anti:freeze

The winning design for the World Trade Center memorial was revealed yesterday.

I have mixed feelings.

It's stark, quiet, and visually stunning. I love the idea of water cascading into a submerged pool. The negative space. The sense of something gone missing - something irreplacable. Water will never fill the space. The pool will always be empty. It's almost like a season without end, an incomplete cycle. Rain falls, but never nourishes. Nothing grows. The absence is still there. This is what it's like to lose a loved one.

It also mimics the life cycle of the towers. Water ascends through the pipes, then falls. I can't help but think of the water once pumped directly from the Hudson into the cooling pipes (and if you haven't seen the History Channel documentary detailing this, you must). It was the most efficient way to regulate temperature inside the skyscrapers. An element once hidden inside architecture - indeed, buried deep underground - is now revealed. A bleeding wound.

But the collapse of the World Trade Center was so incomrehensibly huge, so catastrophic, that people need a sense of healing. A sense that life continues. In that sense, the memorial fails. The empty pool becomes a metaphor for life not going on, for pain not healing, for spaces remaining empty. Is that what we want from public art?

The names are engraved randomly throughout the memorial, and this has victim's families upset. They want more order, less chaos. The artist says he was trying reflect the "haphazard brutality of the deaths." But here is where it gets complicated: Do you want art to memorialize the event, the people, or the towers? Or all three? This, to me, is the heart of the problem. As it stands, this design memorializes the buildings and event more than it does the people. When visitors descend the stairs, they must search for their loved one's name, obscured by rushing water - a metaphorical reliving of their desperate searches in hospital emergency rooms and trauma centers. Should a memorial function in this way?

The chaotic engravings seem best-suited for outsiders, people who lost no one in the attacks. The chaos, the randomness of the names, reflects their television-mediated experience. They won't be looking for specific names, but rather, for some way to process the totality of the tragedy. Which brings me to this question: Who is the memorial really for? Is it for the victims? The families? The nation? The world? This design may need some revision to strike the right balance.

On the other hand, memorials are often transformed by human interaction. The Oklahoma City memorial is made more meaningful by people dipping their hands into the reflecting pool, pressing their palms against stone to leave faint - and temporary - handprints. And Maya Lin was surprised by the ways people used the Vietnam Veteran's memorial - tracing loved one's names onto paper, tucking a little artifact into their purse or pocket (in a sense, symbolically bringing their lost soldiers home again). It is transaction that defines memorials most, and perhaps this design will surprise us, too.

The other key issue is inherent to all memorials: striking a balance between aesthetic achievement and giving the public what it wants. It's almost impossible to strike that balance while clinging to discredited notions of the avant-garde, or the modernist obsession with relentless advancement and purification of forms. And let's face it. It's hard for artists to climb down from the ivory tower. But in recent history, memorial design has been transformed by democratic collaboration. Committees often include victims and victims' families, public representatives, fellow artists, architects, and public art commissions. Artists are more sensitive to public needs, while committees are egalitarian in process. This is no less true in the case of the World Trade Center. When I studied public art and memorials (one of my specialties in my art history program), I was constantly awestruck by the process behind the production. Endlessly fascinating.