MUSEUMS
The North Tower tridents (left), a standing box column (centre) and the Survivors’ Stairs (right)
“The Memorial Plaza is about the
absence 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 and 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 and South Towers of the World Trade Center complex, roughly seven storeys, or 21 metres (70 feet), below ground. “It’s essentially the cavity of the foundations,” says Greenwald. “It’s an archaeological environment with in situ remnants of the original World Trade Center still visible.”
CONNECTING CONTEXTS For the Norwegian architecture firm Snöhetta, who designed the pavilion – the glass atrium 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 below. The space below, Greenwald says, is about “reflecting presence”. “The museum is about what remains,
whether it’s the remnants of the buildings or the artefacts that represent those lives or the material that tells the story of the events of the day,” she says. Snöhetta architect Craig Dykers needed to build a connection between the two contexts. His glass structure rises from the ground, though it’s not too tall, to create a deep atrium inside, filled with light by day, and uplit by night. Inside the atrium, the entrance hall gives
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“It’s extraordinary to take in the authenticity of the site, the
enormity of the space, and begin to contemplate the narrative of the museum exhibit”
way to a staircase down to the exhibition. Two 24-metre (80-foot) steel tridents, once part of the structure of the North Tower, are situated there. “The pavilion suggests presence without being overly vertical, though it gives you verticality in the tridents,” says the museum director, who’s led the team since 2006. “Inside the pavilion, you look at these tridents and you look through the window. 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 1,776 feet [541 metres] 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 Down the first flight of stairs, the visitor enters the main museum space, designed by New York architects Davis Brody Bond. The descent features different levels leading down to the Foundation Hall, passing the Survivors’ Stairs, which enabled hundreds of people to escape the burning towers. The museum is not really a building, but an expansive interior
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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. Greenwald says: “The architects
created a ramped descent with vistas that show how enormous the space is. Scale was always the story of the World Trade Center – the scale of what was here, the events, the potential for redevelopment and recovery. It’s all conveyed in the architecture. It’s extraordinary to take in the authenticity of the site, the enormity of the space, and begin to contemplate the narrative of the museum exhibit. Davis Brody Bond designed what I think is one of the great built environments in New York, if not in the world.”
FREEDOM TO CHOOSE Inside the museum, Greenwald and the design teams decided early on to create a segregated area where visitors opt in – the most difficult artefacts wouldn’t be encountered unless a visitor chose to do so. In the North Tower that space became the historical exhibit, while in the South Tower, it houses the memorial exhibition. Tom Hennes and his studio Thinc
Design conceptualised the exhibition, with the help of media and technology partner Local Projects, and designed about 80 per cent of the exhibits. Layman Design took charge of the historical exhibit. For Hennes, the most important
consideration when designing the exhibition was a respect for the trauma that was engendered by the attacks, and finding a way to present the story without
AM 1 2015 ©Cybertrek 2015
PHOTOS: © JIN LEE
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