Monumental Loss

...Here, two thirtysomething architects, Julie Beckman and Keith Kase-man, envision a two-acre park dotted with scores of paperbark maples and 184 "memorial units"—benches 13-and-a-half feet long, each cantilevered like a diving board over its own little pool of water—in memory of the victims of American Airlines Flight 77's immolation...

...In contrast, meaning is not intrinsic to the Beckman-Kaseman design, but rather amounts to whatever significance the visitor might happen to pin on it...

...A scheme that dripped with sentiment involved 184 glass slabs on which moisture would condense so visitors could finger-write or draw their feelings...

...In terms of enduring significance, so far as she is concerned, they need aim no higher than that...

...Yet the fact remains that only enlightened patronage is going to redeem public art and architecture in America from their currently debased state...

...The Pentagon Memorial will be situated 50 yards or so from the now-reconstructed façade that the jetliner demolished...

...Should memorials amount to furniture, even if it resembles diving boards...

...His cenotaph speaks not only to the lives lost on September 11, but to our republic's sustenance in times of trial by high ideals...

...As at Ground Zero and the Pentagon, this $57 million memorial sprawls: There is no symbolic focus;there are no heroic elements, which is unfortunate when the passengers' bravery prevented Flight 93 from wreaking havoc on Washington...

...One wishes the academic wisdom informing her earnest efforts were more profound, because it's going to take a whole lot less than a century for the memorial units to wear out their welcome...

...Unlike the profusion of memorial units, the cenotaph would offer passing drivers a readily legible landmark, an important consideration at this site...

...Quite an agenda...

...Another is how on earth this design got selected in the first place...

...One participant who never stood a chance was Dino Marcantonio, a classicist now practicing in New York...

...Epoxy polymer concrete will bind the gravel to the stainless steel— with the concrete (the architects have written) "seemingly 'freezing' the gravel in place and floating it above the light pool...

...But apart from the staggering expense, the six-acre antimonument's conceptually and spatially sprawling design basically follows the familiar postmodern recipe, enshrining "loss" through a combination of therapeutic landscape elements with documentary displays ranging from architectural remnants to videotape...

...A couple of miles away, a large grassy bowl will be ringed by memorial groves of maple trees (40 groves of 40 trees) and abutted by a field with the hemlock grove where the crash occurred...

...The problem is that the memory of those who died on September 11, and the trauma the terrorist atrocities caused, is ephemeral...

...Monumental Loss The unbearable lightness of the Pentagon memorial BY CATESBY LEIGH Harried designers, and the number crunchers breathing down their necks, are hacking away at plans for the World Trade Center Memorial, struggling to fit this bloated, billion-dollar, largely subterranean leviathan into the $500 million budgetary straitjacket prescribed by Governor George Pataki and New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg...

...Beckman, who sounds like an intelligent and diligent professional, says that the Pentagon Memorial will be engineered to stand for at least 100 years—no small feat, given the inordinately complicated business of circulating, filtering, and heating the water for the pools year-round, not to mention supplying electricity for the lights inside them...

...The National Park Service will be responsible for maintenance of the privately funded Flight 93 memorial, while taxpayers will be stuck with a hefty chunk of the Ground Zero memorial bill...

...Walls are arranged near the site to indicate the flight path...

...Frozen gravel...

...The statement concluded: "We challenge you to create a memorial that translates this terrible tragedy into a place of solace, peace, and healing...

...But leaving aside the fact that the chevron-shaped Vietnam memorial is spatially compact, clearly focused on its vertex, and handsomely inserted in its landscape setting, it is becoming increasingly clear that the therapeutic culture's dominion over memorial design since Maya Lin's triumph has swiftly degenerated into a tyranny...

...The therapeutic and documentary elements on the Ground Zero memorial menu include a vast, leafy plaza with waterfalls spilling into the huge twin-tower voids...

...And these memorials—the World Trade Center Memorial is scheduled for dedication on September 11, 2009, and the Flight 93 memorial two years later—are destined to be ephemeral themselves...

...That's just one of the questions the Pentagon Memorial project raises...

...Not surprisingly, the six finalist schemes that emerged from a field of 1,126 submissions all focused on "loss" or "absence," and all of them were of the same reductive, conceptualist ilk...

...His entry consists of a handsomely massed and decorated marble cenotaph, crowned with eagles...

...The can-tilevered benches face towards the Pentagon or away from it, depending on whether the victim was on Flight 77 or in the building...

...Anderson-Austra spoke in soothing maternal tones about the jury selection process during a telephone interview...

...The sixth finalist scheme stood apart by offering a single marble mound that would serve as an empty pedestal—for the memorial visitor...

...One finalist offered a wall slab with pieces missing to reflect the absence of the victims...

...Apart from the curious sculptural gesture of the memorial units, the memorial design boils down to factoids: The victims' dates of birth, and where they were at the time of the crash, plus the flight path...

...Marcantonio's memorial conforms to the classical idea of design as an intimation, in symbolic form, of a transcendent realm that endows our brief earthly sojourns with meaning...

...their loss has created an incalculable emptiness...

...Terence Riley, at that time director of the department of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, served as chairman...

...a subterranean multimedia museum exceeding 100,000 square feet that includes vestiges of twin-tower foundation slabs and an exposed segment of the slurry wall that held back the waters of the Hudson when the towers collapsed...

...and refrigerated containers with victims' unidentified remains that would be visible from an adjacent chamber reserved for family members...

...At this writing, the question is how the restricted budget will modify this depressing menu, whose underground elements have raised security concerns...

...Each memorial unit's location within the park is coordinated in relation to two axes, one corresponding to the year of a particular victim's birth, the other to the day of birth...

...It is most unlikely this will be an inspiring venue, but at least it might benefit from mandatory simplification...

...She hired two modernist apparatchiks to serve as competition advisers: Reed Kroloff, former editor of the defunct Architecture magazine and now dean of Tulane's architecture school, and Mark Robbins, dean of the Syracuse architecture school...

...The memorial units—dubbed "light benches" before assuming their bureaucratic appellation—are variations on the 168 chairs at the Oklahoma City Memorial, where the chairs are arranged in rows corresponding to the number of victims on each floor of the Murrah Federal Building...

...Aside from the eccentric sculptural gesture of the memorial units, we are left with biographical data and environmental phenomena such as surface ripples in the pools and the gentle gurgling sound of water passing over a weir into the circulation system, or the nifty shadows cast by the paper-bark maples, which exfoliate their bark, upon maturity, in a delightfully picturesque manner—and in winter shed small leaves that could make grounds maintenance a pain...

...The smoothed gravel finish on each memorial unit will maintain a visual continuity with the ground...

...The real surprise is that an altogether more bizarre September 11 memorial is in store for us, and where you might least expect it: at the Pentagon...

...Design professionals—"public artists," architects, and landscape architects, all of them modernist—constituted a majority on the panel of 11 competition jurors and one alternate...

...Absolutely...

...A pair of marble lions in front of the cenotaph faces a reflecting pool enclosed by rows of cherry trees, while the memorial precinct is itself enclosed by a handsome wrought-iron fence with limestone piers capped by finials and urns...

...The Pentagon has blown a big opportunity to exercise such patronage...

...a monolithic cenotaph, with an opening to the sky punched out of one of the twin-tower pools above...

...In the aftermath of September 11, an Army Corps of Engineers landscape architect, Carol Anderson-Austra, served as project manager in charge of selecting the site for the memorial, "educating" a Family Steering Committee of about a dozen family members of victims about memorial design, and organizing the design competition...

...Do such trivia have anything to do with a proper memorial...

...This tyranny suppresses any expression of civic idealism, let alone spiritual destiny...

...The jury's lay members included former defense secretaries Harold Brown and Melvin Laird...

...It had to speak to those two groups and the world at large," she added...

...Is the public realm well served by such an outlook...

...Visitors will view the crash site from a stark slate-paved plaza...

...The wall will grow by one inch for each year of the victims' ages, or from three to 71 inches...

...But the official groundbreaking will take place next month, with completion anticipated in September 2008...

...It's a small consolation that taxpayers won't foot the bill for the Pentagon Memorial, where even a $10 million maintenance endowment will be raised from private sources...

...And what a pity that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld—who, along with his wife Joyce, has contributed $200,000 to the Pentagon Memorial Fund—signed off on the jury's decision, if only because the competition process was a travesty...

...And it's precisely the artistic embodiment of such idealism, employing fine materials and a humanist idiom everybody understands at an instinctive level, that would allow his Pentagon Memorial to stand for the ages...

...At least Anderson-Austra acknowledges the longevity issue...

...Actually, it's the "world at large"— meaning the public—that's getting the short end of the stick with this project...

...The guiding assumption was that "if the families did not think it was good, and if the design community internationally did not think it was good," the Pentagon Memorial would be a flop...

...The precedent is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Mall, with its multitude of names listed in the chronological order of death...

...In Somerset County, Pennsylvania, the competition-winning Flight 93 National Memorial design aims at connecting visitors with a vast 2,200-acre landscape surrounding the crash site, as well as putting landscape features to therapeutic use...

...The long perimeter benches and the "age wall" enclosing the park will be clad in stone of the same gray and light-brown hues as the gravel...

...At night, the Memorial Fund's website helpfully explains, the illuminated pools will "indicate an abstract demographic cross-section of the victims, showing the random nature of the September 11, 2001 attack on the Pentagon...

...The main idea behind this design seems to be that the memorial units, with the names of their loved ones inscribed on the benches' front ends, will help the bereaved reach closure...

...Another (prior to its modification in time for the second jury round) called for a sunken precinct with a long table and 189 empty chairs—meaning chairs were included for the five hijackers!—with a shiny wall slab reflecting the reconstructed Pentagon façade and bearing an existentialist quotation from the Chilean Stalinist poet Pablo Neruda...

...It gets worse...

...But she comes up with a hackneyed rationalization: Down the line, the Pentagon Memorial and others of its ilk will serve as expressions of the culture of their time...

...Inside this wall there will be a bench with birth years inlaid between pairs of steel timelinestrips...

...The Family Steering Committee, two of whose members also served on the jury, issued a statement urging the competition entrants "to search your souls and envision a memorial that inspires visitors to contemplate what the attack means to them personally, to us as family members, to the community, to the country, and to the world...

...We were looking for a certain kind of background, expertise, sensitivity, integrity...

...The site previously served as a helicopter landing pad...

...Sensitivity" and "an emotional connection" to the memorial project were crucial, she emphasized...

...Our loved ones' deaths have ended the ripple effect of their lives touching many others through the universe...

...The "age wall" will extend along the western border of the memorial in an irregular arc, facing Route 27, the arterial highway running between the Pentagon and Arlington Memorial Cemetery...

...It all sounds like a House and Garden editor's hallucination...

...The committee also declared that "the memorial should instill the ideas that patriotism is a moral duty, that freedom comes at a price, and that the victims of this attack have paid the ultimate price...

...Catesby Leigh is author of the forthcoming Monumental America...

...and nothing transcends the natural realm, or the realm of fact...

...A shiny minimalist tower with 40 aluminum wind chimes to commemorate the 40 victims will mark the entrance to the tract...

...Another consisted of a pavement studded with 184 oxidized-steel boxes resembling flight-recorder boxes on airplanes (the proverbial "black boxes," which are actually orange) with dinky pools inside the concrete-lined boxes and, beneath the pools, mementos etched in mirrors or embedded in protective glass...

...But the therapeutic mission was plainly paramount...

...Can they be serious...

...A certain combination of heart and brain," she said...

...likewise the perimeter bench across the park...

...The classical tradition, representing thousands of years of accumulated design knowledge, shaped the great monumental vistas in and around Washington...

...But its exponents had no voice on the jury...

...a subterranean mezzanine with parapet-walls inscribed with the victims' names girding the waterfalls...

...Their memorial park will boast a gravel carpet that appears to peel up and morph into the multitude of diving boards...

...Fundraising for this $22 million memorial has proceeded at a far from stellar pace over the last three years, with just over $10 million raised to date...

...The park will be covered with stabilized gravel, with each precast, stainless-steel bench-cwm-pool set within a pair of stainless-steel timeline-strips crossing the site on the birth-year axis, and parallel to Flight 77's fateful path...

...This conforms to the documentary, "value-neutral" tenets of postmodern memorial design...

...With the country on the verge of war in Iraq, he obviously had more pressing concerns...