The 9/11 Decade: The Images, the Memorial, the Architecture UPDATED

Rendering (by Squared Design Lab) of National September 11 Memorial and Visitor Center

With Sunday marking the tenth anniverary of the horrific events of Sept. 11, 2001, the news media are already barraging us with images more viscerally powerful than any work of art---the sights of the impact, the implosions and the immediate aftermath. For those of us who were uncomfortably close to the chaos and carnage, these familiar, fearsome images are still too painful to gaze upon.

I wasn't there on that day. My husband almost was.

He had uncharacteristically taken the whole summer off. But he had returned on Sept. 10 to the (now defunct) American Stock Exchange, within falling-debris range of the World Trade Center, in order to prepare for his return the following week. Had he already been making his daily commute (or had he decided to go in for his preliminary visit on Tuesday, instead of on Monday), he would have emerged from the World Trade Center subway stop at about the time when the plane smashed into the tower in which that station was located.

Instead, we first heard the news from our daughter, who called anxiously from her high school to make sure that her father was still safe at home. Some of her classmates weren't as lucky. We immediately turned on the television, saw the second tower fall in real time, and heard the quavering voices of the usually composed news announcers, unnerved like the rest of us by what they had just seen.

Virtually everyone in the NYC metropolitan area has a 9/11 story. Now we're all feeling compelled to rehash our personal accounts, having been forced by the resurrected images to relive that terrible day.

Many of us will make a pilgrimage to the National September 11 Memorial (pictured above), designed by architect Michael Arad and landscape architects Peter Walker and Partners. Its two reflecting pools sit within the footprints of the missing buildings. The names of the victims are inscribed in the bronze panels surrounding the twin pools. I've reserved a free visitor pass for myself, and so can you, here.

While we're at the site, we'll want to check on the progress of the in-construction One World Trade Center, designed by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. It will be the tallest building in the country, at 1776 feet, evoking the year of the Declaration of Independence. (The 1776 idea originated with architect Daniel Libeskind's master plan for the site.)


Architects' rendering of One World Trade Center (not shown: the planned WTC 2, 3 and 4 towers, which would border the memorial site, on the right)

During my recent trip to Canada, I spent considerable time staring at (but not admiring) another David Childs building---the United States Embassy in Ottawa, a stone's throw from architect Moshe Safdie's National Gallery of Canada. (I didn't know that Childs was the embassy's architect until after I had viewed it.)

Here's the front view of our embarrassing embassy:



Here it is from the side, where you can see its disparate elements---a disharmonious clash of awkward forms:



Never was a Joel Shapiro sculpture so infelicitously sited.

Below is my video of Safdie's and Childs' architecture. My narration includes some unkind words about the latter (without naming the architect, since I did not yet know who it was). I was required to turn off my camera at the entrance to the National Gallery's exhibition of Caravaggio and His Followers in Rome (which, as it happens, closes on Sept. 11 and then travels to the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth).

I expect to post more, later, about the art that I saw on my journey. For now, here's my short stroll in the heart of Ottawa (with a short postscript):



Aside from Childs' architecture, there's another way in which my trip to Canada resonated with the aftermath of 9/11: If we are concerned about the possibility of terrorists entering the country through Canada, something should be done about metal detector #11 at Toronto's Pearson International Airport. When my husband walked through that detector, as we headed home, he launched into his usual explanation about his hip replacement (which always triggers an alarm and a pat-down). But he stopped in mid-sentence, realizing that he and his internal hardware had slipped through soundlessly.

UPDATE: Architecture critic Paul Goldberger has a thoughtful piece, Shaping the Void, about the rebuilding of Ground Zero, in the Sept. 12 New Yorker (which just hit my mailbox). In a live online chat supplementing the article, Goldberger said this about the original Libeskind plan:

Of the original plans, the Libeskind plan that was chosen was actually the one I preferred, because of its good balance between commemoration and renewal. He struck an important, and I think necessary, balance between the notion of turning the entire site over to a memorial and restoring the whole place as a business district.