War memorial's timing discussed

By Michael McNutt
The Oklahoman

One of the hardest decisions facing a committee formed to help design and build a memorial to Oklahomans killed in the war on terrorism is determining when the ongoing battle started.

Design ideas
Oklahomans interested in submitting design ideas should send them to the War on Terror Memorial Design Committee, office of the lieutenant governor, state Capitol, Oklahoma City, 73105, or to the lieutenant governor's Web site, www.ltgov.state.ok.us. Design ideas are due Jan. 31.

Members of the War on Terror Design Committee, meeting for the first time Wednesday, wrestled over whether terrorism acts against the United States started with the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, the first Gulf War in 1991, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Building bombing or the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the eastern United States.

No decision was made, and it was suggested the U.S. Defense Department be contacted on what it considers when the war on terrorism started.

The committee, which includes legislators and representatives of several state agencies and veterans groups, was created by legislation passed earlier this year.

The committee will have to find a site, oversee a design and raise money for the project. No state money is set aside for the memorial.

The committee eventually will recommend a couple of artists to the Oklahoma Historical Society and then work with the society to develop the memorial, according to the legislation. The state Central Services Department will maintain the memorial.

Committee member Grady Rainbow, who is on the Oklahoma Veterans Council, said he wanted to make sure Oklahomans -- especially veterans -- have a chance to submit a memorial design. After a design is selected, the committee then could look for an artist instead of asking only artists for ideas, he said.

"This should be a memorial for the veterans," said Rainbow of Oklahoma City. "It's not a piece of art."

Committee Chairman Greg Slavonic of Oklahoma City, a retired Navy rear admiral, said the memorial should recognize "the men and women, soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, who have all participated in this global war on terrorism and their courage, dedication, commitment."

State Rep. Rex Duncan, a committee member, said the memorial should be "pro-American."

Duncan, R-Sand Springs, said he didn't want the memorial to have "peace signs and 'Can't we all get along' messages."

http://www.newsok.com/article/1705846/

Edited by author 12-15-2005 04:37 PM
Dear Friends and Colleagues:

The World Trade Center Memorial Foundation is thrilled to announce the launch of an online gallery where you can purchase photographs of the World Trade Center and renderings of the Memorial that are being generously offered by prominent artists. Joe McNally, formerly of LIFE magazine, Carol Guzy and John McDonnell, freelance photojournalists for The Washington Post, Hollister Lowe, a fashion and portrait photographer, and Jean-Louis Blondeau, who photographed Philippe Petit’s high wire walk between the Twin Towers in 1974, are all participating.

The Memorial Foundation is partnering with Pictopia.com, a premier online photo provider, to fulfill your orders of museum-quality prints and frames. On average, over 60% of the proceeds from each sale will go to help build the Memorial.*

In the months ahead, we look forward to collaborating with professional photography editors and gallery professionals to identify and select future images for inclusion in and expansion of this special collection. Please check it out.

We appreciate your support.

Best regards,

Gretchen Dykstra
President & CEO
World Trade Center Memorial Foundation

*The prints and frames are priced at market rate. As a result, your purchase is not tax deductible.

Memorial Pools Will Not Quite Fill Twin Footprints
By DAVID W. DUNLAP

YOU can't take symbolism too literally at ground zero.

The great pool-filled memorial voids that are meant to mark the absence of the twin towers will be 31 percent smaller than the towers' actual footprints.

Each pool will be a 176-foot square, centered within the original 211-foot-10-inch-square footprint. The tower outlines will not be shown graphically on the plaza, so there will be no indication at ground level precisely where the twin towers stood; only an intimation.

It has been an open secret for almost two years that the pools would not faithfully represent the tower outlines. Official descriptions do not emphasize this fact but are also careful not to equate the pools and footprints exactly. The World Trade Center Memorial Foundation's Web site, for example, speaks of "two voids that reside in the original footprints" - not "two voids that define the original footprints."

Only now, however, is the degree of discrepancy growing clear. On Dec. 5, the foundation and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation issued a request for proposals from construction managers. It indicated that the pools would be 180-foot squares, a measurement that includes a parapet where victims' names will be inscribed.

Among the practical impediments to full-sized pools is how close the north void will be to Fulton Street. If the pool were to grow, the street itself might have to be moved. As planned, the pools will occupy a total of 1.42 acres. The towers occupied 2.06 acres.

"In a perfect world, it might have been preferable for the pools to coincide precisely with the tower footprints," said Daniel Libeskind, the master planner of the trade center site. "But their emotional geometry and integrity are more important. They are at the epicenters of where the towers stood, and much like the twin beams of light, though not exact replicas, they accurately and movingly reflect the power of absence."

Anthony Gardner, executive director of the World Trade Center United Family Group and a leading preservation advocate at ground zero, does not agree. He said the failure to replicate the towers' dimensions and their distinctive cutaway corners "minimizes the enormity of the buildings themselves, the scale of the loss and what was taken."

This is not the only place in the trade center redevelopment where symbolism and literalism diverge.

For instance, the skyline element is routinely described as the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower. But the tower itself is not 1,776 feet tall. That figure comes from adding a mast to a 1,368-foot building. And because of topography, the 1,776-foot mast is actually 1,779 feet above the nearby intersection of Fulton and West Streets.

The symbolic 1776 dimension was proposed by Mr. Libeskind and embraced by Gov. George E. Pataki. David M. Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, architects of the Freedom Tower, was quoted last week by The Poughkeepsie Journal (and then on The Gutter, an architectural Web site) as saying that he "never understood" that decision, "because this building will always be measured in meters." At 541 meters, the Freedom Tower will symbolically commemorate the year Totila became king of the Ostrogoths.

Around the pools, the twin towers' dimensions will be observed at two levels, said Stefan Pryor, the president of the development corporation. The rear walls of the galleries surrounding the pools will be 204 feet apart, the inside dimension of the footprints.

And the pool containment structures, which will be visible from the underground museum, will be 211 feet and 10 inches across. Their exterior walls will align with the remnants of the towers' original column footings, preserved at a level just above bedrock.

"Where the authentic artifacts of the original towers are displayed," Mr. Pryor said, "you'll be able to view the authentic size of the original towers."

One can argue that the pools are so big, the difference will be imperceptible; that the most useful place to represent the dimensions accurately is where visitors will spend the longest time; and that it makes sense to create a visual correspondence between the towers' true dimensions and the column remnants that once defined their perimeters.

It's just that this is probably not the visual correspondence most people will expect. Future visitors will undoubtedly look across the vast expanses of those memorial pools, marveling at how large the World Trade Center towers must have been.

And they will see only 69 percent of the story.

The search for a construction manager to oversee the memorial and memorial museum drew 13 companies to a bid preparation conference yesterday. "We were thrilled by the interest and impressed by who came," said Gretchen Dykstra, president and chief executive of the memorial foundation.

Bovis Lend Lease and Slattery Skanska, already in a joint venture approved to build the World Trade Center PATH terminal and transportation hub, attended. So did the Gilbane Building Company, LiRo Group, Pavarini McGovern, F. J. Sciame Construction and Turner Construction Company, among others. Bids are due Jan. 10.


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/15/nyregion/15blocks.html

BIG CHILL HITS PLAN FOR WTC WATERFALL

By TOM TOPOUSIS
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
December 15, 2005 -- A pair of dramatic waterfalls that are among the signature pieces of Ground Zero's memorial will be a winter washout because of fears that freezing water will spray frigid visitors, memorial officials have decided.
The 30-foot waterfalls that are aligned along the original footprints of the Twin Towers are a key part of Michael Arad's memorial design, "Reflecting Absence."

But months of tests of the waterfalls, at a $175,000 mockup built in Canada, have revealed the potential for problems with the spray blowing out into the galleries below street level in Memorial...

http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/58790.htm

Ground Zero Memorial: Too Small and Too Wet

Wouldn't you know it: At the very minute the WTCMF is crowing that the LMDC has decided to devote $200 million of its HUD booty to building the 9/11 memorial and associated theme attractions at the WTC site, the design itself is SOL. As any thinking observer might have noted at the very second Michael Arad's wack-ass waterpark was unveiled (um, two years ago)—and as several in our acquaintance did—wind from any direction, at any season, will blow his spiritual spumes and vapid veils hither and thither, soaking in borrowed tears those visitors who, given the nature of their visit, might have their tired minds on less mundane chores than staying dry. It was dumb then and it's dumb now; the fact that officials have finally announced that the fountains will be turned off every winter amounts to no more than a final codification of a longstanding idiocy. Oh, and the twin memorial pools aren't going to match the twin tower footprints. In short: SNAFU.

http://gutter.curbed.com/archives/2005/12/...all_and_too_wet.php

 
 Ground Zero Update

WTC families for proper burial update

WTC Families for Proper Burial’s attorneys have given the City's attorneys a report of our efforts and suggestions to date. We do not yet have a response. We expect some response before our rescheduled court date: Thursday, December 22, 2005 at 10:00 a.m.

What can you do to help? Work toward getting the religious community to see the moral value of our mission. We need as many letters of support and commitment from the clergy as soon as possible. For many this is a religious issue: we have not been able to perform the religious rituals and rites we practice in burying our dead. We need and want to exercise this freedom of religion as we bury the remains of the Sept. 11 dead in a dignified and proper location. All letters should be as official as possible and can be sent to: WTC Families for Proper Burial, Inc., P.O. Box 236, Fanwood, NJ 07023

 Save The Date:
DATE: Thursday, December 22, 2005
TIME: 10:00 AM
LOCATION: The Southern District Court, NYC,
                       500 Pearl Street.
                       NY, NY

We know that the date causes problems with the holidays and with traffic, etc., but we really need to show our solidarity.

W.T.C. Culture and the Memorial

When 9/11 family groups led the successful fight in the fall to get two museums bounced from the area near the memorial, Bloomberg criticized the governor for superseding the L.M.D.C., a federally-funded state-city authority. But on Monday, the mayor said the same sensitivities that led to International Freedom Center and Drawing Center leaving the memorial quadrant should apply to the entire site.


“This is clearly not your average piece of property and different standards may very well apply on that site,” the mayor said, citing other exceptions to free speech such as jokingly shouting fire in a theater or prohibitions about what you can say in a courtroom.


He said curators could work on programming with people who understand the site’s importance. In response to whether government or an individual arts group could set this up, he said: “That’s to be worked out. There’s no easy answer to this. You want to have freedom of expression. There’s nobody willing to stand up for the arts more than I am, but I will say there is something different about this piece of property.”


When told of his remarks, Charles Wolf, whose wife died at the W.T.C., and Julie Menin, chairperson of C.B. 1, predictably, had opposite reactions.


“I think he’s pretty much hit it on the mark,” said Wolf, who has had concerns about the mayor’s views. He does not think an arts organization will be able to set up its own board to maintain the proper sensitivity. “You’re going to have to have somebody outside the organization set a standard.”


Menin, a new member of the WTC Memorial Foundation, which intends to raise money for the site’s memorial and cultural buildings, said “you are putting arts organizations in a difficult position if they are censored. You have to respect these organizations enough to know they are going to do what’s best.”


Costs for the memorial and related buildings are getting close to $1 billion, but Bloomberg said even if it doubles to $2 billion he won’t back away.


“It will cost a lot of money but that’s what the commission [the memorial jury] recommended….You can’t walk away from democracy because you don’t like the outcome,” he said.


But the Reflecting Absence memorial design by Michael Arad and Peter Walker is an outcome he likes. “Of the final designs I thought the Arad one was the best,” he said. “I liked the design. I thought it was very moving and beautiful.”

http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_136/bloombergzeroesinon.html

Bashing Reveals Depth Of Bad Image
 
It was bad enough when The Boston Globe called Hartford "America's filing cabinet."

Here we go again with another slap from a big city. This time it's a one-two punch from an eminent regional planner and the paper of record for 43rd Street on Manhattan Island.

And we thought the capital city had turned the corner.

OK, so the hometown of Mark Twain is not yet topping magazine lists of the best places to live. And our famously high poverty rate has been plastered nationwide.

Sure, we still berate ourselves. But does Hartford have to stand for this latest outside insult?

Robert D. Yaro, a fixture in the tri-state planning scene, decried the lack of cultural amenities at the Ground Zero redevelopment in lower Manhattan by comparing the plan to - gasp - downtown Hartford.

"The program was for basically downtown Hartford. A shopping mall and an office park," said Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association in New York, last week at a forum on the World Trade Center site. He noted that it also includes a memorial.

By his Hartford remark, he meant that the plan of development would create something akin to downtown Hartford, which everyone knows is nothing but a shopping mall and an office park. This from a guy who lives in Connecticut - Stamford - and sits on the board of contributors of The Courant's "Place" section.

Doesn't he know we tore down the old Hartford Civic Center shopping mall?

...


http://www.courant.com/business/hc-haar121...hc-utility-business

Now that Norman Foster is back at Ground Zero, it's time to "rethink" his original WTC proposal. Lo and behold he proposed a "Memorial Void" that looks suspiciously like what Michael Arad later put forth.
http://www.renewnyc.com/plan_des_dev/wtc_s.../slides/slide10.asp

My blog entry
http://911memorials.org/?p=323

I see great differences in the overall designs, however, slide 25, does show an interesting similarity to Reflecting Absence.
Are there any conspiracy theorists out there, who would ponder," which came first, Arad or Foster" And who was on the "Inside Track," when building their design?

http://www.renewnyc.com/plan_des_dev/wtc_s.../slides/slide25.asp

Like the chicken or the egg, which came first is a tough question, /m1953. In design work there is little left that's totally original, most is a stew of borrowed ideas that one hopes can be presented in a clever way to give it unique personality with broad appeal. Often when working on a particular problem, many designers come up with similar solutions.

Some of the aerial slides from Sir Norman's presentation do look like the current version of the Arad/Walker design. I do think it's odd that the Foster master plan included a memorial design when the worldwide memorial competition was already announced, but I suppose they all did that to some degree. The egos involved at that point would have all had a problem if some hillbilly won the memorial competition.

americasroof uses the word "suspiciously" in /m1952, and that word could resonate throughout the whole process thus far.

For me the question of plagiarism is not as important as whether voids are effective symbols for a memorial. I think there was a high school class that came up with a design similar to RA.
Any one of those designs could end up as an expensive place for debris to collect.

All that Reflecting Absence says is that all we know and love concerning the towers has gone down the drain, as architecurally they resemble two large sinks. Is this the message we want visitors to take away from the memorial experience? Surely there is a more uplifting and profound message that can be created by using more meaningful architecture.

Arts Groups Scramble To Beat LMDC Grant Deadline

By DAVID LOMBINO - Staff Reporter of the Sun
 
Downtown arts organizations are scrambling to beat Thursday's deadline for submitting applications to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation for $35 million in cultural grants, cultural advocates say.

More than 100 nonprofit organizations are expected to apply to the city and state downtown development agency for grants derived from more than $20 billion in federal funds given to New York after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

http://www.nysun.com/article/24620

Filmmakers re-create rubble of ground zero on Westside
Oliver Stone is directing a look at 9/11 that follows the events through the eyes of two police officers who were trapped beneath one of the towers.

By Kristin S. Agostoni
Daily Breeze

At the foot of the Westchester Bluffs along Jefferson Boulevard, scores of steel-like girders are propped up against stacks of massive cargo containers, while others lean and lie on their sides, poking out from piles of rubble.

From a lookout above it all, the girders look more like cross-hatched toothpicks and the shipping containers like miniature trucks, incongruous pieces of a project taking shape near the Playa Vista housing development.

At ground level, movie makers are at work creating a 1-acre piece of ground zero for the upcoming World Trade Center movie by director Oliver Stone.

Scheduled for an August 2006 release, it is based on the true story of Port Authority police officers John McLoughlin and William Jimeno, who were trapped and later rescued from the rubble of the World Trade Center collapse. The film stars Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena as McLoughlin and Jimeno, and Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal as their wives.

The historic hangar on the former Howard Hughes airfield is enormous enough and isolated enough from the bustle of Jefferson Boulevard for filming interior and exterior shots, said Michael Shamberg of Double Feature Films, who is producing the movie for Paramount Pictures with partner Stacey Sher.

"There's enough land to build the set outdoors," Shamberg said of the Playa Vista location. "And the space is large enough to actually house the physical construction and internal sets."

Designers have worked meticulously to recreate the devastating scene thousands of miles from the real ground zero.

The girders, which are actually made of Styrofoam, were handcrafted in Los Angeles, Shamberg said, and the massive cargo containers were shipped in as reinforcers.

Far removed from New York, the Westside location made filming the sensitive project possible, Sher said. "(But) the gravity of what happened that day is felt every day on the set."

A news release describes the movie as "a portrayal of how the human spirit rose above the tragic events of the day."

Inside, Sher said, set designers created the path the officers traveled from their precinct to rescue people in the twin towers, along with the hole that eventually left them trapped. With family members' permission, she said, they also recreated the interior of each man's home, as the story focuses on the families' struggles to understand exactly what happened.

Through a spokeswoman, Paramount representatives declined to allow a Daily Breeze reporter and photographer onto the set.

http://www.dailybreeze.com/news/articles/2089527.html