Talking With NYC 9/11 Memorial Designer Michael Arad ’91 (Inhabitat)

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“There are two important design objectives for me in thinking about the site, and one was to make absence sort of tangible and visible, and that sense of that violent rupture that occurred here; finding a way to capture that and that sense of ongoing absence and emptiness,” says Michael Arad ’91, designer of the National September 11 Memorial, in an interview with the website Inhabitat.

“It started with a sketch of shearing the Hudson River to form two square voids, and it translated to these two memorial pools on the plaza, which break the surface of this big flat plaza and plunge deep down into the ground.

“Another key idea to this memorial was that it would be a public space at grade—that it would be open and civic and democratic and would bring people together here at the site. And that came out of my own experiences here in New York in places like Washington Square and Union Square, which acted as sites for impromptu memorials immediately after the attack, but even more importantly, acted as places for us to gather and respond as a community.”

Read the full story, published 9/11/15 by Inhabitat.

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