MUSEUMS
Alice Davis, managing editor, Attractions Management
A LIVING MUSEUM
The 9/11 Memorial Museum’s achievements in curation, in architecture and design, in storytelling and in technology should be celebrated. It’s a place of personal stories, collective memory, learning and inclusion
N
ever before has a museum been built to tell the story of an event that was witnessed by one-third of the world’s population. Across the globe, people stopped what they were doing, wherever they
were, and watched the attacks unfold, live, on television. The National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York City, New York, opened in May 2014 to try to tell that story. It’s had 2 million visitors to date. The scale of the plot, the confusion
that followed, the horrifying images of the 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 history 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, New
York, Washington or Shanksville and for those who survived, knew victims
the 9/11 Memorial Museum. Every aspect and every detail had to be considered with thought, assessed from every angle and meticulously judged. As Greenwald describes a walk through the museum, you can see that this is true for every single decision that was made.
9/11 Memorial Museum director
Alice Greenwald, and Tom Hennes, of Thinc, who led the exhibition design
or responded to the emergencies, 11 September, 2001, is not history, but a part of their lives, and a “museum” must seem misplaced in time. “It was important to hear from those who lived that experience, who evacuated the buildings and survived, the first responders, and those who lost their lives,” Greenwald says. It’s hard to imagine a more challenging project than conceptualising and realising
REFLECTING ABSENCE Understanding the relationship between the Memorial Plaza and the museum is important to the visitor experience. Two inverse fountains now fill the footprints of the Twin Towers, set in a public park scattered with trees, surrounded by skyscrapers. Standing there, visitors wouldn’t necessarily know that there’s a museum beneath their feet. It’s marked only by a glass pavilion, some way 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 almost 3,000 victims inscribed around the bronze edges of the pools.
Victims’ names (left) carved around the edges of two acre-sized waterfall pools at the Memorial Plaza (right)
64 Read Attractions Management online
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PHOTOS: © JIN LEE
PHOTO: © JIN LEE
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