August 30, 2006

As controversy and politics have slowed progress at the Ground Zero memorial site, several other memorials to the victims of September 11 are proceeding at paces that surprise even their designers.  The memorial to victims in Westchester, New York, will be dedicated September 10. And the Staten Island memorial, though significantly smaller than some of the others, has been complete since 2004.

Paul Murdoch, who is designing the Flight 93 Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, says that his process has been “not only surprisingly smooth, but also surprisingly accelerated,” even though Murdoch finds that he’s working with far more constituents than he normally does. He credits the National Park Service for its guidance of the process. Nevertheless, since the project involves as much as 2200 acres of landscape, the project is not scheduled to be complete until 2011.

In Alexandria, Virginia, Julie Beckman, who is designing the Pentagon Memorial with her partner Keith Kaseman, has had a slighty different view of working on one of the three major memorials. She says that while the process, which entered the construction phase this summer, was “very fast in the world of memorials,” fundraising efforts delayed construction from the original two-year timeline.  “They assumed that raising $20 million would be a drop in the hat,” Beckman points out. “It wasn’t.”  The bureaucracy has been kept to a minimum, according to Beckman, because the Pentagon Memorial Fund is the sole client, and the Pentagon itself is not weighing in on aesthetics.

Comparatively, the memorial in Hoboken, New Jersey, is inching along. “It’s nothing unusual,” says Jeanne Gang, the architect member of the designers FLOW Group, “Just more people to have to talk to.”  For Gang, as for many of the architects, the emotional content of memorial design is one of the most demanding aspects of the work.  “Now we’re dealing with symbolic meaning,” she says, “which I haven’t really dealt with before. It’s been very difficult, but I feel compelled to move on and do this really well.”  Gang’s team currently is working on construction drawings. They hope that, in spring 2007, they will drive the piles for the artificial island that is the memorial’s centerpiece.

Frederic Schwartz, FAIA, who dealt with political maneuvering as part of the THINK team at Ground Zero, is now designing two memorials, one in Westchester, New York, and also the New Jersey State memorial. “I would use the words ‘phenomenal’ and ‘fantastic’ to describe the processes,” Schwartz says, who also agrees with Gang’s assessment of the sensitive nature of the design work: “The emotion is never ending.”

But for all the praise of the memorial process, perhaps none has been as smooth as that of the Staten Island memorial, two curving fiberglass “postcards” designed by Masayuki Sono and Lapshan Fong.  Their design was selected in 2003, and the memorial opened September 11, 2004—though some work continued after that time. Fong says, “We couldn’t delay even one day.”

For some of these designers, memorial work has led to other projects.  Kaseman and Beckman were invited to a closed interview process to design a memorial to the space shuttle Columbia in Nacogdoches, Texas. They were selected to design the memorial, and are awaiting NASA’s unveiling of the design.  Schwartz says that his memorial designs led the people of New Orleans to recognize that his firm could help; it is now among the teams working on rebuilding plans there. He emphasizes, however, that he does not bolster his resume with the memorial projects. Fong says that the Staten Island memorial had led to more work indirectly, because “it’s in the portfolio.”  But his partner has a different view of the marketing influence of their design. “People see the memorial,” which consists of two curving fiberglass panels, Sono says, “and don’t think, ‘I want a house like that.’” 

Kevin Lerner