MUSEUM


An elevator motor from the Twin Towers (left) A destroyed fi re


truck from Ladder Company 3 that helped people escape (right)


With most museums the central design challenge is


bringing the materials to life, but in this museum the material is all too present and alive for most people


most significant for the people who were directly involved, but the ripples of trauma travelled through society. Our world view was disrupted on that day.”


The designers worked closely with advis- ers, including historians and psychologists, to create a layout that permits each visitor to determine their own route. As long as they are informed about what’s coming next, vis- itors are able to “regulate the intensity” of their museum experience. There is no defi n- itive route through the exhibition, so visitors have the freedom to choose their journey. “Visitors understand they’re in a museum, and not in 9/11,” Hennes adds. “Here and now is a museum on the site of one of its attacks, not a re-immersion in 9/11.”


ETHICS AND APPROPRIATENESS In the same way the visitor experience was devised to avoid being unduly traumatic, every artefact had to be tested by the same princi- ples before it was deemed suitable for display. One unique challenge lay in the fact that so


much of the material was audio media, such as cockpit recordings, voicemails and radio trans- missions. “The timbre of the human voice has an immediacy and a power that is very real,” says Greenwald. “Our advisors cautioned early on that we needed to be extremely prudent in our selection of audio materials.”


CLADmag 2015 ISSUE 2


Hennes gives an example, describing how he had trawled through video of the towers falling countless times, but on one occasion listened with the volume on and heard the screams of a female voice, from out of shot. “I found that more diffi cult than just about any of the material I have seen because it took me to that raw, unprocessed, traumatic, emo- tional experiencing of terror and disbelief of the moment,” he says. Imagining a museum that has this type of subject matter thus demands a sense of responsibility from the project team. “In some ways, that intensity is what we have to shield people from, unless they really want to go there, because it can trigger trauma. Trauma is a felt experience that may not even be fully understood.” Discretion was applied by the curators and designers across every type of artefact, Greenwald says. “When do you cross the line between documentation and exploitation? We debated endlessly that question and we worked very hard not to cross that line.” A case in point was the telling of the story of United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing all on board. Very little survived the impact that could document the attack, but almost 40 phone calls were made by crew and pas- sengers during the onboard siege. “We made choices to include certain voicemail


messages that are heartwrenching, but we felt they passed the test for us of being appropriate in a museum setting,” says Greenwald. “There were recorded experi- ences aboard that plane that we chose not to include, and that was a discretionary deci- sion based on ethics and appropriateness.” As Hennes says, this curatorial vigilance is


necessary to prevent throwing visitors into that state of raw trauma. “To expose people to the unprocessed experience is to invite a kind of shock reaction and it is traumatic.” However, he says, the healing of trauma is about making sense of our felt memory and our narrative memory. “Trauma is a splitting between what we feel and see, which is recorded in one part of the brain; and the story and sequence we give it, which is recorded in another part of the brain. The healing of trauma brings those two aspects of memory together into something coherent.” “We recognised that coming to the site of


one of the attacks would be a kind of pilgrim- age for many people,” he says. “We wanted to create a journey through this horrible event that would be bearable. With most museums the central design challenge is bringing the materials to life, but in this museum the material is all too present and all too alive for most people. The central problem is making it bearable to witness it.”


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PHOTOS: ©JIN LEE


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