A Preview of Designs to Remember

By Nick Pinto
POSTED FEBRUARY 1, 2008

Downtown residents got their first glimpse of the latest designs for the World Trade Center Memorial Museum last month when director Alice Greenwald presented architectural plans and conceptual renderings to a committee of Community Board 1.

Greenwald said the detailed exhibit plans and programming have not yet begun, but as the architectural plans have been refined, the museum is beginning to consider the placement of artifacts too large to install through the front door.

“You can’t bring in a fire truck later,” Greenwald said.

Among those artifacts will be two of the distinctive five-story steel tridents that once clad the outside of the twin towers. The iconic remnants will be visible through the above-ground pavilion (formerly called the visitor center), the low glass structure on the east side of the site designed by the Norwegian firm Snøhetta.

The pavilion will contain an auditorium space, but most visitors will follow a ramp down seven stories to Manhattan bedrock. Along the way, they will catch glimpses of the 60-foot-high exposed slurry wall that makes up the site’s bathtub, as well as the support structures for the above-ground pools that fill the footprints of the twin towers.

In the final descent to the ground floor, they will pass the “survivor stairs,” the stairway from the north side of the Trade Center plaza that many workers used to escape on Sept. 11. The stairs will be embedded between an escalator and a functional stairway so that every visitor can see them.

The bedrock-level museum, designed by Davis Brody Bond, is divided into several irregular halls, their size and shape dictated by the structural footprints of the buildings above.

“This is the most strangely shaped museum on the planet,” Greenwald said. “We are seven stories below ground. Some parts are 65 feet high. It makes lighting difficult and humidity control almost impossible.”

One chamber, not open to the public, will hold the unidentified remains of victims of the 2001 attacks. The primary exhibition space will be inside the footprint of what was the north tower. Other spaces will house classrooms, a digital resource center, and an age-appropriate exhibition for families with small children. The wall of one hallway will bear the names of those who died in the Sept. 11 attacks. Separately, there will be  names of the emergency response and cleanup workers who died subsequently.

“The recovery workers are absolutely part of our narrative,” Greenwald said. “They will be commemorated.”

CB1 member Allan Tannenbaum asked if the museum intended to gloss over the terrorists responsible for the attack.

“No,” Greenwald replied. “There is no way to avoid that.”

“The fundamental challenge is to balance commemoration with education and historical documentation,” Greenwald said. “We can’t invite the public into an exhibit about trauma and re-traumatize them.”

Asked if the anticipated two-year delay in the schedule for completing the memorial site will hurt the museum, Greenwald said not at all.

“It’s like a Rubik’s Cube down there,” she said, referring to the complex network of buildings, utilities, passageways, and transportation lines being fitted under the World Trade Center site. “There’s a lot we have to figure out. An extra two years is a gift.”

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