- I witnessed the attack from the rooftop of my building
in the East Village,
heard the North Tower had been struck by a plane.
I imagined it was an accident.
That's something that certainly
made me feel that I had to find a way to respond to that.
And I think a writer would write,
a poet would compose something.
For me, my tools as an architect led me to think about
what could you do here?
And my initial thinking about a memorial
was actually something that would be located
in the Hudson River because this was a six-story-high
pile of rubble on fire with bodies being pulled out of it.
So, it was hard to conceive of what this place would be
in the immediate aftermath.
It just changed something in me.
It changed my relationship to New York.
Even though I'd been living here for three years,
it made me a New Yorker for the first time.
And it gave me a sense of community,
that we're not facing the horrors
that we had witnessed alone.
They hoped to sow fear.
They hoped to sow division.
And how we responded was the opposite of that.
I think this country was never more united
than it was after that attack.
And so I wanted to bring some of that into this design.
And so, what you see here is essentially
a public space at grade
connected to the streets and sidewalks
and to the neighborhood around us
that invites people here, visitors to the memorial,
but also people who live in this neighborhood,
walk through here on their way from home to work or to shop.
People that work in these office towers
are welcome to come down here.
They are just like the people who are commemorated here.
They went to work that day.
And to me, it was important to bring
all of those groups of people together to this site
and to make it a living part of New York City,
part of the urban fabric.
One of the drivers of the design
was to commemorate loss, to mark absence,
and to find a way to do that
that was powerful and emotional,
make that loss visible, persistent,
and over time it does not go away, right?
These empty spaces will remain empty.
Despite all this water that flows into them,
they will always be empty vessels on some level.
And so, it was important to create a space
that you could walk up to the edge of that, but not enter.
And I think walking up to the edge of each pool,
encountering the hundreds of names around each pool
is at the heart of the experience of visiting this memorial.
When we started this process,
I don't think it was intentional in any way,
but we had not thought about the impact of 9/11 illnesses
on so many, on thousands of thousands of people.
And over a thousand people have already died
of 9/11-related illnesses.
And so, there was no recognition of that terrible toll
anywhere on the memorial.
How do you acknowledge something,
an ongoing and unfolding tragedy that's happening right now
that a lotta people feel that they are struggling with alone
or just with their family?
So, we were able to change the memorial
to add this memorial glade over here.
It was an open area
where you can be underneath the open sky,
and to create these large monoliths
that kind of come out of the ground
and are a testament to sort of the character
of so many of the people
who have been affected by this illness.
These monoliths seem sort of bruised and battered,
but strong.
And they are sort of woven together with steel
that was salvaged from the World Trade Center site.
And they create another place on the memorial
that speaks to this other constituency
that was not addressed.
We didn't anticipate it.
And to be able to correct that shortcoming was...
I'm very grateful for that opportunity.
We build our cities and they build us in turn.
That...
That simple thing of creating a place,
a public place for people to come together,
to support one another, to respond as a community,
I learned that at Georgia tech
as an architecture student years ago.
I had remarkable professors like Doug Allen,
who really instilled the value,
the importance of public space in me.
And I think it was so important
to make this part of New York,
to not say this is something that you only go and visit
once in a lifetime
and then it's never part of your life again.
This has to be part of the lived experience of people.
It has to keep it in our day-to-day lives.
(soft ethereal music)