DEEP VIEW
The Memorial’s
Vernacular Arc
Between Berlin’s Denkmal and
New York City’s 9/11 Memorial
James E. Young
Ph.D., Emeritus Distinguished
Professor of English and Judaic
and Near Eastern Studies
Founding Director, Institute
for Holocaust, Genocide, and
Memory Studies
9/11 Memorial at the Ground Zero, New York: Reflecting Absence, by Michael Arad and Peter Walker
I
n April 2003, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation called a press conference by an abacus grid of trees (even rows replicating somehow predisposed toward articulating the
at the just-repaired Winter Garden of the World Financial Center in lower-Manhattan, the city-grid when viewed west to east, seemingly memory of catastrophe in their work? Would
located across the street from the gaping pit of Ground Zero. Here the LMDC announced natural, random groves when viewed north to this explain how Daniel Libeskind (original site-
an open international design competition for a World Trade Center Site Memorial, and south), which would deepen the volumes of the voids designer of the new World Trade Center complex),
I was one of 13 members of the design-jury introduced that day. Together with jurors as they grew, even as they softened the hard, square Santiago Calatrava (designer of the new Fulton
Maya Lin (designer of the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, D.C.) and Paula edges of the pools. This memorial would indeed Street Transit Center abutting “Ground Zero” in
Grant Berry (whose husband David died in the South Tower on 9/11), among others, we “reflect absence,” even as it commemorated the lives lower-Manhattan), and now Michael Arad (designer
implored potential entrants to this blind competition to “break the conventional rules of lost with living, regenerating flora. of the memorial at “Ground Zero”) have become
the monument,” to explore every possible memorial medium in their expressions of grief,
Until that day in January 2004, the 9/11 the architects of record in post-9/11 downtown
mourning, and remembrance for what would become the National September 11th Memorial Memorial jurors were not allowed to speak to the Manhattan?” I had to concede that while I saw
(Wyatt, B-1). press. Now for the first time since our appointment no direct references to Jewish catastrophe in these
nine months earlier, we could take questions. The designs for the reconstruction of lower-Manhattan,
by the August 2003 deadline, we had received 5,201 official submissions from 62 nations, first question I took from a reporter caught me it could also be true that the forms of post-war
and from 49 American states (only Alaska was missing from the list). In January 2004, off-balance. “Knowing that you have written architecture have been inflected by an entire
after six months of exhausting, occasionally tortured debate and discussion, we announced much about Holocaust negative-form monuments generation’s knowledge of the Holocaust. Michael
our winning selection at Federal Hall on Wall Street, where George Washington took his in Germany and that you were also on the jury Arad and Peter Walker’s “Reflecting Absence” is
oath as America’s first president. that chose Peter Eisenman’s design for the Berlin not a Holocaust memorial, I said, but its formal
Denkmal (for Europe’s Murdered Jews), it seems preoccupation with loss, absence, and regeneration
proposed two deeply recessed voids in the footprints of the former World Trade Center that you’ve basically chosen just another Holocaust may well be informed by Holocaust memorial
towers, each 200 square feet, with thin veils of water cascading into reflecting pools some memorial. Is this true?” Surprised and somewhat vernaculars. This was also a preoccupation they
35 feet below, each with a further deep void in its middle. The pools were to be surrounded offended, I replied that obviously this design had shared with poets and philosophers, artists and
nothing to do with Holocaust memorials. composers: how to articulate a void without filling
Within two months, we received some 13,800 registrations from around the world, and
The winning design, “Reflecting Absence,” by Michael Arad and Peter Walker,
Here the same reporter pressed me further:
Adapted from The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016)
Observing Memories
ISSUE 1
4
“But is it possible that Jewish architects are
Observing Memories
ISSUE 1
it in? How to formalize irreparable loss without
seeming to repair it?
5