MUSEUM


A MUSEUM FOR EVERYONE


From the architecture and exhibition design to the content and visitor experience, every aspect of the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York had to be meticulously planned. Museum director Alice Greenwald talks Alice Davis through the process


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ever before has a museum been built to tell the story of an event that was witnessed by a third of the world’s pop- ulation. On September 11 2001, people across the globe stopped whatever they were doing and watched the attacks


unfold, live, on television. The 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City, New York, opened in May 2014 to try to tell that story. It has already had close to 2 million visitors. The unimaginable scale, the confusion, the


horrifying images of that day and the tragedy of the lives that were lost – it’s incised into the minds of those who watched from afar. “All of us carry a story of 9/11 with us,” says museum director Alice Greenwald. “The premise of the museum is to tell his- tory through the vantage point of those who experienced it, which means it’s inclusive of those nearly 2 billion people.” For those in Lower Manhattan or New York,


Washington or Shanksville and for those who survived, knew victims or responded to the emergencies, 11 September is not history, but a part of their lives, and a ‘museum’ must seem misplaced in time. “It was also important to hear from those who lived that experience, who evacuated the buildings and survived, the fi rst responders, and those who lost their lives,” Greenwald says. It’s hard to imagine a more challenging


project than conceptualising and realising the 9/11 Memorial Museum. Every aspect and every detail had to be considered with


CLADmag 2015 ISSUE 2


away between the two pools of water. The park is a place of contemplation, and there are no signs of the devastation that happened there, save the names of the victims inscribed around the bronze edges of the pools. “The Memorial Plaza is about the absence


Alice Greenwald has been the director of the 9/11 Memorial Museum since 2006


thought, assessed from every angle and metic- ulously judged. As Greenwald describes the museum, you can see that this is true for every single decision that was made.


REFLECTING ABSENCE Understanding the relationship between the Memorial Plaza and the museum is impor- tant to the visitor experience. Two inverse fountains now fi ll the footprints of the Twin Towers, set in a public park scattered with trees, surrounded by skyscrapers. Standing there, visitors wouldn’t necessarily know there’s a museum beneath their feet. It’s marked only by a glass pavilion, some way


of verticality and what’s no longer there,” says Greenwald. “The plaza was always intended to be a horizontal environment. It’s about the absence of the buildings, the absence of the people we lost. It’s about reflecting absence, which was the name given to the design by its architects, Michael Arad and Peter Walker.” The museum itself is in the very foundations of the North Tower and South Tower of the World Trade Center complex, seven storeys, or 21m (70 ft), below ground. “It’s essentially built in the cavity of the foundations,” says Greenwald. “As well as being a historical museum and memorial institution, it’s also an archaeological environment with in situ rem- nants of the World Trade Center still visible.”


CONNECTING CONTEXTS For Norwegian architecture fi rm Snøhetta who designed the pavilion – the glass atrium which forms the entrance and foyer of the museum – a balance had to be struck between the absence represented by the horizontal plane of the Memorial Plaza and the descent into the museum space far below – the space which, Greenwald says, is about “refl ecting presence.” “The museum is about what remains, whether it’s the remnants of the buildings


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PHOTO: ©JIN LEE


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