Traducción arquitectura

 
[pic]
Design After 9/11
The memorial and plaza—the first features of the World Trade Center to open after the attacks—reveal the politics and psychology imperative to the redesign.
By: Ben Adler
 
Copy

Ten years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, roughly half of the eight-acre memorial plaza designed to take its place is a fenced-off hole in theground. The underground memorial museum and its above-ground steel-and-glass pavilion are still under internal construction. There is less still to the commercial portion of the 16-acre site, where half-clad skyscrapers stand among ditches awaiting foundations to be poured. On the 10th anniversary of the attacks, the World Trade Center is very much a work in progress.
The memorial and its plaza weredesigned for three functions: to give Lower Manhattan some much-needed public space, to commemorate the city’s loss of the Twin Towers and the people who perished in them, and to serve as a breathtaking icon of renewal. The memorial and a section of the plaza will open for the 10th anniversary of the attacks, with the museum, pavilion and remainder of the plaza set to open next year.
Yet for allthe time it will take to re-open the World Trade Center, it may take much longer for New Yorkers to decide what to make of it. How the memorial and plaza will fit into Manhattan will depend as much on what the city brings to it as what it brings to the city.
Case in point: Before the stainless steel cladding was added to the memorial pavilion, construction workers on the site mistook thepavilion’s shaded, striped glass for a U.S. flag design. “It was like breaking their heart to say no,” says Ann Lewison, project manager for Snøhetta, which designed the pavilion. “It’s interesting to work on a site where people bring their own meaning.”
When the first visitors arrive this fall, there will be other incomplete features that call for interpretation. Over a decade of development, the city hasintroduced its share of changes and delays to the site—some for prosaic reasons of cost and security, others owing to the sensitive nature of the site and the many stewards overseeing its multiple functions.
One proposal would have used the opportunity to entirely revise the neighborhood: a suggestion to sink part of the West Side Highway, which divides the World Trade Center site from the WorldFinancial Center. The memorial plaza would have then extended to World Financial, connecting it and Battery Park City to the rest of Lower Manhattan. Yet the idea came too soon after Boston’s Big Dig; nearby businesses complained to City Hall about the prospects of sinking tens of billion of dollars and years of construction into moving the highway underground.
Ultimately, a comparatively simpleWorld Trade Center master plan emerged. On the 10th anniversary of the attacks, visitors will be able to go right up to where the Twin Towers stood, read the names of the deceased, and take in the dramatic, flat stone boxes of the buildings’ footprints—now smooth waterfalls. But no decision along the way has been easy.
Designing the Memorial
Few subjects in architecture are more contentious andintensely emotional than the representation of historical memory. Michael Arad, AIA, of Handel Architects, who with landscape architect Peter Walker designed the winning proposal for the 9/11 memorial, says that the presentation of victims’ names required multiple revisions. Every victim’s family has a stake in how their loved one is remembered; by no means do all of their interests align.Initially, Arad and Walker’s design called for a ramp that would wind down around one of the pools to a series of underground galleries with the names of the lost inscribed on the walls. That plan for the inscriptions had to be scrapped: Enclosed galleries would be difficult to outfit with security features. Egress for large crowds in the case of an emergency presented another concern. Arad agreed...