Absence of Reflection

Yesterday's announcement that a design called "Reflecting Absence" had been selected by a jury as the memorial to the victims of the September 11 terrorist attack was greeted with reactions ranging from shoulder-shrugging to outright dismay. The modern art famously preferred by Mayor Bloomberg seems to have seeped its way into the selection process, where virtually all the final selections were abstract, with names and concepts that, like the winning one, verged on parody.

The lack of a more traditional memorial option depressed interest in the process itself and seemed to present a consensus on the part of the selection committee to move away from memorials that directly addressed the attack or its impact in human terms, on a human scale. This is the same mind-set that prefers to speak of "the tragic events of September 11th," instead of dealing directly with the fact that our city suffered an act of war, an attack resulting in mass murder, an attack on American values and institutions.

The winning design — two fountain-like reflecting pools parked in a vast plaza — strikes us as pedestrian. We've seen too many fountains rusting away while their plumbing is awaiting repair. The "Reflecting Absence" design seems at best to amount to a glorified version of the fountain in front of the Seagram Building on Park Avenue, which is not saying much; at worst it evokes a car wash or a giant, walk-through version of some other plumbing fixture.

On the positive side, the official who ran the competition, Vartan Gregorian, promises that more trees will be added to the original design. It would be a tragic irony if a government-run planning process managed to recreate the same vast windswept plaza that made the original World Trade Center site so unfriendly to pedestrians. Also on the positive side, this memorial eliminates the pit that was at the center of the Daniel Libeskind master plan and that we've felt is a factor that would unfortunately prevent the neighborhood from reverting to its most important prior use as part of the Lower Manhattan financial center.

The mayor's point that in such a public process no single design can please everyone is well taken. But with such a lack of enthusiasm on the part of New Yorkers, it is worth wondering why the process could not be opened again to new contestants and new designs.

There is a precedent for such a decision; the initial conceptual designs for the rebuilding of ground zero were presented to the public and re-examined accordingly. New Yorkers will live with the memorial for the rest of our city's history; it's worth taking some extra time for the reflection needed to get it right.