If just a week ago you viewed the new 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero in New York, you might have judged it “a visual bore,” said Blair Kamin in the Chicago Tribune. Ten years after nearly 3,000 people died in the attacks on the twin towers, the former footprints of those skyscrapers have been marked by two vast granite-faced pits. The low, broad railing that surrounds each void bears the roll call of the dead one might expect, given that “rows of victims’ names have practically become a cliché” in our public memorials. But the “painfully austere” site that I visited before the official opening exists no more. This Sept. 11, a switch was hit, and veils of water began cascading down all four sides of each dark hole. The falls add animation and delight to the memorial, and even, when the mist is struck by sunlight, a few small rainbows. “A happy discovery,” architect Michael Arad says of that crowning effect.
“But more than beauty is required of a memorial,” said Witold Rybczynski in Slate.com. There’s no doubt that the waterfalls themselves will sparkle on sunny days, and their hushed roar will help make the surrounding plaza a place for quiet contemplation. But for contemplating what message? The memorial itself is “black as death,” and “there is nothing comforting” about gazing across an empty 65-yard space watching water fall endlessly onto a dark plateau and then again into a smaller, seemingly “bottomless” void at its center. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., has also been called gloomy, but that site, by forcing visitors to ascend a gentle slope after they’ve confronted the names of the American war dead, succeeds in lifting spirits too. At the September 11 Memorial, “the strongest sense I came away with was hopelessness.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
Today's political cartoons - December 22, 2024Cartoons Sunday's cartoons - the long and short of it, trigger finger, and more
-
5 hilariously spirited cartoons about the spirit of ChristmasCartoons Artists take on excuses, pardons, and more
-
Inside the house of AssadThe Explainer Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez, ruled Syria for more than half a century but how did one family achieve and maintain power?
