “grand city plan”, the sparkling document which forever shifts the fortunes of a city leaving an indelible mark on its structure, culture and memory. Plans such as the 1811 plan for Manhattan and Wren’s (unbuilt) plans for London after 1666 come to mind.

However, for every grand city plan there are uncountable forgotten works left as curious footnotes in planning’s history. What, then, are the factors that turn a normal planning document into the grand city plan on the scale of Burnham’s Plan for Chicago?

I believe the there is a correlation between disaster (impending or passed) and the grand city plan. Seemingly, only at a moment when the city is faced with its own mortality can it collectively work together and formulate plans which not only deal with the issues related to the disaster but also greatly affect the city itself.

I intend to study this correlation more clearly using historical as well as more recent examples such as plans for Paris during Haussman’s time (the disaster here being possible rebellion) and Kobe, Japan since 1995. Beyond this, I will attempt to understand what other factors effect the creation and realization of the grand city plan with a focus on what is the role of the grand city plan in today’s planning and urban climate.
Kjersti Monson

The events of September 11, 2001 have clearly transformed the way that the World Trade Center site will be understood and the way it will be used. The degree to which this transformation will affect new development on the site is not yet determined. I propose to study the strange new hybrid that has been born of the competing forces that will shape development in this new urban void­a hybrid which I will call functional commemoration­in relation to the newly exposed circuitous edge within lower Manhattan.

Edge. The destruction of the World Trade Center has left a void in New York City. This is not only an emotional void (the disjunction of this episode from the normal continuum of time), it is an urban void. This void has created an entirely new circuitious edge in the urban fabric of New York. In many ways this scenario is absolutely unique in the history of America. In some ways, however, from the perspective of planning, it's not so unique: As in the age of the Moses brand of urban renewal, a tabula rasa has been violently called into being through the destruction of a patch of living urban density. The city has been wounded. Systems that we equate with normalcy have been interrupted. There is a conspicuous absence of that which once defined the geopsychological space of the city. What is left are naked edges around a hole. These new edges­perhaps shying from exposure at first­will eventually offer anchors to the void, providing opportunities for reconnection. The buzzing around these edges will provide insight to the designer/listener, as new relationships are forged across the abyss and new desire lines are plotted. The activation of the new edge is one factor to consider.

Site. In purely practical terms, the World Trade Center site is high-buck real estate in a heavily circulated and particularly dense part of Manhattan. The site is subject to immense market and real estate pressures, and will undoubtedly be redeveloped in part in accordance with these pressures. Other, newer, pressures on the site come from the obvious role of commemoration that the site will now rightly embody. Anything that is built or developed there will, by no formal virtue of its own, be perceived as highly iconic. The site is charged with intense local and regional relevance from the perspectives of circulation, infrastructure, real estate, commemoration, economy, open space, and politics. This radical new void has emerged out of violence in direct contradiction to the market forces that have shaped lower Manhattan. Violence begets commemoration. Therefore, a radical new relationship between memorial (art/ephemeral) and function (site-planning/corporeal) will be implicit in any new development effort.

Memorial. Historically, the physical expression of memorial has been understood as a contemplative destination, often in the form of a discrete object. As we know, Maya Lin redefined memorial in 1980, expressing commemoration in the language of place (not object) with her controversial design proposal for the Vietnam Memorial (construction completed 1982). Even as subsequent memorials have increasingly evolved as places that relate to us spatially, they have largely remained in the realm of the contemplative destination. Frequently, these destinations do not physically occupy our everyday path­they are special destinations, existing at a point in time and space that is separate from the merely common. Their sacredness seems to rest in their solitary purpose: commemoration. In the case of the World Trade Center site, this cannot be so. Market forces will not allow this land to remain undeveloped. Too, there is a general feeling of defiance and resistance against allowing the site to remain strictly open­strictly void­as passive recreation space. Instead, this commemorative destination is likely to be a combination of horizontal and vertical elements, a conglomeration of multi-use spaces in which market forces and physical planning have a formative voice, impacting and being impacted by the desire to memorialize. The likelihood of a contemplative memorial emerging as the sole use of this place is unrealistic. So we are faced with the interesting challenge of defining functional commemoration.

Function. Function can be defined on many levels. Circulation, infrastructure, urban ecology, real estate, markets, and public open space can all be defined geographically and in terms of function. These conditions can be physically and conceptually mapped in a way that allows us to glean the functional relationships this site engages (or in some cases neglects) within its context. Relationships between functions cannot be determined without an essential exercise of excavation through critical mapping. Understanding the site on its own terms will reveal dynamic relationships and necessary interconnections, providing the necessary tools (and limits) for a meaningful, functional, and visionary intervention.

This project does not propose to construct a design proposal. It does propose to expose a series of relationships or contradictions through physical and conceptual mapping of the site, its edges, and the conditions that have impacted it. It is as much concerned with cultural and political forces (and fractures) as with physical forces in the representation of this site. It is intended as a study in layers. At this stage, it is as much about defining the questions as seeking the answers.
Early Images
Mitchell Joachim               

GSD 9204-00 Preparation of Thesis Proposal for MAUD        
Advisor: Alex Krieger

World Trade Center Regeneration: An Urban Memorial   

“It is a contradiction in terms. If it is a monument, it is not modern, and if it is modern, it cannot be a monument." - Lewis Mumford

1) Intention:
This is an inventive proposal to regenerate the New York Downtown and World Trade Center site.  Consider it an open platform for discussing the program implications of designing, researching, and planning in the wake of a crisis.  The overarching proposition is to create an analysis for public review and deliberation based on humanist criterion not pure economic gain.
The undertaking of such a potentially massive academic project is clearly in need of an equal distribution amongst multiple concerned students.  Therefore it is necessary to divide the almost innumerable aspects of the project into a group effort.  Every student would then concentrate on his/her own facet; no single design solution is expected.  Perhaps it is best thought of as kind of book with a myriad of chapters on the future World Trade Center site.  Ultimately, in this case, proposing an integrated urban memorial is only one such chapter.


2) Responsibilities:
The principal segment of the overall study involved a multitude of accomplished tasks. The following comprises of the bulk of work engaged for the entire stated agenda: Participated in a student-initiated effort to inform and assist New York City in establishing a framework for rebuilding the devastated downtown area.  Created, published, and updated periodically a website for student group dissemination (www.archinode.com/wtc).  Organized and presented an extensive survey of exemplary modern memorials and architectural monuments.  Traveled to document and photograph prototypical memorials in the New England and Washington areas (Gloucester Fisherman's Memorial, Salem Witch Trials Memorial, and Washington, DC Vietnam Veterans Memorial). Contributed in forum discussions, compiled literature, data, and lecture information from the Cambridge and N.Y. area (Noam Chomsky, "The New War Against Terror", Peter Eisenman "Memorial and Memory: The World Trade Center and After", William LeMessurier "World Trade Center Discussion", Joseph B. Rose "Rebuilding Lower Manhattan", and The History Channel Special on WTC).  Also submitted a design schematic for the GSD student charrette competition and exhibition of ideas.  In addition numerous other tasks, including but not limited to; faculty meetings, gallery negotiations, newspaper interviews, and maintaining connections with interested groups etc. were fulfilled.      


3) Proposal for Thesis Research:
"I really believe we shouldn't think about this site out there, right behind us, right here, as a site for economic development.”   "We should think about a soaring, monumental, beautiful memorial that just draws millions of people here that just want to see it.”  "If the memorial was done correctly, you'll have all the economic development you want, and you can do the office space in a lot of different places." - Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani

The idea of a memorial seems to consistently resonate amongst governing powers and the munificent public in the city of New York.  It is the overwhelming consensus of American citizens that space should be set aside to memorialize the victims of September 11th.  Any urban or architectural solution enacted that does not resolve the presence of a memorial will certainly be disregarding this general will of the public. The site of the previous World Trade Center needs a place of remembrance for those events, but should not be entirely limited to one program.  Although an entire solution for the former WTC is necessary, mitigating the issues of a memorial is the constraint dealt with herein.  The criterion of the location, energy, and typology for a memorial fitting into the site is the bounds of this project.  Considerations of other relevant projects in congruence with a memorial do not fall within the scope of this document.  That is to say whatever interventions, built edifices, or landscape environments deemed worthy of this location should be discussed as complimentary elements in relation to the memorial.  What is or is not appropriate for the site and a memorial, and how can this be determined?  Therefore no-designed memorial per se¢ is being proposed but instead a coded list or theory of immanence, possibilities, and integrations. 
First, dealing with when to take action is paramount to a successful design process.  Notice the rapidity with which the Oklahoma City memorial to the people who died in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995 was undertaken.  Also the momentum of the Aids Quilt was applauded for its’ timely endeavors. It wasn't until 1922 that the United States got around to building a memorial to Lincoln, and even then it was controversial.  But in our media blitzed times, the impulse to memorialize tragedy is instantaneous. It is as if an architectural designed memorial is the express resolution for whatever appalling event occurs and a swift way to move on. The transition is crucial.  The coming together of fundamental ideas in a sometimes apprehensively diverse society, through a presumptive communal or national bereavement, is what the monument embodies.
The collective impulse to memorialize is immediate.  When first arriving at a design in Oklahoma the process was arduous because the wounds were still fresh. Everyone involved with the event expressed their respective contributions to the design. The process was elective, fascinating and sufficed. First concepts were to destroy the Murrah building and to obliterate evidence of the tragedy, erase its memory, and also avoid the site's becoming a pilgrimage spot for lunatic sympathizers with Timothy McVeigh.  John Wayne Gacy's dwelling in Chicago and Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment building in Milwaukee had been destroyed for these reasons.
Eradicating the fragments is not always forgetting.  In a very dissimilar context, that is what the Nazis attempted to do to the Jewish peoples. Obliterate and displace all memories. It is the quandary that faces the custodians of every Nazi death camp: is Dachau (Auschwitz, Majdanek, and others) currently a deterrent narrative or a tourist attraction or possibly both?  Jean Baudrillard, in a remark also relevant to New York now, discussed how "forgetting the extermination is part of the extermination itself," but obliterating what the terrorists performed might also be a way of exterminating them. The willful desire among Oklahoma survivors to eradicate McVeigh (by executing him) was about attempting to erase his ethereal presence.
That was one of many public discussions.  It was overwhelmed by designs to construct something where the Murrah building stood. The initial memorials, spontaneous, were similar to the haphazard shrines that have surfaced in New York: flowers, letters, quilts, clothes, and pictures.
The public overtly expected a memorial to include everything: a site to pry; a site that warned against future terrorism; a symbol that the terrorists hadn't triumphed; a history museum; a place to which locals could come to listen to music and tourists could meditate on American values (and spur the local economy).
The final concept called for a grid of bronze and glass chairs in a field, the chairs representing the 168 people who perished. When it was complete, many survivors said the process, although sometimes verbally acidic, was constructive — it wrought them together to create something that might enlighten humanity, somewhere they could occupy, something benign that came from the ruinous, a spectacle of fortitude by survivors.
The kinds of solutions and questions being asked here for all intents and purposes dictate an approach to designing a memorial.  Qualities and measurements of data extruded form the pre-existing structures will hope to reveal insights for a finer calibration of humane concerns.  What did those buildings mean in terms of humanity and the domain in which we thrive?  How can this be measured and contrasted to a mitigating alternate solution?  Of course we can perform better today at planning/ designing solutions, but how can we prove this here ardently?  Where did the WTC construct fail at providing humanly scaled benefits and conviviality for the people of the city?  Will exploring the life support systems of those prior structures reveal an undergid of mistakes that lead to their demise?  A visual model expressing the differences in the needs of old and the needs of today could stridently appeal to the ultimate designers of the entire site.  Modeling an analysis of per-existing volumes of space, energy, and density will reveal the gross miscalculation of humane agendas needed to successfully fit a project to the surrounds.  Also a second model of required goals to be met would offer precursor design solutions.  For instance, can you possibly imagine designing a second new structure that moves nine million cubic feet of air per minute to cool fifty thousand office workers on a sunny day one thousand three hundred feet in the air?  Should such conditions exist again or can these satanic mills of industry be reconfigured to address future generations?  How would a memorial recognize both the horror of 911 and of the past symbolism those buildings represented to the whole of humanity.  Why is it appropriate to ask these design questions, whom are we ultimately concerned for?  Does design need to again formalize a style or to radicalize historicist monuments?   
Modern memorials today seem to invoke the use of forms with a “less is more” conviction. Maya Lin's Vietnam memorial in Washington is an obvious example of Minimalism. Peter Eisenman's Holocaust memorial in Berlin for the Murdered Jews, originally conceived with Richard Serra, is a minimalist field of plain concrete pillars, akin to headstones. Rachel Whiteread's Holocaust memorial in Vienna, a massive eggshell-colored box designed to resemble an inside-out room with shelves of books, is yet another. And Oklahoma City, with a grid of chairs lined up similar to Donald Judd boxes, symbolizing the victims of the terrorist bombing there, is the most germane example for New York. Even the temporary viewing platforms at the former Trade Center site are in a Minimalist vein.
The practice of style is usually a matter of who wields authority at a given moment.  A rigorous debate over the World War II memorial on the Mall in Washington, the most conspicuous non- Minimalist memorial of recent years, claimed to privilege the inclinations of the war veterans, as if veterans were a monolithic group.  Hundreds of years before, when public art was commissioned by royalty, aristocrats and the church, official taste was synonymous with high art. Democracy and the modern era of design altered all that. Official art in a democracy requires consensus, an aesthetic common denominator.  Not the always the ideal requisite for good design.
But modern art (used in the fundamental sense) is about an individual’s vision. The idea of a consensus, or compromise is antithetical to it. Its values and directions are often entirely formal: line, color, mass and weight. Memorial art, on the other hand, is therapeutic, redemptive and educational. These are different things and not always complementary.
Memorials should not just simply encapsulate the past but bring resolve and offer consolation.  They are not places for radicalism or political agendas.  They are moments of solitude, peace, and evocation.  Today the traumatized WTC survivors recount tales of narrow escape within the confines of the densest place on earth.  Should a memorial recall the impenetrable, dark architecture that stood before or should it be a part of our enlightenment and healing?  The Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC does not offer answers or retell events.  How is this successful or is it?  Minimalist granite plaques, religious archetypes, and over-scaled sculptures do not proactively engage humanity. They do not prevent the atrocities of yesterday form happening again.  They better serve as geographical locators then cognitive accounts of history.
The town of Dachau outside Munich in Germany is a preserved space for memorializing the holocaust.  It also serves to actively record its entire history to date, so no such horror could happen again.  Inclusive in the memorial at Dachau is a museum and an archive of the tragedy, as well as support for finding other perpetrators.  One of the most powerful effects of Dachau is to see the piles of human shoes, clothing, teeth, and hair of the Jewish victims.  What kinds of similar references could be made at WTC? 
Memorials, being fixed with immutable materials, (expensive, rare marbles, industrial glazings, and resource intensive alloys) have an inherent problem because memories are not fixed. Salient low embodied materials (extruded harvested wood, recycled metals, soy-based composites) should be developed to send a regenerative signal for tomorrows’ denizens.  Perceptions of society always change. Minimalist abstraction, with its allegorical pliancy, turns out to function in a memorial context as the default available mirror for a contemporary society aware of its own constantly alternating sense of history.  The publics’ perceptions of Minimalism, to the extent it knew about Minimalism at all, is best illustrated with Serra's "Tilted Arc" in New York.  It was loathed by most of the people who worked in proximity to it. A vast curved sheet of extravagant Corten steel, the sculpture traversed the plaza in front of a downtown federal office building. Serra's supporters did not help the cause by saying that the work addressed the condition of alienation in contemporary society.  It was ultimately “deconstructed”.  Fine art outlives the events that prompted the artisans to create it.  A good memorial now must primly reach future generations to remember what refuses to forgotten. 
The archetypal source of the universal modernist memorial can be traced back to at least Rodin in the 19th century.  This monumental work commemorates an incident in the Hundred Years War between the English and the French.  Commissioned in 1884 to design a monument to the burghers of Calais his idea influenced many others to come.  The impetus for the memorial came from a tragic narrative.  In 1347, six burghers compromised with their lives to the conquering English in exchange for ending a siege of the city.  The original design shows the work mounted on a pedestal, which was usual for heroic monuments at the time.  Rodin quickly abandoned this type of monumental presentation in favor of a more realistic placement of the Burghers at ground level, with space between each figure. In this way, Rodin pioneered a new monumental form, which was psychologically realistic in its concept and presentation. As he is reported to have said to his friend and biographer, Paul Gsell, 
"I have not shown them grouped in a triumphant apotheosis, such glorification of their heroism would not have corresponded to anything real. On the contrary, I have, as it were, threaded them one behind the other, because in the indecision of the last inner combat which ensues between their cause and their fear of dying, each of them is isolated in front of their conscience." 
Rodin refined and shaped the figures at full scale, grouped one beside another, looking tired and gaunt.  These men were not plastically transformed into heroes. Their visages suggested mistrust and fear.  This was an exceptionally different monument from other memorials previously.  Rodin visualized them either elevated on a pedestal, profiled against the French Houses of Parliament, or at eye level, closer to the common individual. His objective was to parallel the human condition: he brought the masses into a proximal and realistic relationship with the heroes.  The burghers were average people who were transformed into humble champions.
Almost a century later this concept of the monument has undergone many dynamic changes.  An introduction of the anti-monument became the basis for an unexpected antifascist memorial in Germany.  In 1985, the artists Jochen and Esther Gerz conceptualized a project for a pedestrian mall in Harburg, a dilapidated suburb of Hamburg.  The ensuing monument they designed comprised of a single monolithic column. It was constructed as a hollow aluminum mast with a layer of pliable lead.  A steel writing stylus connected to it so visitors could scratch into the column. Every time a portion of the column got adequately covered with graffiti, it would slowly lower itself into the base.  Locals scrawled a plethora of things into it, as they were intended to, including Stars of David and nazi swastikas. It became known as the "fingerprint" of the city: "The filth brings us closer to the truth than would any list of well-meaning signatures." The fully intact edifice was entitled  “disappearing monument”.  Completed in 1986, it eventually vanished into the ground by 1993.  Underneath the base houses an area to view the sunken portion of the monument.
Designs of memorials can be subdivided into primarily two broad-based categories: the memorial and the anti-memorial.  Memorials that are traditionally programmed to serve as respites and passive remembrances of an event are considered to be of the first category.  Moreover, the anti-memorial is proactive, dynamic, and a critical evocation of a recent event or a disturbing current situation.  These types more often then not dispel notions of elapsed time and seek to suggest that memories are highly active, increasing in reality, and irresoluble.  An anti-memorial to Heroin Overdoses in Melbourne by Sue Anne Ware is one such charged work.  Also the “Black Garden" in Germany by Jenny Hozler is intended to be an anti-memorial.  The most successful anti-memorial in recent history was Chris Burdens’ “The Other Vietnam Memorial”.  Here names were gathered from four different Vietnamese war time phone books and then merged to compile three million different names. These names were etched into human sized copper plates that were then placed in a rolodex-like summation.  
Other classification of the memorial archetype is the cognitive and the non-cognitive versions.  The former is a massive division of designs that includes an array of thematic types: War, Terrorism, Heroes, Genocide (Holocaust), Protests, etc.  Cognitive memorials in some fashion inform the visitor of a past event via communicative signs; language, names, or any method requiring learned recognition.  Egyptian obelisks, to the Vietnam Wall make up this typology.  Conversely related, Non-cognitive archetypes are not overtly marked by symbolisms.  This variety tends to be an inconspicuous backgrounder, similar to Indian/ Chinese burial mounds or the enigmatic excavations at Stonehenge.
A fitting memorial archetype for the World trade center must meet many conditions.  It must be egalitarian and democratic, by attempting to include the voices of all willing design participants.  It must also offer a viable solution to modernisms default minimalist designs.  Inasmuch as possible obliterate any commendation for the future use of terrorism anywhere by individuals, or national super powers.  Furthermore it should acknowledge the American right to religious freedom.  And more importantly, it should recognize specific poor attributes of past architectural idioms that lead to so many deaths.  This last concept should be a critique of the former World Trade Center complex, associative mega-structure aspirations, and extreme high-density dwelling. 
The premise for this opposition would be grounded in a firm contrast to ecological design theory.   For instance calculations of HVAC air volume, solar income, water usage, low embodied energy materials, human scale, etc. would be discussed in relation to the WTC project.  The green urbanism means of resolving these polemics would prompt something regenerative and munificent for all generations.  A memorial predicated on ecology and the needs of future will be the most appropriate design signal.  
Perhaps the memorial for the WTC will usher in a new modality of thinking about the collective peoples of the earth.  A visual depicting the loss of thousands of people instantly is unfathomable, and arguably exists.  What about qualifying measurements of the loss?  Does a simple picture of four hundred fireman and rescue workers suffice or could that be expanded somehow?  A new memorial archetype must legibly underscore the very nature and entirety of the event and foreground the historical mistakes that made it possible.  This is a proposal to actualize and script such a programmatic solution in forthcoming writing and models. 




Facts in support of a refined ecology in design model:
Compiled from The New York Times and World Trade Center Designers:
Minoru Yamasaki Associates of Rochester Hills, Michigan and Emery Roth & Sons of New York.
Manhattan holds 6.8% of NYC land area. 19% of city inhabitants live there, 2/3 of the jobs are in this borough along with half of all retail sales.  In Lower Manhattan alone, some 25 million square feet of commercial real estate was destroyed or damaged. More than 14,000 businesses have been harmed, and 377,000 jobs have been disrupted or displaced.  In the weeks after the World Trade Center disaster, some 25 displaced Manhattan companies, including American Express and Lehman Brothers, absorbed 3.6 million square feet of space in New Jersey, according to GVA Williams. While that activity caused a temporary rise in leasing in the fall, mainly along the Hudson River waterfront, it was far less than some had expected.  The World Trade Center is owned and operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a self-supporting agency of the two states. It was developed and constructed by the Port Authority at the request of the two states to serve as headquarters for international trade within the bi-state port. The World Trade Center opened for its first tenants in December 1970.  The World Trade Center consisted of two 110-story office towers (One and Two World Trade Center), a 47-story office building (Seven World Trade Center), two 9-story office buildings (Four and Five World Trade Center), an 8-story U.S. Custom House (Six World Trade Center), and a 22-story hotel (Three World Trade Center), all constructed around a central five-acre landscaped Plaza. All seven buildings have entrances onto the Plaza as well as onto surrounding city streets. The Mall at the World Trade Center, located immediately below the Plaza was the largest enclosed shopping mall in lower Manhattan, as well as the main interior pedestrian circulation level for the complex.  The two office towers, each rising 1,350 feet, were the tallest buildings in New York City and the 5th and 6th tallest in the world.  The Center contained approximately 12 million square feet of office space, including the two million square feet of office space in Seven World Trade Center. In the two Tower buildings, each floor was approximately one acre in size.  Each Tower contained 4.8 million gross square feet of floor area.  The Center was located on a 16-acre site in lower Manhattan, stretching from Church Street on the east to West Street on the west, and from Liberty Street on the south to Barclay and Vesey streets on the north.  Average daily population: Some 50,000 people worked in the World Trade Center. Another 70,000 business and leisure visitors came to the center daily.  Construction and other facts:  More than 200,000 tons of steel was used in the Trade Center's construction. Construction of the Trade Center used 425,000 cubic yards of concrete.  There were 43,600 windows in the two Tower buildings -- over 600,000 square feet of glass.  There were 99 elevators, including 23 express elevators in each Tower building.  There were five levels below ground including parking for almost 2000 cars.  Stations of the three major New York City subway systems -- IRT, BMT and IND. -- were located in the Mall below the towers.  There were "sky lobbies" at the 44 and 78 floors in each Tower. In effect each Tower thus became three buildings, one on top of another. No regular passenger elevator ran all the way to the top. The Port Authority investment in the trade center as of January 1, 1992, was approximately $1. 29 billion.  The total weight of the structure was roughly 500,000 t, but wind load, rather than the gravity load, dominated the design. The building is a huge sail that must resist a 225 km/h hurricane. It was designed to resist a wind load of 2 kPa—a total of lateral load of 5,000 t.  87,000 tons of steelwork was used in each tower.  The twin towers' HVAC system circulates and filters 9 million cu ft of air per minute to more than 9 million sq ft of office space.  A 2.5-acre refrigeration plant located at the fourth basement level provides the Air conditioning.  Instead of cooling towers, intake and outflow pipes run to the river, only 150 ft away.  If all the glass used in the construction of both towers were melted into a ribbon of glass, 20 inches wide, it would have run 65 miles long.
TEXTS:
archinode.com
World Trade Center Regeneration
TEXT: S. Schmaling
TEXT: FINAL
New
Memorial Design