http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/05/14/article/design/sept-11-memorial-museum-at-ground-zero-prepares-for-opening.html?emc=edit_th_20140514&nl=todaysheadline
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September 11 Memorial Museum
wnyc.org |
Hello Everyone:
Thursday May 15 is an auspicious day for the people of New York City and the United States. Today marks the ceremonial opening of the National September 11 Memorial Museum on the Ground Zero site. This day finally has arrived after ten years of bottomless grief, partisan bickering, two ill-conceived wars, financial setbacks, and Hurricane Sandy. President Barack Obama is expected to be on hand to mark the occasion and the museum will officially open to the public on Wednesday May 21, 2014. In his thoughtful review published today in the
New York Times, "The 9/11 Story Told at Bedrock, Powerful as a Punch to the Gut," veteran art critic Holland Carter writes, "It delivers a gut-punch experience-though if ever a new museum had looked, right along, like a disaster in the making, this one did, beginning with its trifurcated identity."
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September 11 Memorial Museum site
museummonger.wordpress.com |
Some of the question that surrounded the creation of this museum dedicated to that most awful of days and its aftermath: Was it going to be a historical document, a monument to the dead, or a tourist attraction? How many historical museums are built around actual cemeteries that are still being added to? For that matter, how many cemeteries have a twenty-four dollar entrance fee and sell souvenirs? How many tourist attractions repeatedly move a person to tears? This is what this museum does. I don't care who you are, where you were, or what you were doing on that most awful of days, if you were in New York that day or following the events in the media, you could not but feel a sense of paranoia and horror in watching the story unfold second by second.
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Stairs in the September 11 Memorial Museum
friendsofoceanparkway.org |
The families of the 2,983 people killed on that day and those who died in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center raised the above questions and many other anguished, angry questions regarding the museum have been widely reported. In a way this reminds of the fantastic Amy Waldman book
The Submission, which centers on the reactions by the families to the Indian-Muslim architect winning a fictitious 9/11 Memorial competition. In real-life, the current debates over purpose, propriety and protocol still continue. There were moments when said debates threatened to derail the project or delay but work on the museum moved forward. From all that painstaking, sometimes rancorous effort, emerged a place that was held true to it goal: tell the story of September at the Ground Zero bedrock.
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September 11 Memorial Museum during construction
nytimes.com, |
From above ground, the National
September 11 Memorial Museum is accompanied by two granite basins of cascading water filling the footprints, however the museum is almost entirely underground. The majority of the 110,000 square feet of gallery space, is deliberately seventy feet below ground, where the foundations of the towers met raw schist. Holland Carter writes, "Invisibility can make for strong drama. A descent into darkness is the stuff of suspense. It's also the classic route of religious ritual and regeneration, bringing images of the tomb and the seedbed to mind." The museum makes full use of these associations in a slow revelatory manner.
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Entry pavilion for the September 11 Memorial Museum
metalocus.es |
The drama of the place subtly begins on the aboveground plaza level entry pavilion, half way between the memorial fountains. The Norwegian architectural firm Snøhetta was commissioned in 2004 to design the only building in the memorial plaza. The pavilion is a glass box tilted sharply, resembling a falling building. The blond-wood atrium features a private room for the September 11 families only, is in Mr. Carter's opinion, "atmospherically neutral, even bland, but offers an unmistakeable sight: two of the immense trident columns that were signature features of the twin tower façades." According to project architect
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The Twin Tridents
archdaily.com |
Craig Dykers, "Our desire is to allow visitors to find a place that is a naturally occurring threshold between the every life of the city and the uniquely spiritual quality of the Memorial."
(http://www.snohetta.com/projects) The tridents, once clad in aluminum now covered in rust, survived the collapse of the north tower. Despite dwarfing the atrium, only a small section is visible to the public. Looking over a balcony, a visitor can follow their lines as they plunge several stories down in the direction the visitors will take to a second lobby below plaza level, out of the natural light of day into the sepulchre-like tomb.
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Second lobby level
nytimes.com |
The heady geo-politics of 9/11 and World Trade Center are alluded to in a staggering quotation from Minoru Yamasaki, the architect of the towers, in which he declares his work "a monument to world peace." Needless to say not everyone subscribed to this utopian vision. To many the WTC represented, at best, "...two cold giant vertical bars of silver bullion, at worst obscene gestures of capitalist might." Even as you breath in the architect's words, confront the faces of the fallen and hear their final words as you move down the darkened hallway, deeper into the museum, you cannot help but be struck by the pending sense of doom and catastrophe that crowds the air. It is recorded sound which plays a major role in this museum. As does scale. As a visitor emerges from the corridors claustrophobic sound cloud onto a platform overlooking a gaping space containing a sixty-foot-high exposed section of the WTC's wall. This thick foundational barrier made of poured concrete was laid before construction began in 1966 to hold back the Hudson River.
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The slurry wall
911memorial.org |
When the towers collapsed, there was a palpable fear that this wall would give way flooding the site. Miraculously, it held. When German architect Daniel Libeskind was hired as the master planner for the new trade center complex in 2003, Mr. Libeskind spoke of that slurry wall as the soul of his design. By that point, this remnant of the once mighty towers had come to symbolize urban recovery, democracy, communal strength, the human spirit, and the virtues of sound engineering. The metaphors were plentiful in the days and months after that most awful. Everything connected to it was framed in the context of polarities: light and dark; wounding and healing; death and rebirth. The interior design of the museum by Davis Brody Bond maintains those polarities in several features, specifically the long descending ramp taking visitors down several stories between the enormous sunken cubes of the memorial pools.
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Visitors being led down into the museum
fastdesign.com |
The ramp was inspired by the access road dug during the early recovery phase, eventually taking on a sacred aura. In the museum sense, the ramp becomes a processional, lined with slow reveal vistas and projections of "Missing" posters that papered the city in the days following September 11. When the path terminates at the bedrock, it offers a choice of paths: toward a quiet memorial to those killed in the terrorist attacks or the more disturbing presentation of the actual events. Here is where the dual nature of the museum become more apparent. The memorial display is similar in nature to the photographs that line main elevator shaft at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C, a communal commemorative display. These portraits and their spoken can be viewed on touch screens and projected large in another room. Presently, about 14,000 yet to be identified or unclaimed remains of the 9/11 deceased rest, unseen, in an adjacent repository created at the request of the majority of the families.
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9/11 families protest keeping the remains in the museum
newyork.cbslocal.com |
A small group of families protested the presence of the remains in the museum. This small group of families have taken issue with the idea of a museum in the first place-particularly one that will, inevitably serve as a tourist attraction and mortuary. Other museum critics are concerned that the building, which took in eleven feet of water during Hurricane Sandy, could flood again. Lastly, the fact that the remains are not properly entombed but in storage and under the jurisdiction of the New York City Medical Examiners, compromises the sense of repose. However, repose is not something a person would associate with the museum other larger exhibit, focusing on the actual day. Moving through several galleries, the exhibit incorporates video and audio recordings, photographs, and hundreds of artifacts which record the minute by minute event of that Tuesday from 8:46 a.m. when the first plane slammed into the North Tower to just past 10:28 a.m when the South Tower fell, the remaining hijacked planes destroyed, the Pentagon in flames, and thousands of people gone in an instant.
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Glass installation of the moment of impact
momentofimpact911.com |
The installation was the product of a team of designers led by museum director Alice M. Greenwald, formerly of the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. The exhibition drew from the museum's collection of over 10,000 artifacts, some quite devastating to see and listen to. Videos of people jumping out of the towers are set in alcoves with an advisory notices. Even in our desensitized cultural environment, the sight of seeing someone leap to their certain death can leave the most hardened person dumbstruck. Holland Carter observes that for some reason, the larger items: a burned-out cab, an intact fire-truck with carefully folded fire hoses, a steel column decorated with prayer cards, and store-front jeans display are the easiest to absorb despite the fact they remain covered with WTC ashes. The exhibit also features less disquieting objects, personal items some donated by the families. In their usual environment, a purse, pocket, or bedside, they are mundane, however behind a vitrine, they become infused with lost life. They elevate the museum experience to one-part theater, voyeuristic, and devotional.
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9/11 artifact on tour
timesunion.com |
In searching for a proper analogy to make in reference to the museum, Mr. Carter looks to the dynamic of a religious pilgrimage site, regardless of religion. The mortal remains of secular saints, sanctified by there touch, are the center of attention. The visitor walks along a holy route, stopping at the equivalent of side chapels and altars, meditating on the icons, talismans and embodied miracles, the crucifix of crossed steel ground zero girders, a Bible found fused to a hunk of steel prophetically opened to passage warning against repaying violence with violence. The dominant narrative in the museum is similar to that of a place worship, framed in moral term-angels and devils. In the telling of the tale, the angels are in abundance, heroic. The devils are few and are portrayed as the devil incarnate in standard issue film blandly titled "The Rise of Al Qaeda," presented at the end of the exhibition. Mr. Carter describes the narrative as, "...not so much wrong as drastically incomplete. It is useful history, not deep history; news, not analysis."
This useful history approach the museum utilizes, to a high degree, still living the history, working through the grieving, memorializing it, still hanging on to the idea that September 11 "changed everything," ignores the evidence which suggests, for better or worse, this not the case. While the displays of hyper-patriotism have long subsided, so has the "we're in it together" generosity Americans extended to each in the immediate days. Thus with its narrow perspective, or perhaps, because of it, museum has done something powerful. Thankfully, the museum regards itself as a work in progress. Good, because memorial museums seem to come off as final summations, the narrative encased in amber. However, if the museum wants to comprehensively tackle the reality of September 11 and its aftermath successfully, the result will a greater deepening of our understanding why nearly three thousand people died on that day and why thousands more died in the ensuing conflicts.
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