To commemorate the utter devastation and human loss that occurred at Ground Zero on September 11, 2001, a memorial will look to the very footprints of the twin towers and the bedrock below for a place of healing.

Michael Arad and Peter Walker's winning World Trade Center memorial design, Reflecting Absence, fills the skyscrapers' footprints with reflective pools that extend thirty feet downward to bedrock. The proposed Freedom Tower (1,776 feet high) stands in the background.

inning out over fifty-two hundred entries, New York City architect Michael Arad and Peter Walker's bold design for the World Trade Center memorial, Reflecting Absence, stands as a stark reminder of loss.
        The announcement on January 6, 2004, of the winner of the World Trade Center memorial design contest--Michael Arad and Peter Walker's Reflecting Absence--is a climactic ending to months of passionate public debate in what was the largest open-design competition in American history. The competition emerged from the need to answer the darkest human tendency to terrorize, kill, and destroy with the brightest human desire to honor, inspire, and transcend. It was, in fact, an attempt to address both public and private pain. As jury member, scholar, and chairman of the Carnegie Corporation Vartan Gregorian put it, "We were searching for a plan that would begin to repair both the wounded cityscape and our wounded souls, to provide a place for contemplation of both loss and new life."
        Launched in April 2003 by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation--the organization overseeing the planning and development of the decimated site, including Daniel Libeskind's overall architectural plans--the competition received 5,201 submissions from 63 nations and 49 states. The enthusiastic response arose from the overwhelming nature of the September 11, 2001, tragedy and the world's reaction to it; it also reflected the LMDC's decision to open the competition to "anyone from anywhere" over the age of eighteen who could afford the $25 submission fee.
        According to the competition guidelines (posted on the Internet for easy accessibility), all entries were to be submitted and judged anonymously. The media were prohibited from any involvement whatsoever. The secretive process of this first stage was to permit the diverse thirteen-member jury--including Maya Lin, winner of the 1981 Vietnam Memorial competition; a widow of one of the tragedy's victims; New York's deputy mayor; and other art and architectural professionals--to process the entries without the politics, pressure groups, and public relations usually accompanying such contests.
        On November 18, 2003, after months of deliberation, the panel unveiled eight finalists at the Winter Garden in the World Financial Center, across the street from the excavated pit where the twin towers once stood. Architects, artists, journalists, and politicians mingled with firefighters, policemen, and the families of the deceased. Each carefully peered through the glass to study the designs and evaluate the best way to honor their dead.
        The selected designers were young, unknown artists, not elite architects. Professor of architecture Pierre David and two students submitted Garden of Lights. Michael Lewis and Norman Lee, designers for Votives of Suspension, received college degrees only three years ago in theater and museum education. Japanese artist Toshio Sasaki, a former recipient of the NEA Visual Artists Fellowship, was best known for his installation work.
        The finalists found ways to commemorate the tragedy by drawing on creative combinations of natural elements--water, light, garden, and stone. In its statement at the unveiling, the jury declared, "The eight memorial designs chosen have a number of characteristics in common. They strive neither to overwhelm the visitor nor their immediate surroundings. They aspire to soar--not by competing with the soaring skyline of New York, but rather by creating spaces that strive to reconcile vertical and horizontal, green and concrete, contemplation and inspiration. They allow for the change of seasons, passage of years, and evolution over time. They emphasize the process of memorialization over their own grandeur and present themselves as living landscapes of living memory that connect us to our past and carry us forward into the decades ahead."
        The November unveiling triggered public scrutiny of both the competition and the designs. Victims' families claimed that the jury ignored their desire to preserve the tower footprints at bedrock. (Many of the designs offered only partial access to the original bedrock.) Almost half the families have never received their loved ones' remains; the original footprints, their only tangible link to their lost kin, are of the utmost symbolic importance.
        Other family members criticized the absence of tower remnants, such as the twisted remains of Fritz Koenig's sculpture Sphere, once the centerpiece of the WTC plaza, or the shards of the south tower's facade that rose so symbolically from the

The bbc art + architecture (Gisela Baumann, Sawad Brooks, Jonas Coersmeier) entry, Passages of Light: The Memorial Cloud, envisioned a shrouded space below street level enclosed by a crystalline "cloud" of thousands of pipes to honor the victims.

smoking ruins in the months following the attack. Critics of the eight designs claimed that they were uninspiring, generic, and sterile. Some, including former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, argued it was too early for a memorial to have any significance and suggested postponing the competition indefinitely.
        Following this suggestion would have been disastrous. Allowing Libeskind's plan to proceed forward without a memorial would risk allowing the commercial reconstruction to compromise the integrity of the World Trade Center site. Permitting retail stores and restaurants to overrun the memorial would be emotionally devastating to both victims' families and the city. "The site plan must yield to the memorial," explained Matt Higgens, LMDC's chief operating officer. The jury had to decide on which plan has the most potential and work with the designer toward a final vision.
        After allotting $130,000 to each of the finalists so they could further develop their ideas, the jury embraced Arad's minimalist design with its focus on the absent towers. Arad, a 34-year-old Israeli architect working for the New York City Housing Authority, was virtually unheard of in the art and architecture world. Yet the plan edged out the other two designs regarded as semifinalists in the competition--Passages of Light: The Memorial Cloud and Garden of Lights. At the January unveiling, Gregorian claimed that Arad "has made the gaping voids left by the towers' destruction the primary symbol of loss."
        Arad, who had stood on Fulton Street on September 11 with his wife and watched in horror as the first tower collapsed, began sketching ideas even before the competition was announced. The concept of the missing towers was visible even in his early sketches. Reflecting Absence fills the two footprints with reflective pools that are submerged thirty feet below street level in the middle of a large plaza. The two footprints thus become voids extending almost an acre. The expression of loss is stark and unambiguous. Cascading water feeds the pools from the outer walls of the footprints; sloped buildings or ramps border the footprints and guide the visitor into the memorial itself. Libeskind felt the design fit well with his overall plan. "It's simple and bold," he said, noting, "The jury saw it as a bold interpretation of the void."
        In Arad's plan, the sights and sounds of the city will disappear and the sound of cascading water become louder as the visitor descends to a subterranean walkway, where he will be able to see a thin veil of water and stare out at a vast pool that flows toward a central void for each footprint. The names of victims will be arranged around each pool. In his preliminary design, Arad had the names appear in no particular order to heighten the chaotic nature of their deaths. Many firefighters and policemen expressed disappointment that their deceased were not honored with a separate list. In his revised plan, Arad placed individual shields beside the names of all the public safety workers lost in the attacks.
        The other significant improvement that occurred between November and January was Arad's collaboration with landscape architect Peter Walker. A former chairman of the landscape architecture department at Harvard University and cofounder of the firm Walker and Partners, Walker reconfigured the design around the pools that Arad had initially envisioned

Garden of Light, by architect Pierre David with Sean Corriel and Jessica Kmetovic, had a glass wall surrounding a garden, lit by 2,982 cones of light, which would be open only from 8:46 am, the time of the first attack on the towers, to 10:29 am, when they were both gone.

as an unadorned grove of tall pine trees (subsequently criticized for their fragility). Walker's revisions softened the starkness of the plaza, a major point of concern to many on the jury. Now, according to Gregorian, "while the voids remain empty and inconsolable, the surrounding plaza's design has evolved to include teeming groves of trees, traditional affirmations of life and rebirth." The final plan credits Walker and Arad as its designers.
        Together Arad and Walker resolved concerns raised by victims' families. They exposed more of the towers' bedrock; more important, they placed the collected unidentified remains in the central void of the northern tower pool seventy feet below ground level, the deepest point of the site, encased in a large slab of stone. Finally, Arad and Walker added an underground memorial center to house artifacts from the attacks, including the charred vestiges of fire trucks and the twisted columns of the towers. Visitors to the memorial center will enter by walking down a ramp, passing the remnants of the slurry wall.
        While the jurors chose only one winner, all eight final designs were beautifully rendered and deserve both praise and examination. Partners Gisela Baumann, Sawad Brooks, and Jonas Coersmeier of bbc art + architecture honored victims within a shrouded "space" below street level enclosed by a crystalline cloud. The plan, considered a semifinalist, was appropriately named Passages of Light: The Memorial Cloud. The cloud consisted of thousands of clustered pipes floating above the bedrock level. Radiating circles of light embedded into the floor beneath the cloud represented each of the 2,982 victims. The names of the approximately 1,400 victims who perished in the North Tower made up the largest field of lights. Another cluster of lights represented the approximately 600 victims in the South Tower. A "Line of Rescuers" ran through both groups, where fallen public safety workers were represented.
        Garden of Lights, by Pierre David, Sean Corriel, and Jessica Kmetovic, was the third semifinalist. The design envisioned 2,982 cones of light shining down on 2,982 alabaster altars, each containing a victim's name. The cones would be submerged below a vast garden, surrounded by a wall that would be open only from 8:46 a.m. to 10:29 a.m. The plan ultimately lost because access to its underground chamber was too limited.
        Joseph Karadin and Hsin-Yi Wu's Suspending Memory reversed Arad's idea by surrounding the two footprints with a vast basin of water. Each victim was represented by a column emerging from one of two islands that Karadin and Wu imagined as gardens. As each column extended through the garden surface, it was transformed from concrete into glass, with a victim's name and birth date engraved on its top. A memorial bridge linked the two islands. Suspending Memory was a bold, poignant design, but its sheer expanse of water made it the least accessible to the public.
        Brian Strawn and Karla Sierralta also created a vast underground sanctuary in Dual Memory, the least abstract of the designs. Beneath its street-level garden of sugar maples was a subterranean chamber, where heartbreaking images of the lives lost rotated on glass walls. Water would continuously flow down the walls.
        Another final entry, Bradley Campbell and Matthias Neumann's Lower Waters, envisioned a waterfall dropping into a shallow pool. Yet, their street-level space, which included a memorial museum rising from the north tower and a garden on the south tower, was not as focused; the blockish museum obscured the north-tower footprint rather than honoring it.
        The other designs used the garden as a metaphor for renewal and continuation. Both Norman Lee and Michael Lewis' Votives in Suspension and Toshio Sasaki's Inversion of Light were austere and minimal, losing emotional intensity. Lee and Lewis' design imagined 2,982 votive candles, each with a symbolic flame representing a victim, hanging at different levels in semienclosed subterranean spaces where the towers once stood; only narrow slits of sunlight outlining each footprint would penetrate these hidden spaces. At street level would be a park where visitors could view the exposed slurry wall remaining on the western edge of the site.
        Sasaki's Inversion of Light visualized the north tower's wall with a curtain of clear, thick glass on which the names of victims would be etched. A representative floor plan (the only image from an original tower in any design) would be illuminated from below. The South Tower would be symbolized by a reflecting pool above a circle of lights. The lights would reflect toward the sky. In the winter, the heat of the lights would vaporize the water and create an image of flames.
        With the competition over, the real work begins. The jury has agreed that all 5,201 memorial entries should be put on public display as soon as possible. Working out the details of the winning design by 2009 is the next step, at an estimated cost of $350,000. How the construction and maintenance will be paid for is still under debate. Building and preserving a site exposed to the elements and to thousands of visitors a year will be challenging. The final plan will have to reflect the practical aspects necessary to allow the memorial to stand for a long, long time. What's most significant is that a competition has yielded a memorial design that aspires to convey death and regeneration so future generations can remember and learn.