Unseemly memorials

WHEN the process of choosing a memorial design for ground zero got underway three years ago, New Yorkers had good reason to hope it would steer clear of the acrimony that had, by that point, already compromised Daniel Libeskind’s master plan for the site. A high-powered jury, including America’s most esteemed memorial designer, Maya Lin, met in secret to sift through more than 5,000 entries. The winning design, by an unknown 34-year-old New York architect named Michael Arad, proposed turning the footprints of the twin towers into huge reflecting pools lined with fountains that would cascade into subterranean galleries. It was widely praised for its stark power when it was unveiled in early 2004.

Similar optimism greeted the winning design in the other major Sept. 11 memorial competition, for the crash site of United Flight 93 in rural western Pennsylvania. Among other features, Los Angeles architect Paul Murdoch’s plan called for ringing the huge site with a crescent of maple trees that would turn a blazing red each fall.

Now, five years after the 9/11 attacks, both memorials are mired in conflict. Arad’s design has been gutted, its underground rooms eliminated to save money after the total budget for the memorial, an attached museum and related infrastructure neared $1 billion. The headstrong architect himself has managed to alienate engineers, politicians and at times, even his partner on the memorial, landscape architect Peter Walker.

Murdoch was forced to revise his design after apoplectic, irrational bloggers (and one apoplectic, irrational congressman, Colorado’s Tom Tancredo) denounced its crescent of trees as a symbol of Islam. In both cases, fundraising to build the memorials has lagged.

One obstacle after another

What went wrong? The answer lies, at least in part, in the way memorials have been selected, designed and built in this country in the last two decades. New memorials overwhelmingly use a Minimalist approach that works best in a vacuum, when the designer has at least a measure of autonomy. But they operate, increasingly, in a highly contentious cultural and political context. This is particularly true of the 9/11 memorials, charged with commemorating a series of attacks that we are still struggling to define.

Since Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial opened in 1982, memorials that share its aesthetic language -- sober and formally restrained, with a simple list of names in place of grander, figurative elements -- have had the inside track in international competitions. It’s not hard to understand why that approach has become a lingua franca for memorials. It is bracingly direct, it avoids kitsch and sentimentality and it provides a powerfully intimate framework for visitors to reflect or mourn. And it is often favored by the jurors in international competitions, who tend to be drawn from an elite, like-minded pool of architects, artists and academics.

Precisely because these memorials are so stripped down, however, any unwise change or attempt at value engineering -- even a seemingly minor one -- can threaten their overall integrity. Because they lack the obvious symbols of courage or national pride that can be found in more traditional memorials, they are vulnerable to the charge that they’re unpatriotic. And because the federal government is now unwilling to pay the full cost of major memorials, their planners have to seek funding from outside sources -- from foundations, corporations, individuals and other groups that often expect to have a say in a memorial’s final design. For that and other reasons, it’s hard to imagine Lin’s Vietnam memorial, which sparked plenty of controversy in its day, being approved now in anything like its searingly simple form.

At ground zero, of course, where the targets were corporate office towers and where those killed were not soldiers but financial analysts and dishwashers, the rebuilding effort and the memorial have as much to do with real estate as with a response to terrorism or a commemoration of death.

The players who have helped shape that effort include family members of the victims: a governor, George Pataki, with an unblinking eye on the White House and his legacy; a shameless developer, Larry Silverstein; a master planner, Libeskind, with a remarkable talent for compromising self-preservation; and a giant bureaucracy, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

That group has spent the last two years pushing at the edges of Arad’s plan. Over the summer they finally broke through, getting the below-ground level removed as a cost-cutting measure and rearranging the display of victims’ names in a manner more palatable to family members and the police and fire departments.

The neutrality of Arad’s design, its isolation from those swirling forces, was in any case always an illusion. The jury chose it in large part because it so aggressively challenged Libeskind’s master plan, which by remaining open down to bedrock and using jagged, explosive architectural forms had been criticized for presuming to act as a memorial in its own right -- and a saccharine one at that.

Even in his initial entry to the memorial competition, Arad blithely changed major elements of the master plan, moving buildings and ramps around as if they were pieces on a Monopoly board. Now he is tasting a bit of his own medicine.

Murdoch, for his part, has learned a bitter corollary of memorial design in the Maya Lin era: When you pare down your scheme to nothing but symbols, however handsome, those symbols are bound to be highly charged -- and open to aggressive, even influential misinterpretation.

Filling the void

The spectacular nature of the Sept. 11 attacks also complicates the memorial-design effort. Because it was a national event from the start -- one we all experienced, at least to a degree, through the media -- popular culture has flooded the marketplace with depictions of that day, filling the void left while the official memorials are slowed by controversy and funding problems. Books such as Ian McEwan’s “Saturday” and music by Bruce Springsteen and composer John Adams have been critically acclaimed, though they reached relatively small audiences

This summer, Hollywood unveiled its own 9/11 memorials: “United 93,” an austere film by Paul Greengrass about the same passengers Murdoch’s plan is meant to honor, and Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center,” about a pair of Port Authority policemen rescued from the rubble of the twin towers. In their muscular realism and their sometimes strained attempts to turn a day of American vulnerability into a story of courage and valor, the movies are all that the corresponding memorials are not. On its face that may seem obvious: Such products are Hollywood’s stock in trade, though this pair, particularly Greengrass’ film, is rather restrained.

But they offer a reminder of how much the public craves narrative -- basic, heartfelt storytelling -- when it comes to remembering even the most tragic events. Architects and designers may dismiss that desire as unsophisticated, but they shouldn’t expect it will change.

The lesson is clear at the site of the memorials by Murdoch and Arad, where “interpretive” centers will pile relics from the attacks and explanatory displays atop the abstraction of the winning designs. At ground zero, a planned memorial museum will cover a staggering 120,000 square feet and cost nearly $200 million. Add roughly $300 million for Port Authority infrastructure, and there’s very little left for the memorial itself.

There is a certain presence and power that only bricks-and-mortar memorials possess. Even in watered-down forms, the designs by Arad and Murdoch may ultimately rank among our culture’s most important responses to 9/11. But future memorial juries would be wise to think about how and why these designs have been so easily pushed off track.

That doesn’t mean they need to trade Minimalism for figuration or abstraction for dumbed-down literalism. It simply means avoiding brittle, detached purity in favor of a more thoughtful, adaptable kind of design -- and designer.

*

christopher.hawthorne@latimes.com