FEATURE
The North Tower tridents (left), a standing box column (centre) and the Survivors’ Stairs (right)
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 archi- tects, Michael Arad and Peter Walker.” The museum itself is in the very foun-
dations of the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center complex, roughly seven storeys 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”.
146 ATTRACTIONS HANDBOOK 2015-2016 “The pavilion suggests presence “The plaza was always
intended to be a horizontal environment. It’s about the absence of the buildings and the people we lost”
“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 connect these two contexts. His glass structure rises from the ground to create a deep atrium inside, filled with light by day and uplit by night. Inside the atrium, the entrance hall gives way to a staircase down to the exhibition. Two 24-metre (80-foot) steel tridents, once part of the North Tower, are situated there.
without being overly vertical, though it gives you verticality in the tridents,” says the museum director. “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 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.
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