Buildings
WTC Memorial Architects Say Work Is Moving Quickly
(archrecord.construction.com - 08/30/2006)
By Kevin
Lerner
As controversy and politics have slowed
progress at the Ground Zero memorial site, several other memorials
to the victims of September 11 are proceeding at paces that
surprise even their designers. The memorial to victims in
Westchester, New York, will be dedicated September 10. And
the Staten Island memorial, though significantly smaller than
some of the others, has been complete since 2004.
Paul Murdoch, who is designing the Flight 93 Memorial in
Shanksville, Pennsylvania, says that his process has been
“not only surprisingly smooth, but also surprisingly
accelerated,” even though Murdoch finds that he’s
working with far more constituents than he normally does.
He credits the National Park Service for its guidance of the
process. Nevertheless, since the project involves as much
as 2200 acres of landscape, the project is not scheduled to
be complete until 2011.
In Alexandria, Virginia, Julie Beckman, who is designing
the Pentagon Memorial with her partner Keith Kaseman, has
had a slighty different view of working on one of the three
major memorials. She says that while the process, which entered
the construction phase this summer, was “very fast in
the world of memorials,” fundraising efforts delayed
construction from the original two-year timeline. “They
assumed that raising $20 million would be a drop in the hat,”
Beckman points out. “It wasn’t.” The bureaucracy
has been kept to a minimum, according to Beckman, because
the Pentagon Memorial Fund is the sole client, and the Pentagon
itself is not weighing in on aesthetics.
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Comparatively, the memorial in Hoboken, New Jersey, is inching
along. “It’s nothing unusual,” says Jeanne
Gang, the architect member of the designers FLOW Group, “Just
more people to have to talk to.” For Gang, as for many
of the architects, the emotional content of memorial design
is one of the most demanding aspects of the work. “Now
we’re dealing with symbolic meaning,” she says,
“which I haven’t really dealt with before. It’s
been very difficult, but I feel compelled to move on and do
this really well.” Gang’s team currently is working
on construction drawings. They hope that, in spring 2007,
they will drive the piles for the artificial island that is
the memorial’s centerpiece.
Frederic Schwartz, FAIA, who dealt with political maneuvering
as part of the THINK team at Ground Zero, is now designing
two memorials, one in Westchester, New York, and also the
New Jersey State memorial. “I would use the words ‘phenomenal’
and ‘fantastic’ to describe the processes,”
Schwartz says, who also agrees with Gang’s assessment
of the sensitive nature of the design work: “The emotion
is never ending.”
But for all the praise of the memorial process, perhaps none
has been as smooth as that of the Staten Island memorial,
two curving fiberglass “postcards” designed by Masayuki
Sono and Lapshan Fong. Their design was selected in 2003,
and the memorial opened September 11, 2004—though some
work continued after that time. Fong says, “We couldn’t
delay even one day.”
For some of these designers, memorial work has led to other
projects. Kaseman and Beckman were invited to a closed interview
process to design a memorial to the space shuttle Columbia
in Nacogdoches, Texas. They were selected to design the memorial,
and are awaiting NASA’s unveiling of the design. Schwartz
says that his memorial designs led the people of New Orleans
to recognize that his firm could help; it is now among the
teams working on rebuilding plans there. He emphasizes, however,
that he does not bolster his resume with the memorial projects.
Fong says that the Staten Island memorial had led to more
work indirectly, because “it’s in the portfolio.”
But his partner has a different view of the marketing influence
of their design. “People see the memorial,” which
consists of two curving fiberglass panels, Sono says, “and
don’t think, ‘I want a house like that.’”
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