Towers: a new memorial for 9/11

In our thread on horizons I discuss Towers 1 as follows:

In a several Matisse works I saw today at Foundation Beyeler in Basel, a local horizon is
created at the bottom of the
painting (reading as the front in the painting’s perspective) by table tops or 2 or 3
angular lines sometimes the ghost of table tops. (Recall the long discussion of Cezanne
tabletops in Beautiful Evidence.) Just before I left home, I’d been working on
exactly the
same problem in the Towers sculpture display (note the angular base formed by 2 planes
at the bottom Towers 1.

The top plane carries the towers and rotates against the lower plane creating the skewed
semi-perspectival darker planes, as the whole thing sits on a tabletop. My Beyeler notes
are filled with sketches of the Matisse skewed local horizons; perhaps it would be good to
see some maps of those planes similar to the Loran maps of Cezanne in BE.

Appropriately, I’m showing and talking about some photographs of Towers 1 here
at ArtBasel on
Wednesday.

Towers 1 also of course is arrayed against a beautiful cloudy sky, the “back or
main or upper horizon” (better term to come) and indeed the local horizon of the table
tops is itself outlined by the upper horizon.

This account, it must be said, is after-the-fact since these particular visual effects were
discovered in the trial and error process of the making Towers 1. The
photographs were taken from below the plane of the piece so to express the lower local angularity and
perspective as well as the big sky
perspective.

The important analytical point is to think about multiple horizons, local and cosmopolitan.
This is always an issue in placing a big piece in the landscape: what do you get locally (as
on top of a rolling hill), and what do you get globally (as against the distant horizon of
earth and sky)?

I missed the sailboat metaphor but it is certainly there.

My metaphor is a 400 feet tall version to serve as the 9/11 memorial instead of the
currently planned voids. The stainless steel produces beautiful light and shadows, always
changing with the sun and season; the piece stands out among the tall buildings and
could be seen far away and flying over; it reaches up into the sky (like the pillars of light
did in the very successful informal memorial); the bridge (of life) points up and forward; the piece does
not attract mischief; and there would be exactly 2979 circles showing absence, each circle
individually and uniquely identifiable with each death; and shadows of individual circles
move around the piece with the light, the shadows projected over the entire surrounding
area and buildings. The two WTC foundations remain, open and viewable, underneath the canopy of the stainless steel memorial.

Stainless steel requires little upkeep and always looks as good as it did when first constucted. The cost of this piece, whatever it may be, is surely a lot less than the currently projected $960 million for the void memorial.

The current version is 8 feet tall; scaling up will require some excellent structural engineering.

David W. Dunlap and Charles V. Bagli, “New Plan Unveiled for W.T.C. Memorial“. New York Times, 20 June 2006.

Aaron Swartz’s NYT link generator provided the permalink.

Xu Zhou prepared this beautiful rendering of the Towers piece. The image captures some of the materiality and reflectivity of the sculpture. We can now set the rendering down in different contexts and eventually maybe we’ll have a 3D tour around the piece. Click on the image for a big file and scroll down to see many fine details, particularly the reflections on the base plane.