Reflecting Absence
Michael Arad and Peter Walker's Reflecting Absence consists of a field of trees interrupted by two large voids containing recessed pools, marking the footprints of the Twin Towers. The deciduous trees (swamp white oaks) are arranged in rows, forming informal clusters, clearings and groves. The park is at street level, sitting above the Memorial Museum. The World Trade Center site is a bathtub, as the area was excavated to construct the original World Trade Center and the earth was used to build Battery Park City, a neighboring residential community.
The names of the victims of the attacks (including those from the Pentagon, American Airlines flight 77, and United Airlines flight 93) and the 1993 bombing are inscribed on the parapets surrounding the waterfalls, in an arrangement based on "meaningful adjacencies".
A portion of the Slurry Wall (approximately half of what Daniel Libeskind originally wanted to preserve), originally designed to hold back the Hudson River, will be maintained in the Museum.
Read more about this topic: World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition
Famous quotes containing the words reflecting and/or absence:
“Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“So far as discipline is concerned, freedom means not its absence but the use of higher and more rational forms as contrasted with those that are lower or less rational.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)