Reading symbolism in the Sept. 11 era

MAYBE spelling out the words “Let’s Roll!” across the hills of southwestern Pennsylvania will do the trick -- you know, like the Hollywood sign, but with bigger letters and a star-spangled exclamation point.

Truthfully, it’s hard to know what advice to give Paul Murdoch about the best way to recast his politely streamlined but politically controversial design for the Flight 93 memorial, slated for a wind-swept site 80 miles outside Pittsburgh. The Los Angeles architect barely had time to enjoy his victory over four other finalists before his design was savaged by angry bloggers and a congressman, Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), who charged that its crescent of red maple trees is a sign of sympathy for Islamic terrorists.

The crescent is a common symbol of Islam that appears on the Algerian, Tunisian and Turkish flags -- a form whose power, Murdoch now ruefully admits, he might have considered a bit earlier in the design process.

“It didn’t seem, to us, loaded at all,” a drained-looking Murdoch says, sitting behind the broad desk in his Wilshire Boulevard office, where he runs a small firm with his wife, Milena Murdoch. “We wanted to use the crescent of trees to embrace the final resting place of the victims -- that was the symbolism. And we continue to feel that most people understand that.”

Given that symbols are the stock-in-trade of memorial designers, Murdoch is guilty of at least a degree of naivete about his plan’s potential for controversy. But he’s also right to complain that his design, expected to cost more than $30 million, is being considered in a hothouse. The politics of Sept. 11, as he puts it, have become “so highly charged it’s hysterical. I mean that in the true sense of the word. This is hysteria. I feel like I’ve walked into a war.”

A culture war, that is. Murdoch is only the latest architect to be drawn into the growing battles on the subject of how best to memorialize 9/11. The debates suggest an age-of-terror version of the fights over identity politics, provocative artworks and the Western canon that flared up 20 years ago.

In the case of Flight 93, the Hallmark-card Minimalism that is now the lingua franca for memorials -- and the design world’s version of political correctness -- has clashed with the notion that what we ought to remember about its passengers, above all else, is their onboard rebellion. It’s not just the crescent, that is, that has Murdoch’s most vocal and spotlight-seeking critics up in arms. It’s that his design strikes those critics as too reflective -- too abstract, in a word -- to do justice to the legacy of Todd Beamer and the other passengers who joined him in charging the cockpit.

Minimalist memorials have often faced that sort of opposition. And given that the attacks of Sept. 11 caught the nation so plainly off guard and left so many victims without a chance to fight back in any sense, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that what many of us want to remember of that day are examples, however rare or symbolic, of American action rather than inaction.

But Tancredo and others go a bit further: They see a direct connection between that in-flight struggle and the work of the American military in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. In a letter to the National Park Service, which runs the Flight 93 site, Tancredo called Murdoch’s crescent “unsuitable for paying appropriate tribute to the heroes of Flight 93 or the ensuing American struggle against radical Islam that their last historic act and the ‘Let’s roll’ effort has come to symbolize.”

For all the vitriol of the Flight 93 debate, though, it’s got nothing on the conflict over plans for the World Trade Center site itself, which continues to set the standard for 9/11-related grandstanding.

Last week, New York Gov. George Pataki summarily barred the International Freedom Center -- an institution that promised to “explore freedom as a constantly evolving world movement in which America has played a leading role” -- from its site overlooking Michael Arad’s ground zero memorial. Pataki said he was persuaded by critics of the IFC who claimed it might promote an agenda insufficiently friendly to the United States. The IFC follows New York’s Drawing Center out the door of the cultural building after that small visual arts museum came under similar fire and abandoned plans to move to ground zero from its current location in SoHo.

Both institutions were asked to pledge that no material critical of the U.S. or its government would ever appear on its walls, however fleetingly -- a loyalty oath that would effectively neuter any arts group agreeing to it.

The Drawing Center, to its credit, simply ignored the demand and began looking elsewhere for new space. The IFC responded in more politic fashion, sending a July 6 letter to the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., which is overseeing the ground zero redevelopment, promising that it would never become “a forum for denigrating the country we love.” Even that half-capitulation wasn’t enough, and when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) came out against the IFC 10 days ago, its fate was sealed.

It was an odd twist of fate indeed for the IFC, which was co-founded by Tom Bernstein, a former owner of the Texas Rangers with President Bush. In its early days it was an easy target for critics on the left, who predicted its programs -- all freedom all the time -- would be consistently patriotic to the point of jingoism.

Wary of that charge, its leaders changed the name from the Freedom Museum to the International Freedom Center. They developed installations aiming to draw connections between the victims of 9/11 and “freedom fighters” around the world, such as Nelson Mandela. The expanded mandate was enough to raise the hackles of neoconservative pundits with astonishing speed -- most dramatically Debra Burlingame, whose brother Charles “Chic” Burlingame III was the pilot of the jetliner steered by hijackers into the Pentagon.

“The so-called lessons of Sept. 11 should not be force-fed by ideologues hoping to use the memorial site as nothing more than a powerful visual aid to promote their agenda,” Burlingame wrote in the Wall Street Journal. She identified the centerpieces of that agenda -- the capital letters are hers -- as “Internationalism and Global Policy.”

The implication was clear not just for ground zero but for the Flight 93 memorial as well: Context is OK as long as it is not “internationalist” (a code-word for soft and anti-American, like the U.N.) but homegrown, fully valorous and, ideally, reproducible in figurative form. Burlingame nominated “the story of the courageous young firefighter whose body, cut in half, was found with his legs entwined around the body of a woman. Recovery personnel concluded that because of their positions, the young firefighter was carrying her.”

It would be quite a statue -- Laocoon attacked not by snakes but Al Qaeda.

The departures of the IFC and the Drawing Center leave the ground zero cultural building, designed by the talented Norwegian firm Snohetta, without a cultural tenant, though the underground museum holding crushed firetrucks and other 9/11 artifacts may wind up spilling into its galleries. They make more uncertain the fate of Frank Gehry’s performing arts building across the street, which is supposed to house the Joyce Dance Center and the Signature Theater Company: Will those groups have to take the loyalty oath as well? And they raise the possibility that a rebuilt ground zero, already lacking housing thanks to the demands of leaseholder Larry Silverstein, will be completely empty of cultural facilities too.

So much for vibrant, 24/7 activity at the site, which has been promised from the beginning. And so much for Daniel Libeskind’s master plan, which is now entirely compromised.

Murdoch can only hope his design maintains a bit more of its integrity. He has retreated to his office to take a fresh look at the memorial, on which he collaborated with the landscape architect firm of Nelson Byrd Woltz of Charlottesville, Va. It essentially carves the huge memorial site, which covers 220 acres and includes a former strip-mining operation, into three sections. There’s a tower (filled with wind chimes) near the entrance that helps make the site visible from the road, the now-infamous crescent of maples that will flame red each fall and, on the south end of that arc, a series of low walls protecting the crash site itself from the public. Only family members will be allowed in that area, though other visitors will be able to leave flowers and other items in special niches on its perimeter.

Each individual part of Murdoch’s design is executed in cool, spare forms. But considered as a whole, the effect is earnest overkill, demonstrating all the ways that Minimalism has lost its bite over the last two decades. Every bit is Labeled and Capitalized, its symbolism and lessons made clear. The tower is called the Tower of Voices; it is exactly 93 feet high, to match the flight number. Down the hill is a glass plaque inscribed with the Mission Statement. The crash site is Sacred Ground. There is the road that runs toward the crash site -- the Approach Road. Coming back, you take the Return Road.

And we haven’t mentioned the obligatory interpretive museum, which will be full of enough literal and figurative objects to make the forms of the memorial more easily digestible still.

The task in front of Murdoch -- to figure out a way to mollify the memorial’s critics without turning it into inoffensive mush -- won’t be easy. The crescent stands at the very heart of his design, both aesthetically and conceptually. And the fully inflamed debates over how to memorialize Sept. 11 don’t seem likely to grow more measured anytime soon.

Murdoch realizes that -- pointing out, for example, that as controversial as Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was when it was unveiled in 1980, the war had been over for five years by then.

“But we’re still in the middle of a conflict here” in Iraq and in the war on terrorism, Murdoch says. “The emotions are raw.”

The comparison to Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, though, isn’t an especially favorable one for Murdoch. Lin’s design does not have a feel-good title such as “Crescent of Embrace.” It does not try to tell you how or what to feel, or take you through a landscape-architecture version of the Kubler-Ross stages of grief.

In short, it has the courage of its minimalism.

Murdoch’s design is hardly unique among contemporary memorials in the way it cloaks gushing sentiment in stylish, stripped-down forms. The finalists Murdoch prevailed over used the same approach. They also had titles: “Memory Trail,” “Disturbed Harmony,” “Fields, Forests, and Fences.” The designs in the ground zero memorial competition were similar.

That in the end is the bitter lesson for Murdoch: Having designed a memorial that insists on taking us by the hand and leading us through its site, he’s not in a very good position to complain when people judge it in less than sophisticated ways.