MUSEUM


The World Trade Center’s steel ‘tridents’ inside the Memorial Pavilion’s atrium


We set out by saying that our intention was to reflect the


present with the Memorial Pavilion, whereas the two waterfalls going into the footprints of the two towers reflect the past


or the artefacts that represent those lives or the material that tells the story of the day.” The Snøhetta architects needed to build a connection between the two contexts. Their glass structure rises from the ground to create a deep atrium inside, filled with light by day, and uplit by night. Inside the atrium, where the entrance hall gives way to a staircase down to the exhibition, are two of the 24m (80ft) steel tridents, which were once part of the structure of the North Tower. “We set out by saying that our intention was to reflect the present, whereas the two waterfalls going into the footprints of the two towers reflect the past,” says Snøhetta’s Kjetil Traedal Thorsen. “In that sense it would be a more dynamic building, creating an immedi- ate connection between the public and what was happening on the site.” [For more on the process of designing the pavilion, see our interview with Thorsen on p68]


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“The pavilion suggests presence without being overly vertical, though it gives you verticality in the tridents,” says Greenwald. “Inside the pavilion, you look at these tridents and you look through the window and not only do you see both of the pools, where the Twin Towers stood, but you also see the new One World Trade Center, rising 1,776ft [541m] into the sky. You immediately get the proportions of what was here. It was critical in the design that when you entered the pavilion you were still within the memorial context: you were not separate from it; there was a continuity.”


AUTHENTICITY AND SCALE Heading down the first flight of stairs, the visitor enters the main museum space, which was designed by New York architecture firm Davis Brody Bond. The descent features dif- ferent levels leading down to the Foundation Hall, passing the Survivors’ Stairs which


enabled hundreds of people to escape the burning towers. In many ways, the museum is not a building, but an expansive interior space, punctuated with original pieces of engineering – now historical assets – such as the slurry wall, twisted pieces of steel and the box columns that have been excavated to reveal the outline of the North Tower footprint. “Given a fixed set of existing geometries at the site, we were faced with the challenge of translating them into a series of coherent spaces that are punctuated by surface, tex- ture and volume,” says Davis Brody Bond. “We chose as the space’s main narrative


element a gently descending procession (dubbed ‘the ribbon’) that guides visitors from the plaza to the bedrock level where the cut columns of the World Trade Center towers are revealed. The ‘ribbon’ evokes the ramp used to remove debris from the site in the aftermath of the attacks. It also offers multiple


CLAD mag 2015 ISSUE 2


PHOTO: JEFF GOLDBERG/ESTO


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