One of the ponds Memorial 11 September. Peter Walker and Michael Arad. NY, 2011
This week in New York are commemorating the tenth anniversary of the tragic collapse of the twin towers World Trade Center. One of the activities related to that event will be at the inauguration of a memorial. It joins a new space for the evocation of a historical event that moves and will touch our consciences for a long time.
The September 11th Memorial is the result of a design competition that won the team headed by American landscape Peter Walter, collaboration with Michael Arad. Ranked vacuum created by the disappearance of those unique towers that projected Minoru Yamasaki, they were a symbol representing the city of New York and, by extension, U.S.. A monumental architectures with formal nods neogothic that were almost an evocation of a particular way of understanding the culture and civilization itself. The two identical skyscrapers that formed the World Trade Centerter of New York were never a sample of architecture aesthetically relevant, but, however, both its monumental size and landscape position gave them unparalleled iconic significance.
The landscape and sculptural intervention designed by Peter Walker consists of two gigantic homers ponds occupying the empty space on which were placed the foundations of the towers. This raises maintaining the vacuum generated and accentuating that feeling of loss that induces hinting at the missing volumes. There, at the bottom of these sunken spaces, two separate ponds interspersed large scale on which large volumes of water falling in the manner of cataracts. At its center, a second hollow squares act as water drains leading to unknown caverns inside the earth. Water movement somehow recalls the infinite energy generated by the destructive action at a particular point on the planet.
Infographic of the Memorial Recreation 11 September. Image: PWP
This proposal leads to a thought horror terminal, also evocative of the disappearance occurred in that place as a result of widespread terrorist attack in history and known. According to digital images that have been developed to explain the idea, the September 11th Memorial is likely, a must see and an attraction for the city important, once it is inaugurated and opened to the public.
This monumental space future joins a trail of works halfway between sculpture, architecture and landscape design that evoke events or important historical figures. A few relatively recent examples may illustrate this large set of spaces dedicated to the memories that go back as far back as the stelae and tombs that prehistoric everywhere left in memory of those contemporaries disappeared. This is the case of the evocative architecture to be built in the Mound of Ardeatine, Located just outside of Rome; or other abstract construction that twenty years ago was established as a memorial to the Holocaust in the center of Berlin; or enclosure also famous memorial to soldiers killed in the Vietnam War, located in the city of Washington.
Monument to the Martyrs of Ardeatine. Mario Fiorentino, Cacaprina, Cardelli, Aprille, architects and sculptor, Mario Coccia. Rome, 1949. Photos. Federico Garcia Barba
In Rome, gifted architect for the monumental, as Mario Fiorentino, with the help of other colleagues neorealist, would do a great job to accommodate the graves of Jews murdered by the notorious German SS calls Ardeatine caves. There, en 1949, be placed in alignment the graves of the deceased under a strong and heavy concrete deck, generating a shady space and distressing that lights up a tiny sliver of light opened in its lateral limits. The Monumento ai martiri delle Fosse Ardeatine weight reflects the distressing historical fact that both load on the consciousness of the human species.
The Monument to the Victims of the Holocaust (Holocaust Mahnmal), designed by architect Peter Eisenman in 2005 by the Pariser Platz Berlin is a space that induces feelings of claustrophobia and bureaucracy that lead us to recall the extremely rational in the Nazi state conduct a heinous extermination. The appeal to the tens of thousands of concrete monoliths that create a maze that only reveals the silhouette of heaven generate a place that introduces a highly empathetic helplessness experienced by the millions of people slaughtered without mercy.
Holocaust Mahnmal. Peter Eisenman, arquitecto. Berlin, 2005. Photo Sleepy Surge, Flickr
Newly, there in that city of the dead in Miniature, material hardness and abstraction of parallelepipeds bring out the feeling of inhumanity present in a recurrent throughout the centuries in the actions of our species. The Monument to the Victims of the Holocaust possibly inspired other funerary, megalithic alignments Carnac in Brittany.
On Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, of Chinese sculptor- jacket Maya Lin, the idea for the tribute to the 58.000 MIAs be confined to the generation of a slight inflection topographic. There in that space landscape is a monolith incrustaría horizontal dark black granite which would record the names of all those who leave their lives in the course of that infamous war. The use of unification in one piece of thousands of dead people and generate collective emotionality that place has become the capital city of the United States, in one of the most visited over the years.
That proposal 1982 Lin become one of the most renowned living artists in American panorama. She is the author of numerous proposals sculptural high interest, as the call Time Table located in the gardens of Stanford University.
Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. Maya Lin. Washington DC, 1982. Photos: Gregg Zollo, Flickr
What is interesting about these works is the personal way that appeals to volumetric forms to express a collective feeling in a metaphorical way. Is the use of certain feelings and ideas that emerge involuntarily spaces and access to materials, in tectonic, are able to induce a thought of solidarity and community with our neighbors in a way difficult to explain in words.
We could consider these proposals as an artistic expression in its purest. The manner in which it was achieved imagine these areas is something that lurks in the minds of their creators and may not be copied or remedarse absolutely. Probably, there arises the creative process of conjugation of ideas and concepts on the experience that the author aims to inspire the visitor, mental accumulation with previous experiences made, sculptural, literary or architectural emerged with a similar claim.
The wall of Maya Lin memorial engraved with the names of the soldiers killed in the Vietnam War. Photos: H.C. Woodward, Flickr
This suggests that human artistry is on where you can be a hope for the future, beyond the dictatorship of the economy and the rule of the machines. The inability to reproduce the creative moment, the artistic idea, is a value beyond monetary consideration.
The development of rational discipline and material progress is not going to lead to a better world and prove himself Holocaust. There is something other than, Art. A book of poetry is worth more than a railroad, Gustave Flaubert would say in his inner Notebook 1840.
Time table. Maya Lin. Stanford, California. Photos: Ian Hsu, Flickr
WTC building 7 have no memorial?
I loved,Federico. Very interesting and very well written. Congratulations!
Great article!!!
I loved it and share it with your permission, Thanks Federico !!
I liked it, Federico, good architectural reflection, art on a new urban landscape of loss, absence.
WOW! love me Article, exact!, … Muybueno!