New Jersey has announced the winner of a memorial dedicated to residents who died in the WTC attacks, one Frederic Schwartz. If this is a familiar name, it’s because he was recently announced as the designer of a memorial in Westchester County (titled, ‘The Rising’ perhaps to appeal to the New Jersey jury?). And he was a member of the THINK design team that most everyone believed would ‘win’ the site concept competition (because one of the three designs they submitted received a plurality of the public voting).
The Times provides the details, and some insight into just how rudderless their criticism is sans Muschamp. Clearly respecting the clout of the Families of September 11 they take pains to quote a representative who declares the salient differences between the New Jersey and New York approaches quite concisely: “it will be above ground and the families of the victims chose the design.” Well, I guess we can tell what the FO911 thinks of Mr. Arad. And they reproduce a submission brief comment that the type used for the unavoidable wall of names is Times New Roman “a familiar and easy-to-read typeface.” Particularly to users of Microsoft worldwide.
Schwartz had previously displayed a design concept on his site for Hoboken (or so my memory dictates) that would be a glass wall with a ramp that rose from side to side, the wall parallel to the river, so you would see the empty (for now) site through the wall, and could progress up the ramp, reading, presumably, the 700 names. If was a far more elegant solution. The selected idea is two parallel stainless steel walls that run along an visual axis that terminates at the WTC site, the effect being that when you approach it along the viewing axis, the image of the Twin Towers will be recreated. The concept may be laudable, but viewed from any other angle, the effect is somewhat fearsome and oppresive. And the remainder of the site seems rather slapdash. I’m trying to avoid seeming callous or crass here, but as the number of satellite memorials continue to be announced, some in view of the proposed site memorial, do we go down the road of making each location-specific site the only place a name is displayed? Using the logic of this memorial suggests we should we develop a Manhattan-specific site as well. Isn’t this Balkanization (particularly as it encroaches visually on the site itself) counter to what supposedly seperates us from them, that so many disparate peoples collected and worked together each day in relative harmony?
Lend me some sugar, I will be your neighbor.
Brooklyn development blah blah, gentrification drives out all the artists blah blah, what’s next a Starbucks? Blah blah. I clearly have nothing to add; I really just wanted an excuse to write that headline. Props to Curbed for two, two relevant cultural references in one hed. We just enjoy being juvenile once in a while.