Dan writes about the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition and asks which of the designs is most striking. For the most part, I agree with him that all of the designs seem too similar to Vietnam memorials. But if I had to pick the most striking design, it would be Passages of Light: Memorial Cloud:
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“Through the Memorial Cloud we hope to elicit two more responses, one highly physical, the other imaginative, both of awe. One recovers a sensation associated with the World Trade Center Towers when we recall standing in their presence: the urge to look skywards, a vertical gesture associated with hope. With the second gesture we seek to give expression to a relation between those we mourn and those who live on affected by the tragedy and repercussions of the attacks. This is a relation between the finite and the sublime. The cloud’s design as a bundle of 10,000 vertical conduits for light which support each other structurally, distributing forces of tension and compression, figuratively represents our shared responsiveness to crisis and our cumulative strength.”
