Winning World Trade Center memorial design unveiled

NEW YORK: New York officials unveiled Wednesday the final design of the memorial to victims of the September 11 attacks, with two reflecting pools, surrounded by gardens, to fill the space left by the World Trade Center’s twin towers.

“Reflecting Absence” by architect Michael Arad, was chosen from among more than 5,000 entries submitted to an international design competition.

Lower Manhattan Development Corp., which ran the competition and is in charge of rebuilding Ground Zero, the area devastated in the suicide attacks in 2001, said last week that “significant changes” had been made to Arad’s original plan as a 13-member jury named the winning design.

After Arad’s design was selected, landscape architect Peter Walker gave the project its final form. Media widely broadcast the final version Wednesday.

The reflecting pools are to sit almost empty, with water running down the sides only, symbolizing the vacuum left by the 2,982 people who died in the strikes by Al-Qaeda members who hijacked passenger jets which were slammed into the towers.

New York Governor George Pataki said the plan for the memorial “had to be consistent with the Libeskind masterplan for Ground Zero, but it had to be more than that.” The memorial will occupy the footprints of the World Trade Center’s fallen twin towers and include the names of all the victims of the attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.—AFP

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