Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're Inside the ICE House. Our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership and vision and global business. The dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs and harness the engine of capitalism. Right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's exchanges and clearing houses around the world. And now welcome, Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
Given our proximity here at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, to what many people born more than 30 years ago, knew as the World Trade Center. We're devoting two special episodes to remember and reflect on the 9/11 attacks as it affected us both here in New York City and in a broader way around the world. So as we think about Lower Manhattan, I made my usual city bike ride this morning from the West Village through Tribeca and finishing up at a bike rack at the corner of Albany and Greenwich Streets. The last site on that route, one that always leads to some introspection was the 9/11 Memorial.
Josh King:
Twenty years ago on a bright crisp September day, I was living in Washington DC, with my wife. We had no kids back then, so my routine was pretty simple. Get dressed and walk down Connecticut Avenue to my office, near the White House where I'd worked just a few years before. Heading south, I looked in the window of an appliance store and saw the World Trade Center towers in flame. Then looking up, I saw streams of White House staffers, their blue security passes jangling around their necks hurriedly walking toward me. I made a U-turn and joined their throng heading out of harm's way, presumably. It's safe to say the world has been a different place ever since. Memorials are often built to enshrine victories or mourn defeats, but many modern monuments also cement a moment in our national identity. Serving as a reminder of how and why this moment should be immortalized.
Josh King:
They're complex and collective civic undertakings that ensure that they memorialize critical periods in our historic consciousness. The architect and designer of the 9/11 Memorial is my friend Michael Arad. His intent, as he's said in the past was to show in the Towers absence, people could still find meaning. The plunging waterfalls in the footprints of the Twin Towers, invite introspection as they did for me today. The names of almost 3,000 victims are inscribed in parapets along the pool, forcing people to reckon with the individual stories and people that were lost on that autumn day, almost 20 years ago.
Josh King:
Michael's vision has helped shape the discourse surrounding 9/11 and how we remember it here in New York City. As one of his first major projects, it was an incredible undertaking, but his meticulous approach was reflected through every step of the process ensuring that even 20 years on, we pause to remember that moment. The project along with this other work has redefined the role of public spaces in our lives and reminds us of the power of reflection and community. Our conversation with Michael Arad is coming up right at after this.
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Josh King:
Our guest today, Michael Arad, is a partner at Handel Architects LLP. His design for the National September 11th Memorial at the World Trade Center was selected from more than 5,000 entries submitted in international competition. He grew up across Israel, the United Kingdom, the US and Mexico, and earned his degrees at Dartmouth and the Georgia Institute of Technology. In 2006, Michael was one of six recipients of the Young Architects Award of the American Institute of Architects. Michael's also been selected to design the Memorial to the victims of the 2015 Charleston church massacre at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in South Carolina. Michael, welcome Inside the ICE House.
Michael Arad:
Thank you.
Josh King:
I talked about how I experience your work most mornings, 20 years on as you walk by, how do you experience it?
Michael Arad:
It has certainly changed over time. The Memorial was dedicated almost 10 years ago on the 10th anniversary of that attack and everything leading up to it was charged with so much emotion and difficulty. And since then, I've finally been able to sort of step back and actually see and reflect on what we've built. For the first few years, all I could see is, a misaligned joint here, something that I wish could be just a little bit different there. But the passage of time has allowed me to sort of, kind of zoom out and look at the big picture and see how the site is now a living part of New York and how it welcomes people every day. And that's very rewarding. A few years, actually, after the memorial was dedicated, the construction fences that had surrounded it found they came down and they came down without any found fair announcement. And you can probably remember how previous to that moment, anybody who wanted to visit the memorial actually had to arrange for a time ticket, go through security screening, go through this sort of long fenced enclosure to emerge onto the plaza.
Michael Arad:
And that was appropriate it for the time. We built the memorial ahead of the streets and sidewalks that surround it, and that's highly unusual, but it was important to mark that 10th anniversary. But it meant that everybody who visited the memorial at that time was there for one sole purpose, an important purpose, but I'd always conceived of the memorial as a public space that brings together multiple constituencies. That the people who live in this neighborhood, that the people that work in the office tower surrounding it, and the people that come to visit this memorial almost as a modern pilgrimage site. All coexist on this plaza together and bring meaning to the experience of visiting the site.
Michael Arad:
The names that are inscribed around those pools are names of people who lived and worked here. And I think there's something incredibly powerful about seeing those names, while being surrounded by other people who live and work here.
Josh King:
We're going to get into many of the features during our conversation, but the memorial has more than 400 swamp white oak trees that dot the site in its many green and open spaces. Is the idea that life in the city continues to grow and move forward?
Michael Arad:
Yes. And if I can step back a second and talk about that connection to the city and to its life. The original old competition guidelines actually called for this eight acre site, which was half of the original 16 acre World Trade Center. A super block that was created in the 1960s and '70s to be set some 60 feet below the surrounding street level. You probably recall the recovery effort that ended almost a year after the attack and it ended when the site, which was a six story high pile of rubble was carefully removed and to reveal the lowest basement within the World Trade Center complex. There were parking levels below that plaza that was created back then. And it revealed this slurry wall, which had been buried and hidden from site for decades.
Michael Arad:
And I think there was something very powerful about revealing that slurry wall that held the Hudson River and the master planner for the site, Daniel Libeskind wanted to preserve that in an open air environment. And when I approached the competition and I sent in a proposal, it was almost sort of polemical. Like writing a letter to the editor saying, "This is the wrong direction." The right direction in my mind was to try and integrate this site back into the life of the city to make it ... To knit it back into the urban fabric. And so I sent in a proposal that actually brought the site up to grade, up 60 feet to meet the surrounding streets and sidewalks. And that decision was influenced by being here in New York after the attack, by seeing how important places like Union Square and Washington Square were, and that they provided us with a place to come together as New Yorkers to respond to what we had seen, not alone, but together.
Michael Arad:
And I think in doing so, we build these spaces, they in turn build us. It changed the way or it affected or directed the way in which we responded to that attack. I think the people who perpetrated this attack hoped to sow fear and division, and I think that our ability to come together in public spaces allowed us to respond with compassion and stoicism and bravery. And I had never seen the city or this country as united as it had in the aftermath of that attack. So to me, that incredible power of public space, to do that, to change how we understand events, to change how we understand our place in society. I was here on a foreign worker's visa, it made me an American and a New Yorker for the first time, that we response.
Michael Arad:
I went out and bought an American flag and hung it off my window in the East village, because I felt for the first time that I was part of this community and I can trace it almost to a very specific moment. A couple of nights after the attack, when I made my way to Washington Square Park and stood two or three in the morning around that fountain in the middle of the park next to a complete stranger but I felt connected to that person. And when I walked up to that circle and stood side by side with that person, all of a sudden, the burden of comprehending and understanding, responding to what I had seen, felt somewhat lightened. Not that that burden went away, but it was something that we could approach together. And so, that's why I thought it was so important when looking at the World Trade Center site to actually make it a public space like Washington Square, like Union Square because I believe that these spaces form our understanding and our response.
Josh King:
Your dad was a diplomat. And just to do a little progression from our conversation, coming back to the current moment for a minute. What are your thoughts as you watch the news of diplomats, soldiers, pilots working around the clock to secure the safe passage of US citizens and refugees out of Kabul?
Michael Arad:
My father wasn't just a diplomat. He was a refugee. He grew up in Romania during the second World War. He was among the fortunate ones. Most of his family survived and they immigrated after the war to Israel. He was settled initially in a tent and then in a little tin hut before they finally settled in a town halfway between Tel Aviv and Haifa, [inaudible 00:12:46], as refugees. His mother, my grandmother never learned how to speak Hebrew. So she spent decades in a place that was foreign to her. So as I look at the news in Afghanistan, I see people experiencing trauma and displacement in a way that I can relate to quite easily.
Josh King:
In an interview, you mentioned that you once considered, for all that journey, actually becoming a lawyer and as a creative guy, it makes sense that you scraped that plan, even though I'm sure a background in law mixed with creativity could have been helpful as you navigated the intricacies of New York City construction codes. What drew you originally to design and architecture?
Michael Arad:
Yeah. Let's just restate the promise here. I think my parents always thought I would be a great lawyer. And my father took his law degree in directions that most lawyers don't. He worked at the Ministry of Justice and then as an Israeli diplomat abroad. And I think on some level, the idea for working as an Israeli diplomat appealed to me. I studied government at Dartmouth. I interned at the Israeli embassy at one of the most historic moments, the summers of '93, and '94, when the peace agreements were signed between Israel and the PLO. And then with Jordan, I remember being in charge of the delegation of Israeli press and kind of chaperoning from the White House to the State Department, it was incredibly exciting.
Michael Arad:
But while I was at Dartmouth, I also started to take a lot of classes in art history, studio art. I've always been drawn to that. I credit my mom with taking me to museums as a kid again and again. And what initially was probably a reluctance became an acquired taste and something that I appreciated greatly. So by the time I finished college, I didn't really think I was at a fork in the road, but I applied to law school in Israel, didn't get in the first time I applied and ended up being a ski bump for a year out in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. And I took that year to take that test again, but also to prepare a portfolio of the work that I did as an undergraduate and applied to graduate schools in architecture. And it was real like fork in the road, law, school, and Israel, work. Actually, architecture school in the US, in no small part, having a girlfriend who's now my wife that was living here helped sway the scales and the direction of staying here in the US and studying architecture.
Josh King:
So let's travel back a little bit to the moments and the weeks, years around the competition to develop the design. You talked about your visits to the other iconic open spaces in New York City. The design that you initially created resulted in this, I guess, 30 inch by 40 inch poster delivered to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation committee long before these submissions were done digitally. What did you include in that initial design and what were you trying to convey?
Michael Arad:
I actually started thinking about a memorial long before this competition. And at the time, I wasn't actually thinking about a memorial at the World Trade Center site. In part, because of that six story high pile of rubble that the bodies were still being pulled out of, that was still smoldering. And it just felt too soon to contemplate what should actually happen here at this site. It felt like a wound that was too sensitive to touch. And so I was drawn a little bit further west to the Hudson River, and I imagined a memorial there that was somewhat inexplicable. I imagined somehow the surface of the river being shore and open, forming two square voids and the water cascading into these empty spaces, but failing to fill them up over the passage of time.
Michael Arad:
And I was kind of obsessed with this idea and I sketched it, but I found myself all of a sudden with a lot of free time on my hand because my work visa expired and what should have been a routine renewal of that, for another three year term, was delayed as the INS was folded into Homeland Security. And so I had plenty of time to actually take those ideas and sketches and ended up building a small model made of plexiglass using a pump that was repurposed from some little desktop fountain. I went to an architectural model shop in the Garment District. I think they were under the mistaken impression that I was still working at KPF, when I showed up there, but graciously, they let me use their laser cutter and helped me assemble this little desktop fountain that tried to materialize that I idea of those two square voids in the river.
Michael Arad:
And I ended up building this so fountain that did create that visual effect of these two voids, the water cascaded into them into sort of the hidden chamber below that, and then was pumped back up. So you had that surface of water with those empty spaces in them, and ended up taking that little model and putting it on the rooftop of my apartment building in the East Village, where I'd actually witnessed the second plane as it crashed into the South Tower. And I photographed it against that skyline, against the missing towers that I could see mirrored and reflected in those two voids. And then I took that model and put it on a high shelf and set it aside. But I came back to it a year later, when the competition was announced.
Michael Arad:
And I think there are really two basic fundamental ideas that underpinned the memorial design. One of which I'd already talked about, which is how important it is for to be a public space, that is knit back into the urban fabric. That is a place that welcomes all of these different constituencies, that allows us when we visit the memorial to do that both in New York City, but also as part of a sort of a broader public. The second idea was, how do you make our absence visible and tangible? And that was the idea behind that initial exploration of the memorial voids and the Hudson River. And I thought, "Can I bring them to the site now and use them to mark the footprints of the towers and surround them with the names of those that we lost?"
Michael Arad:
So that was what was on that initial kind a petition board. It was a couple of photographs of that first model. It was a couple renderings, one showing the plaza at grade, the other, showing a series of memorial galleries, right at the edge of the pool, where you would encounter the names. And I believe that, that moment of approaching the edge of that void and seeing the hundreds of names around each void is the most powerful moment in a visit to this memorial.
Josh King:
Competition, ultimately selects yours out of 5,201 other submissions, an important component of that as you talked about was the names which were cut with lasers into these 76 sloping bronze panels that run in this long, continuous railing along the pool. You've spoken about how arranging the names and creating what you called meaningful adjacency was critical to your vision, and also an exceptionally difficult thing to accomplish. What were the challenges you faced with making sure the names were presented in the right way and how did you overcome those?
Michael Arad:
It was certainly not an easy task and this idea of meaningful adjacency was something that came up early in the process, but was dismissed by the LMDC as utopian or unimplementable. In part, I think because LMDC was contending with demands from so many different family groups. At that point, by 2004, when the design was selected, a lot of those relationships were fairly fractious. And here I come in and say, "Let's reach out to each and every family member to participate in this process." And it just felt like that was something that wasn't in their bandwidth to deal with. And I was asked to come up with a different arrangement. I just could not think of another way of arranging the names that would let alone have the poetry of reaching out to families, that would actually just be equitable. Something as simple as an alphabetical arrangement, privileges, some relationships and not others.
Michael Arad:
And my wife and I don't share the same last name in alphabetical listing, if we were on that list, would've separated us. Even something as straightforward as an alphabetical listing, would not find a way of distinguishing between different people who share the same name. And there are three Michael Lynch's who are commemorated on the memorial. So there had to be a way of letting people who visit the memorial know, which marker belongs to which person. So in the absence of another way of arranging the name that I could think of, with a very heavy heart, I suggested that we bring no order to the arrangement and let the haphazard brutality of that day be reflected in the name's arrangement. But it was incredibly difficult to make that suggestion, knowing full well, that families that travel together on the planes, fathers and sons that worked together in the office buildings would be separated.
Michael Arad:
But what happened, and I don't think everybody understood how powerfully important this was to family members. So fundraising for the memorial essentially came to standstill for two years. There was so much controversy surrounding this. There was no buy-in from families, of course. And it took two years for this issue to be revisited because it had to wait for Michael Bloomberg, who was mayor at the time to take on the role of chairman of the Memorial Foundation. And this was one of the first things he wanted to resolve, once he took on that role in 2006. The mayor is famously a data driven guy. And at our first meeting with him to discuss this very issue, he had a lot of questions about the information that we were trying to convey. What if we used this type of abbreviation or that type of order, what would be the consequences of that?
Michael Arad:
And what came out of these conversations with the mayor and with his Deputy Patti Harris, was the idea of grouping the names into nine broad categories, which reflected people were that day geographically. So you have the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. You have the four flights, you have the 93 victims, who were commemorated on the plaza and are commemorated in this memorial too. And you have the first responders who in turn are grouped by where they came from, from the same precinct, building, from the same firehouse. At that point, I asked the mayor, if we could revisit this idea of meaningful adjacency within this rubric. So some of these groups like World Trade Center have hundreds of names in them, whether it's at the North Pool or the South Pool.
Michael Arad:
We were given a green light to explore this idea, if you think about it, if we were to get a thousand requests and only be able to resolve half of them, we would have now created a sense of division. And some people got something and some people didn't and any politician is averse to those situations. The mayor gave us opportunity to try this. And we didn't know how we would approach it. I mean, we had some ideas, we didn't even know how many requests we would get. And it was only in late 2009 that letters finally went out to family members, asking them to verify spelling, nicknames. However, they wanted the name of their loved one to be inscribed, but also to share with us any meaningful adjacencies.
Michael Arad:
And we got over 1,200 requests and we went to work on arranging the names. We thought we would be able to work with a computer algorithm that would kind of carry all of those requests and help us to arrange it. But at the end of the day, we found out that it was one person with their eye had a better ability to both resolve this issue graphically, so that there was a consistent density and visual appearance to the names as they traveled from panel to panel, to panel to sort of create that archipelago of violence that lined the memorial panels and to address the adjacency request. And even, where no adjacency request was made, we tried to work with people who knew the deceased and the people who they worked with to bring names together that would've been together that day.
Michael Arad:
This task fell to a young woman. Amanda Sachs, who worked at our office and she basically used quarter scale printouts of each name and these cardboard panels, which were about two and a half feet long, stand-ins for the 10 foot wide panels that we have on the memorial and arranged the names in one arrangement, took a picture, tried it again. We did not want to create any unintentional breaks between sections, except where it was important to end one group and begin another group. In doing so we also became aware of the nature of some of these requests, and we could have imagined some of them, but others, we never would've anticipated. There's one example that I keep going back to because it's just so powerful.
Michael Arad:
It's the family for a young woman who lost her father that day. He was on Flight 11, which crashed into the North Tower and she lost her best friend from college who was working at the North Tower. And so we were able to place his name among the last ones under Flight 11 and her friend's name among the first ones under World Trade Center. And when that family visits the memorial, I think it's very meaningful for them to see those two names next to each other. But when I share that story with you, all of a sudden that abstraction of close to 3,000 dead recedes. And you focus on the story of one young woman and the effect of that day on her life. And I think that's very important that we are able to convey those moments to visitors to the memorial.
Michael Arad:
There are a variety of ways in which we can do that. The Memorial Foundation has worked with StoryCorps to record oral histories that visitors can listen to when they stand in front of a particular panel. There are 76 panels around each pool. So let's say you're standing in front of panel S for South 15, you can look up on your phone information about that panel. You can see those hidden adjacency requests that are revealed on the phone. The nature of them might be shared through a recording that's available. It was almost like a way of allowing for other people to come in and use that arrangement to share information with other people. And I think that was important for the design of them memorial in general, to leave it open-ended enough, that other people can find ways to enrich the experience of visiting this memorial.
Michael Arad:
One of the things that emerged, which I couldn't have anticipated is, was one of the docents that volunteers at the site. The idea of putting a white rose on a person's birthday at their name. And that happens every day of the year, obviously. And it's a powerful, a beautiful gesture. I can't take any credit for that, obviously, but it emerged because there was the ability for the public to define ways of developing rituals of remembrance and commemoration.
Josh King:
You talked about the Hudson River, as you thought about your initial approach to designing the memorial and water is this critical element to the memorial. When viewed from above you watch these streams of water fall down into the pool below, but as they descend, they sort of disappear and combine into this one powerful fall. What role does water play in the design and how does it interact with the other elements?
Michael Arad:
Yeah, so that moment of the clarity of each individual stream, as it comes off the edge of the weir, and then gets subsumed in this curtain of water is something that spoke to me about my desire for this memorial to both commemorate individual loss, but also collective loss. I never could have imagined that our fountain designer, Dan Euser would find such a beautiful way of materializing that sort of latent impulse within the design. And I think that's part of any design process, is that you sort of have broad goals and directions, but throughout the process of refining that design of going from idea to reality, there are so many opportunities to ... And so many different channels, in which that design could take shape and form.
Josh King:
What was that engineering design aha-moment that Dan and you and the team had when he came to you and said, "We can work the water in such a way as it creates this."
Michael Arad:
Dan had to build a full scale mock up of the corner of the pool. So it was 30 feet tall, 15 by 15 feet in length, at each corner because you can't scale down the behavior of water. You have to actually build something full scale in order to understand the influences of various things on how that water will behave. In his, let's call it workshop, which was really ... He ended up building it in his backyard, because this was such an enormous piece of fabrication. There were so many different profiles for the serration at the edge of the weir. Initially, we looked with the water as a-
Josh King:
A weir is?
Michael Arad:
You've seen weirs on a dam, for example. It's the edge that the water spills over.
Josh King:
Yeah.
Michael Arad:
And at the 9/11 Memorial, you'll see there, they've sort of tapered fingers about an inch and a half on center, made of aluminum. So that profile kind of feathers out to nothing at the top of the weir, but then that 45 degree angle that the water drops off, that metal edge. Those weir fingers, let's call them that, kind of develop a higher and higher height that ends up separating the water that comes ... There's about an inch of water that comes over the top of the weir into individual streams. And Dan looked at so many different densities for those weir fingers. So many different dimensions and geometries before we ended up with that. So there was a whole process of exploration and Dan has been designing fountains for decades and I'm working with him right now, actually on the design of the name's fountain of the Emanuel Nine Memorial. But you still need to explore, you still need to develop. You still need to test. Each condition is different and there's something to be learned from that process.
Josh King:
After the break, we'll dive deeper into the lessons from the 9/11 Memorial. Michael's work on a new public memorial and where the future goes from here. That's all coming up right after this.
Speaker 3:
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Josh King:
Welcome back before the break, Michael Arad partner at Handle Architects LLP and the architect of the National September 11th Memorial at the World Trade Center and I were discussing his background, his design and the need for monuments and memorials for moments like this. Seldom Michael, does a designer get to go back to his work and make meaningful changes, but you had that opportunity to expand on the 9/11 Memorial, to recognize the thousands of men and women who came from across the country and the world to respond to the crisis. In 2019, you and Peter Walker completed the Memorial Glade, which included a pathway flanked by six large stones ranging from 13 to 18 tons and inlaid with steel from the World Trade Center. Why was this such an important addition to the original design?
Michael Arad:
The original design failed on some level to recognize the loss of life from 9/11 illnesses. It was a terrible emission. I don't think any of us had an inkling of the toll that 9/11 illnesses will have taken on our community, and there are estimates that the number of people that will die of 9/11 illnesses will exceed the number of people who perished that day. And in many ways their deaths are, and I hate to enter into this sort of calculus of suffering, but the attention that this country and the world had to those who died that day disappeared by the time, we looked at the number of people who die weekly now of 9/11 related illnesses. And they feel isolated, their suffering has been going on for years or decades in some cases.
Michael Arad:
And I remember talking to somebody who told me that when they visited the memorial, they did not feel that there was a place on the memorial for them. And that was heart breaking for me because I thought that we had designed a place that was welcoming to all. And fortunately, we were asked to rectify that mistake, and it's a very different charge. The names of those who perished that day are known, the names of people who are dying and might die next year from 9/11 illnesses are not known. And there is no sort of total tally of all the people who have been affected by 9/11 illnesses.
Michael Arad:
So we had to find a different approach to this commemoration. It was clear that anything that was going to be next to the pools was not going to work. And we looked around at the memorial plaza and my eye was drawn to the Memorial Glade, an element that was part of the design from the beginning, but really was not in use because the amount of foot traffic across the memorial and the lawns that formed the Memorial Glade prohibited the use of that space, other than once a year. In the afternoon of 9/11, that area was open to the public and it was intensely used, but only for one day a year. So I thought, "Can we take this beautiful design eye element and actually make it part of the day to day life of the memorial by creating a new path through it?" And have these monoliths flank that path, almost like markers that erupt out of the plaza, everything else around the 9/11 Memorial has a certain flatness to it. That's very intentional, the two voids reed against that field, and this is one place where we looked in a different direction. We tried to use the materials that are there already, that stone paving of the plaza, but in a way that was very different.
Michael Arad:
Instead of these pavers, which are about a foot by five foot, we have these enormous monoliths, that are eight feet by 15 feet, and they seem to erupt out of the plaza to sort of point skywards to offer resistance. They're bruised, they're battered, but they're strong. And they're tied together with these sinews of World Trade Center steel that was recovered from the site. This design process was also very different. I sat with members of this community and through many design meetings, and it was both taxing and rewarding emotionally at the same time. And I'm incredibly grateful for this opportunity. It was an enormous responsibility and the weight of it was something that I feel privileged to have been involved in this process.
Michael Arad:
When the Memorial Glade open on the day that commemorates the end of the recovery effort, it was very powerful to be there and to see that. In a way, it was different than the experience I had when we dedicated the memorial. I felt closer and more connected to the people that I worked with who came to this opening. And it was so meaningful for them. And to see these photographs of a group of people all standing there, touching these monoliths together, it was powerful and rewarding.
Josh King:
Tragically, Michael, the events of 20 years ago aren't the last thing that required memorialization in our country. In 2015, 9 members of the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina were murdered during Bible study in a dark moment of this country's history. The church grounds have been reimagined, in order to create a national memorial honoring the survivors and victims of it. You and your firm have been selected to lead the building and design of this memorial. Talk a little bit about how you approached that project, where you drew the inspiration from and where the project now stands.
Michael Arad:
We suffer tragedies as a nation so frequently, but there was something about what happened that day there that struck a chord in how monstrous it was. And then the next day, with the incredible grace shown by some of the family members towards the killer. The expression of forgiveness and faith. I don't think any of us could have imagined or understand. And I still struggle to understand, where that faith and forgiveness comes from, even though I've been intimately involved in this project for the last few years. When we were approached to participate in a vetting process for this, I felt, as if the very ground under me just disappeared.
Michael Arad:
It was I think, a Monday morning and I was at work and that call came in and I did not expect a call asking me to participate in this, but it was obvious that we had to, that we had to do whatever we could. And what was interesting is, that call did not ask us to propose any design. It asked for our understanding of forgiveness, our understanding of how you might go about addressing what happened here and addressing the underlying racism that is such a part of life in this country. And so that began a series of conversations that eventually led to our selection. There's this incredible pressure of the blank page. How do you respond? And almost as a way of deflecting that inevitable moment of contending with what the design would be. We struggled the fact that, we didn't even know where it would be.
Michael Arad:
I mean, there was no there, there for where a Memorial should be. When you go to the church today, you will see people leaving tributes in front of the front door of the church. You'll see tour buses going by people taking pictures of the church facade, but there is no receptacle for people to go to, and pour out their emotion and connect to the history of this site. So our first task was to figure out where we might build a memorial, and that led to the reconfiguring of the church grounds and trying to understand, could we frame the church in a way and its surroundings that would figuratively elevate the church grounds? The church is currently flanked to the right and left by some parking. And we were able to convince church leadership to allow us to take over that parking and to create on one side of the church, a memorial courtyard on the other side, a survivor's garden and at the center, the church.
Michael Arad:
It seems appropriate and goes to the very understanding that they had of the centrality of faith and church and community as they dealt with the legacy of that day, but also with the legacy of 200 years of history. And then we generated a variety of designs based on conversations that we had with survivors and with family members and friends of the deceased. We didn't hit it out of the park on the first go, it took a few turns at bat. And one of the initial designs that we proposed actually proved somewhat divisive because half the people who were in that room on the design committee that approved the design, loved it. And the other half were reluctant. It was clear that we could not just move forward with a majority or plurality that we had to have some unanimity on this process.
Michael Arad:
Initially, I was drawn to this idea of figural or presentation, which is something that I had never done, but it felt very important to me that when visitors to the site come here, they understand who was killed here. But as we moved forward, although we are commemorating the nine, we are also commemorating something bigger than that. We're commemorating the church and its beliefs and this congregation and its history by putting the nine figural representation is a proposal. It actually brought them to the front and pushed to the back some of the issues of forgiveness and faith and belief that were central to many people that were involved in this.
Michael Arad:
And we ended up with a design that I think is very much inspired. It's an analog to the church itself in some ways. It's these two large fellowship benches that sort of arc around creating a sheltering space with their high backs around a name's fountain. And the names of the nine are inscribed on this fountain. The source of this fountain is hidden and the water emerges from the bottom of this very large bowl through a crossed shaped opening. And so that rock and the flow of water and its religious connotations of blood and tears and faith and the rock of belief and foundation, all came from long conversations with many people. If that is sort of the central element of the memorial courtyard, there's another element in that courtyard that came from a request from one of the family members. He said, "This idea of community and congregation is very important, but we also want a place for quiet contemplative prayer too."
Michael Arad:
And so at the corner of that courtyard in a more hidden location or a more private location, I should say, is a contemplation fountain. A crucifix is on the wall above it, or I should say a cross sits on the wall above it. There's a place to kneel and prayer. And it is sort of more intimate and small to allow one to withdraw from that sort of larger communal space, that was important to create because I think community and congregation are at the heart of that history. And then on the other side of the memorial is the survivor's garden. It's marked by five live oak trees, for the five survivors and six benches, one for each survivor and one for the church itself. And those elements frame an open rectangle of lawn that's imagined as a space for, if the memorial courtyard is somber, this is meant to be more of a day to day life. And anything can happen here, whether it's kids running around on that lawn, a seminar being led with the circle of people on that lawn, or even a tent being erected there for a wedding ceremony. We want to see that being woven back into the life of the congregation.
Josh King:
Where does the project stand now? For people who are outside of Charleston, outside of South Carolina, how can they get involved, support, contribute?
Michael Arad:
Yeah. So I would direct everyone to Emanuelnine.org. They could see the design there. They can contribute there. The project has had some fundraising success this year with money from both the state and the city and the county, as well as a lot of private donations, large and small. We are kicking the project off right now. It had been at a standstill during a year of COVID, plus. But a couple weeks ago, I was up in a quarry in Vermont, looking at marble that we will likely use for the fellowship benches and the name's fountain. We've brought on board a series of engineers in consulting in the last month and a half, structural engineers, civil engineers, surveyors, geotech engineers, to analyze the soil on which we are building. So we brought Dan Euser on board a couple weeks ago for the fountain consulting. So that process is at the beginning, but-
Josh King:
Getting the old band back together.
Michael Arad:
Yeah. Well, it's a new band in some places, but it's nice to be working with Dan again.
Josh King:
Talking about the standstill and the year of COVID. In February, President Biden took a moment to lead Americans in a moment of silence to mourn the more than 500,000 Americans who have lost their lives to the pandemic. This crisis Michael, so far from over. But thinking about how we will remember this moment in history is very much a present concern. New York Magazine reached out in March and asked for design proposals for a temporary COVID-19 memorial. How do you answer that call and what was your vision for how people might consider the events of the past year and a half?
Michael Arad:
It's difficult to call and I was initially reluctant to suggest anything, and it was the way it was framed as a temporary memorial that allowed me an entry point into this project. Because I think as this pandemic still rages on, talk of commemoration feels premature. And unfortunately, we're looking at over a 1,000 dead a day, again in this country, right now. And that is alarming and disheartening and it feels on some level almost disrespectful to start talking about what a memorial might look like in the midst of a pandemic. I feel like there needs to be some distance in this proposal because of the notion of it being temporary and the request to sort of reach out to people who were affected by the pandemic, I found sort of an entry point.
Michael Arad:
And one of the people whose experience that I chose to sort of focus on and frame the design around was a friend, Rabbi Rick Jacobs. We worked together on a project in Jerusalem that hasn't materialized, but perhaps will. And Rabbi Jacobs lost his mother during the pandemic. She was in California, he was in New York and he was unable to attend her funeral and having lost both my parents in the last few years and spoken at their funerals, him being denied that incredibly important moment forever, felt very poignant and something that I could relate to. And so that formed a framework for me to start thinking about how we might approach this. And obviously, any proposal is not meant just for one person, but that is a way for me to enter into that.
Michael Arad:
The proposal that we drew up was actually for a temporary memorial that would be constructed in the middle of the Central Park reservoir for a week, once a year in March to mark, what feels like the beginning of the pandemic, if there is a beginning date. And the reservoir actually is bisected by a submerged wall. So the moment that reservoir is drained a couple of feet, that wall appears. And it was done as essentially a utility, to allow them to service one side while the other side held water. In fact, that reservoir was built in response to a previous pandemic and the need for clean water in the city to prevent future pandemics.
Michael Arad:
But the idea was that we would build a platform at the center of the reservoir, that you'd be able to approach that platform that floats in the reservoir on top of that stone wall and both be in the city and away from it, somehow simultaneously to create a place that you cannot access the rest of the year. That you could approach and then look at the city beyond, but somehow not be in it while you're in it. To create a place that would be open to different rituals. Some people might go there alone. Some people might go with a group of friends, hold their own ceremony. And some people might actually attend a prayer service that's led by a priest or a cleric or a rabbi, whatever it might be, but something that was open ended enough to do that.
Josh King:
Sometimes to take on yet another project, when the needs of the moment require it, because among other things you got a day job. I mean, you're working on lots of residential, commercial projects. You're a commercial architect at Handel Architects LLP. If you could work on anything right now, putting the memorial work aside, what floats your boat? What are you excited about?
Michael Arad:
I think cities are what excite me most. So how we are going to build the future of our country, of our world in a way that provides the greatest opportunity and the best life to the largest number of people, is really important. And we're confronted by social and environmental disasters worldwide right now. So I think it's an important thing and I think we need to address it at every level, whether it's regional planning, city planning or individual buildings. Right now, I'm working on projects in places like Columbia, Maryland. The Gowanus Canal here in Brooklyn, Long Island City here in Manhattan, that variety is enriching. I think every project has its own set of challenges and demands. And I think working with great clients is always a privilege. The people who engage with you, who bring something to the table and that back and forth makes any project better.
Josh King:
As we wrap up Michael, we began this conversation with this remembrance of mine from being in Washington DC 20 years ago. I lived there for 10 years up to that point, spending so much time in a park, honoring the Marquis de Lafayette, his contributions during the Revolution. The Lincoln Memorial that speaks to the sacrifices during the Civil War. The newer World War II Memorial. And of course, Maya Lin's masterpiece, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the opposite side of the Reflecting Pool. Coming now to the end of 20 years of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which various estimates put the death toll among US service members at north of 7,000. Not to mention, as you talked about your additional work at the 9/11 Memorial, over 30,000 suicides of service members and veterans of those wars. What's one way or some ways to think about for generations that will succeed us to memorialize that sacrifice?
Michael Arad:
That's a really difficult question because it's obviously, something that we need to convey that story to future generations. And I don't think it can only be one location in Washington that you visit on your school trip in high school. And I'm not sure architecture or design in that sense of a built thing in an environment are the right response. The challenge is to not let those stories fade away, to not let those sacrifices be for not. I think our conversation right now is part of what should be a much bigger conversation that appreciates and honors those losses and creates a way for us to move forward with resolve to address that.
Josh King:
Moving forward with resolve to address that. This conversation just one of millions, probably that have to be had. Michael, thanks so much for having at least one of those conversations with us today.
Michael Arad:
Thank you.
Josh King:
And that's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Michael Arad, a partner at Handel Architects LLP and the designer of the National September 11th Memorial at the World Trade Center site. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes, so other folks know where to find us. If you've got a comment or a question, you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet at us at ICE House Podcast. Our show is produced by Stephan [Capreol 00:54:48] with production assistance from Pete Asch and Ken Abel. I'm Josh King, your host signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
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