Getting the committee’s aesthetic of atrocity right has taken five years with nothing to show for it. Estimated costs to complete the 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero are approaching $ 1 billion. From the beginning, we have argued that the inspiration was always there, in front of the collective faces of the committee, staring in absolute and abject horror at them and anyone who looked back: the still standing remnant of broken dreams and lives in a building one once known as the World Trade Center. They should have saved it and engraved the names of those killed that day on the concrete walls surrounding the twin foundations. They almost got it right when they marked the site at night with twin searchlights that soared into the sky. So subtle, so deep. Now, it seems they just want to make the horror and implications of what all this means for our future disappear by cornering the chaos and subjecting it to a design that buries it underneath a park where you can safely go feed the pigeons. . We keep hearing this voice somewhere in the committee: “Yeah, it was horrible, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make it pretty. My God, the last thing we have to do is scare people.”

Too bad for us. They remind us of the 35 million dollar “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe” in Berlin. Although we truly believe that “less is more” when it comes to art and architecture, we let the Germans take that idea that came from their culture to build a monument without hope and spirit. Redefine “austere”. Perhaps that was the point, but the remaining concentration camps say more than that monument will ever say. Still, it didn’t stop college students from playing hide and seek among the dark concrete blocks. If they had been little kids, hopefully a parent would have told them to stop and explained why. But these were America’s educated elite backpacking Europe. They themselves, we fear, will one day be happily feeding the pigeons in the new park on Ground Zero.

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