What many of us remember of the day are the images—horrendous—replayed endlessly and mechanically on television. A fireball. Then another. Smoke billowing into a pale blue sky. Tiny figures tumbling groundward. Then the Twin Towers, tremendous pillars, collapsing into jagged wrecks of steel and concrete. Dust choking the air like some terrible blizzard. We came home early from school and watched the news, the towers falling again and again for days.
I visited the site a little more than a year after the fact. It was a stop on a driving tour through Manhattan led by an old cop, a friend of a friend of my father’s. My first time in the city. My brother and I sat in the backseat of the policeman’s squad car, a timeworn Chevrolet Caprice, robin’s-egg blue. The cop was a chain-smoker who, miraculously, took long drags on his cigarette but never exhaled. He had, no doubt, lost friends in the attack. The site was a gaping void glimpsed briefly through a gap in construction fencing. I looked and there was nothing to see.
The site’s emptiness was irresistible to architects: the masterplan competition received more than four hundred proposals. Daniel Libeskind rode a wave of patriotic feeling to win the contest, his scheme anchored by the 1,776-foot tall “Freedom Tower,” a colossal gimmick. The new One World Trade Center topped out in 2013, designed by David Childs of SOM. Though it fills the patch of skyline vacated by the fallen towers, Childs’s skyscraper does not itself make much of a monument. The design is so bland that one ultimately feels nothing in looking at it. Memorials by their nature never satisfy completely, standing as they do in place of something once cherished and now lost. But the worst are those that offer a vapid something in place of meaningful nothing.
This image did not win any competitions, but it has stuck with me all the while, more provocative and more difficult than any of the better-publicized proposals. Here, the lost Twin Towers are reincarnated as many towers, all cloaked in blue-gray camouflage and huddled around the vacant World Trade Center site like a mourning family. It is a sly image that these days nevertheless strikes a melancholic tone. It inverts the generic expectations of a memorial. Refusing to install a legible symbol on the site of unfathomable loss, it instead makes a monument of invisibility itself. The image was authored by Michael Meredith, now of MOS Architects, but originally published under a pseudonym—Meredith Michaels.
