A view of the South Tower excavation (left) and the Ladder 3 fire engine (right), a poignant artefact
When do you cross the line between documentation and exploitation? We debated that question endlessly and we worked very hard not to cross that line
forcing visitors to relive that trauma. “Trauma plays a central role at the
personal and the social scale,” Hennes says. “That’s 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. For many people it became a singular event that changed everything.” The designers worked closely with
advisers, including historians and psychologists, to create a layout that permits each visitor to determine his own route. As long as he’s informed about what’s coming next, the visitor is able to “regulate the intensity” of his museum experience. There’s no definitive route through the exhibition, so the visitor has the freedom to choose his journey. “Visitors understand they are 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 As the visitor experience was devised to avoid being unduly traumatic, every artefact was tested by the same principles before it was deemed right 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 transmissions. “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.” Hennes offers an example, describing
how he’d trawled through video of the towers falling countless times, but on one
AM 1 2015 ©Cybertrek 2015
occasion listened with the volume on and heard female screams from out of shot. “I found that more difficult than
just about any of the material I’ve seen because it took me to that raw, unprocessed, emotional experiencing of terror and disbelief of the moment,” he says. Imagining a museum that has this type of subject matter demanded 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, by definition, is not fully understood.” Discretion was applied to every type of
artefact, Greenwald says. “When do you cross the line between documentation and exploitation? We debated that question endlessly 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. Little survived the impact that could document the attack, but 37 phone calls were made by crew and passengers during the onboard siege. “We made choices to include
certain voicemail messages that are heartwrenching, but we felt they were appropriate in a museum setting,” says Greenwald. “There were also recordings that we chose not to include, and they were discretionary decisions based on a question of ethics and appropriateness.” As Hennes says, curatorial vigilance is
necessary to prevent throwing visitors into a state of 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 the sequence we give it, which is recorded in another part of the brain. The healing of trauma brings the two aspects of memory together into something coherent.” “Coming to the site of one of the attacks is a kind of pilgrimage for many people,” says Hennes. “We wanted the journey through this horrible event to 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. The problem is making it bearable to witness it.”
REMEMBRANCE AND EVOLUTION A salient point is that the 9/11 Memorial Museum has managed to reflect too the resilience of the city, the strength of the spirit of the people who were affected the most. It seems vital to the museum that in places it has this energy within it, and that it’s closely related to the words of the people who did not die that day. There are listening alcoves in the
history exhibit where visitors can hear recordings made by people who escaped the Twin Towers and the Pentagon or by the rescuers. “There’s something powerful in hearing their experiences spoken in their own words, not filtered through the curatorial voice,” says Greenwald. In the memorial exhibit, first-person
recordings by relatives and friends of victims strike a similar chord. “The stories they tell are the same stories all families
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