Trade Centre memorial designs go on show

Eight competing designs for a memorial to the nearly-3,000 victims of September 11 terror attacks – including reflecting pools, walls of names and a tomb for the unidentified – were unveiled as the rebuilding of New York’s World Trade Centre entered a delicate new phase.

A 13-member panel chose the eight finalists from a record 5,201 proposals for commemorating the 2001 attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, as well as the 1993 trade centre bombing. The panel will settle on a final design by the end of the year.

The designs include gardens, maple trees, soaring light beams and private areas for relatives of the dead. One envisages a blue light projected upward from a resting place for the unidentified remains of trade centre victims.

“We really now are at the point that gives the families hope,” said Monica Iken, whose husband Michael was killed at the trade centre. She said each design “brings you into a space that says this is a sacred, spiritual, peaceful place of reflection where we’re going to honour and remember”.

But deciding on a final memorial is certain to create friction and hurt feelings.

The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the agency overseeing the competition, had issued guidelines that say all proposals should recognise the towers’ footprints and preserve a wall that is the only remnant of the original complex. It also said that all victims need to be recognised, and that some should not be made to seem more important than others.

However, some firefighters and their families have been pushing to have the fallen rescue workers honoured together and to have an inscription describing their sacrifice.

But many firefighters, dozens of whom arrived to view the plans on display, said they were encouraged to find at least three designs proposed listing rescue workers’ names together. Other entries proposed alphabetical listings, while one suggested that victims could be grouped together along with their relatives, friends or colleagues.

The designers found different ways to recognise the 2,982 victims of the 1993 and 2001 attacks.

One design, Supsending Memory, represents each victim with columns that begin as concrete and end as glass, listing important events in the person’s life. Another would include large photographs of the victims on glass panels in the northern tower’s footprint. Many of the designs list victims’ names on stone walls that surround the site, some with a constant flow of water over the names.

One entry proposed creating a crystalline “cloud” with cathedral-like vaults that allow soaring beams of light. Another proposes recreating the floor plans of the 94th and 95th floors of the north tower, and inscribes victims’ names on a clear glass plate near the location where the first plane hit the tower.

The designs will be kept on display near the trade centre site until the jury makes its choice.

Daniel Libeskind and David Childs, the architects for the new trade centre skyscraper, are working against a mid-December deadline to complete revisions to Libeskind’s Freedom Tower design. The tower design could be adjusted to accommodate the winning memorial.