The twin reflecting pools sit in the exact footprints of the Twin Towers and are inscribed in bronze with the names of the 2,983 people killed in the September 11, 2001 attacks and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
The Memorial plaza with the reflecting pools is free and open to the public with no ticket needed, while the Museum requires timed-entry tickets reserved online in advance.
The competition drew 5,201 entries from 63 countries, and the design chosen in January 2004 was among the plainest of them: Reflecting Absence, by Michael Arad, developed with the landscape architect Peter Walker. Two square voids are cut about 30 feet into the ground within the towers' footprints, each close to an acre. Water runs down all four walls, gathers, and disappears into a smaller opening at the center that never fills. They are the largest constructed waterfalls in the United States.
The names carry the argument. All 2,983 — the 2,977 killed on September 11, 2001, and the six killed in the 1993 bombing — are cut clean through 152 bronze parapets, and their order is neither alphabetical nor by rank. Arad held out for what the memorial calls meaningful adjacencies: colleagues beside colleagues, responders beside their own companies, people who died together placed together, along with roughly 1,200 specific requests from families, resolved first by algorithm and then by hand.
The plaza is a roof. The museum designed by Davis Brody Bond reaches some 70 feet below it, so the more than 400 swamp white oaks above are growing in an engineered soil and drainage system carried on structure rather than on ground. Snøhetta designed the glass pavilion that takes visitors down. What the museum holds is the site's own fabric: the slurry wall built during the towers' construction to keep the Hudson out of the excavation, and the Last Column, cut from the pile in May 2002.
The detail most visitors register first is sound. The falling water is loud enough to flatten the traffic, which is what makes the plaza feel separate from streets only a few yards away. The Callery pear standing on the plaza was pulled from the rubble in October 2001, nursed back over years at a city nursery in the Bronx, and replanted here.
180 Greenwich St, New York, NY 10007 · Official site ↗
The National September 11 Memorial & Museum is a memorial and museum that are part of the World Trade Center complex, in New York City, created for remembering the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks which killed 2,977 people, as well as the February 26, 1993, World Trade Center bombing which killed six. The memorial is located at the World Trade Center site, the former location of the Twin Towers that were destroyed during the September 11 attacks. It is operated by a non-profit institution whose mission is to raise funds to program and operate the memorial and museum at the World Trade Center site.
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