THE LIMITS OF DESIGN

Like 5,201 other designers, I submitted a plan for the World Trade Center Memorial Competition a decade ago.  And like all but eight, mine was not among the finalists. 

I never entered the competition expecting to win anything, only to be part of something.  A resolution perhaps, or maybe just a chance to come to terms with my own feelings about the event.  But even as I worked on it, I wondered if the burden of this particular challenge was something I really wanted to bear.  Could any design really achieve what it was meant to in this overwhelming case? 

The more I worked tried, the more I began to see that when it comes to an event on the scale of 9/11, no experiences, talents, or resources are up to the task.

Tragedies have a way of making us all equals.

I spent the month of June back in 2003 revisiting the events, absorbing the facts, working out a concept, sketching ideas, making models, calculating distances, doing drawings, and finally preparing a presentation.  Doing, in other words, what a designer does.  The creators of the competition were precise in their directions, which meant dealing with a 40-page document outlining the hopes, goals, limits, needs, mission, deadlines, and conditions for each submission.  Absorbing all this was tough enough and I can see why only a third of the people who registered ever submitted final entries.

Most of my work appears on paper and screens, measured in feet or inches, seen by handfuls of people at one time.  Yet here was a space roughly the size of four football fields that would have to accommodate many thousands of visitors at once.  How to ensure that visitors to the site did not feel lost or diminished?  How to create a memorial that would never seem crowded but not appear vacant?  How to address the monumentality of the event itself?

All the numbers connected with 9/11 were unimaginable: 13.4 million square feet destroyed, 23 buildings damaged, 1.8 million tons of debris. 3,016 men, women, and children from 92 countries lost their lives.  But numbers can numb and one of the first steps for me was to put them out of my mind and think only of the number one.  The one person who might come to this site and know it as a memorial and try to find some kind of solace there.

The technical challenges were one thing; the emotional and psychological ones were of a far greater magnitude.  The needs of so many different groups had to be considered...the loss of the victims, the grieving of the families, the memories of the survivors, the sacrifices of the rescuers.  Not to mention the desire for connection and closure by all visitors now and forever.  The guidelines emphasized honor and remembrance, grief and loss, celebration and inspiration.   They referred to ”a place made sacred through tragic loss.”

All those urgencies and hopes, and all under the overarching burden of memory.  I knew that a great design could lift the heart, but could it mend one as well?  Could it also heal a wound, cure a catastrophe, console a city, or expect to raise the spirit of the whole wide world?  Could a single design for a memorial, no matter how brilliant, possibly encompass all these?  Could mine?

Perhaps this kind of thing reaches the limits of design.

The memorial has been open for a year and people go there.  I have not visited yet; perhaps I do not want to conclude my own process yet.  In any case, whether it accomplishes what everyone needed will take longer to decide.  One thing is certain...the memorial will not work for everyone.  But it will be one more step in the invention of the future, the rebirth of this perpetual city.  The evolution of the possible.

That much at least is within the realm of what designers can do.