I found out that early early Well look at the crowd thank you all for coming. I believe there may be a remote stream somewhere is that correct. There is. Upstairs. OK so if you are very uncomfortable back here it's being remotely streamed in the gallery upstairs upstairs directly above this up the steps and. Before I introduce Michael I just wanted to thank in particular a couple of people for surprising me a number of years ago with this honor. Particularly Lucy Andrea who may or may not be in the audience and I think it was probably her did David Greene. Jim Weiner and others who sort of spearheaded it and particularly Mickey Steinberg without whom. This would not have happened and to the other three hundred thirty people who contributed to this. Let me say that when I was a graduate student I considered this is really for the students in the audience here. I considered the lecture series to be an essential part of my education and when I think back over thirty five year teaching career here and some time before that in practice and so forth. One of the things that really stuck with me when I act and still remember John Heda breathing into a microphone. You know I can still recall. Michael Graves. Speaking of I've never heard of him at the time right. Young guy. And I really encourage all of the students in the audience here to to attend as many of these as possible even when you think it's you know somebody talking about Lean construction or someone talking about the issues of planning and zoning and so forth. You will learn from these and you will carry them with you and they will stay with you and Ben if. It you for your whole career. So it's really for you for the students that these lectures are endowed this is one endowed lecture. We only need about six more ten more such endowments. So that we will not burden our ever shrinking budget the way that it seems to be. Alan is correct in that my only hope for this is that at least once a year in perpetuity. Which is a fairly long time that. That a landscape architect would be standing here presenting a work work of landscape architecture or history or some other aspect of a profession that I have attempted to represent on a faculty of architecture in a College of Architecture that includes industrial design and city planning and construction and music for a long long time. Michael is not landscape architect. But in some ways I think you will have to agree with me that his work on particular the memorial in New York is really could be classified as a work of landscape architecture which of course it really isn't. It's really a memorial it's also a work of art. It's also a work of architecture. Which I like because it blurs these kinds of artificial distinctions that have become so ingrained with us over the years. Because of different licensing requirements degree requirements all these things that have come into play in the last hundred years since these disciplines moved into the academy. It's not the only reason but but it played a law a large part. So I am really really police Michael. Agreed to do this and. And now let me turn our focus to the main event which is Michael Michael went to Dartmouth College he actually grew up some of you may or may not know this grew up in is a real Mexico City Washington D.C. attended and graduated with a major in political science from Dartmouth College. He then came to Georgia Tech and he and his now wife Melanie who is also an alumna of this college. In city and regional planning and a lawyer practicing in New York. In fact lived in a has a this is quite unique. When he first came to Atlanta he lived in the Claremont hotel. Which tells you something about that that graduate students on the budget is not you're not unique graduate students. In that in that in that way. He then went to work for Cohn Patterson Fox after several years he became a licensed architect and went to work for the New York Housing Corporation and was an eyewitness to the events as the planes flew into the building on that Monday morning. And as you'll see actually it moved him greatly. He submitted to boards along with I guess what. Ten thousand of the boards five two thousand. How many was it five thousand are two hundred out five thousand two hundred architects and make international competition. And and he won. He made it into the the Round of eight in the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation which had been created to sponsor and hold this competition. I actually published these on their website and when I saw the eight arrayed and looked at that I really just factually were told that this is a car this morning. I realize that actually I said you know what you might win this thing because of it's clear the clarity of the idea in which in my view the other seven by and large had over designed everything. And the clarity of the of the idea. Despite all the matching nations of what you can only imagine. What he's been through in the last eight years to get this belt. The changes the state of New York the governor of New York. A mayoral election. All of the families of the victims the first responders and so forth. Everybody invested in this emotionally in a way that made it politically very difficult. Michael persevered through all of that. It is now open and I'm not going to say much more because I want to bring Michael to the stage so that he in fact tell you the story. Michael. Wow It's an honor to be here and I'm so so honored to be lecturing is part of the Doug with Allen actor and Doug was my favorite professor attack and. It feels a little three zero to be of here on this stage having him present me move on to reality. You know one thing. So where do I start. As Doug said I was in New York in two thousand and one and I thought attack I witnessed it firsthand. I was actually at home. In the East Village when I heard that a tower had struck the World Trade Center and I went up to the roof of my apartment building in these village to see the second plane strike the south tower and one of those things that you never forget. And this is horrifying and awful as it was to see that what I also saw in New York in the days and weeks and months that followed was actually incredibly uplifting the way the city came together the way we all came together in the wake of that attack and and I couldn't have believed it myself if you would have told me this sort of the transformation that I felt personally as somebody had been living in New York for about three years that sense of connection to other New Yorkers that sense of community and what you saw in New York was something that I hope you see in the memorial was this stoicism defiance but also incredible compassion a way in which we came together and I was so moved by what I had seen that I wanted to imagine a memorial and a few months after the attack. I started to sketch ideas for memorial and I could not imagine a memorial on the side of the towers it was too soon. It was a six story high pile of rubble that was aflame and bodies were being pulled out of the daily And so I was drawn actually to the river nearby to the Hudson River and I imagine the surface of the river torn open forming two square voids and the water cascading into these voids and disappearing and that notion of this sort of inexplicable rift in the surface of the water if the river is frozen You could carve that void but in its liquid state you couldn't really do that but it was this persistent image that that haunted me and I wanted to know. Could you. You do realize that idea and so the sketch of these two voids in the Hudson River by the World Financial Center in Lower Manhattan ended up a year later becoming this little model about a foot by foot. You can see it on a coffee table in my living room here a little Plexiglas model that actually was a small sculpture a small fountain and how to a pump no bigger than in two by two inches it was ripped out of a desktop fountain and using Plexiglas I built this this little sculpture and ended up photographing it on the roof of my apartment building in the East Village capturing that sense of the absence in the skyline being mirrored in reflected in the surface of the river and I did this in many ways for myself. There was no client there was no program there was no competition and I worked on it for a year aided in part by the fact that I had to take time off from work because my work visa had it had expired and wasn't being renewed because if all of the concerns are surrounding Dynas and homeland security and so once I finished this model took these photographs I sort of set it aside on a high shelf and forgot about it for about a year. And I came back to it in two thousand and three following the competition that was held for the design of the master plan of the say that competition was won by Daniel Levy skin. And you can see here the sixteen acre site of the World Trade Center site over here a very large portion of lower Manhattan and as you can see that's a very dense street grid of lower Manhattan was interrupted when the World Trade Center was built in the seventies and that street grade was sort of erased creating a large super block with those two large buildings and part of the leaves can master plants adjusted. Bringing those some of those streets back through the site bringing Greenwich back through the site. Bringing Fulton back through the site Greenwich running north south Fulton running east west and creating a site for a memorial an eight acre parcel here and putting five new office buildings around one two three four five office buildings as well as a PATH station a transit station and a performing arts center around the site. So taking that large sixteen acre superblock carving it up into four unequal blocks in size one where the towers had been. And I thought that that was a very strong and powerful move it really talked about integrating the site back into the fabric of form and hand but I was concerned about other parts of the master plan. So for example you could see there was a large bridge building that would be over the North Tower footprint which is delineated here without their light green color and another building cantilevering over the South Tower footprint and entire site some thirty feet below the surrounding street level so if this is a surrounding street you could see this long. Graham. The visitors would walk down to the site. And I felt that what it did it took the site and it created a powerful memorial but it was a memorial that would be forever cut off from the life of the city. I can imagine New Yorkers who work in your By who live here by happening to just come across the site and walk through it. I could see people coming specifically to that site to commemorate but in doing so would set the side aside from memory and simultaneously also in some way a race that history and leads to forgetfulness and I thought that this site should be part of the city that. The everyday life of this. And I thought of my own experiences shortly after the attacks in places like Washington Square and Union Square that became impromptu gathering places for New Yorkers to come together to support one another to to come to terms as a community without attack in a way that would have seemed an imagined unprecedented even a week before that the way that you know that sort of brusque image that New York has if itself is a city of strangers just completely disappeared. And it's something that I knew intellectually that something that I heard many times people like Doug tell me about the importance of public space in the city but it wasn't until you experience it in the aftermath of an attack like this that you understand how how emotional that aspect of public space is and how public space reflects those best values of a democratic society that sense of of a shared mission even through conflicting viewpoints that you could have different things going on. Side by side and I thought that the site should be elevated and brought up and made part of the city again I came across this quarry in New Jersey and there is just something about the geometry of it and that sense of both rune and rebirth of water in vegetation and the clarity of this this void that was removed from the order. And these ideas led me to start sketching ideas for this memorial plaza which you see here on the right with these two voids puncturing the surface of the Plaza the voids which had been previously in the Hudson River sort of migrated to the site to where the tower towers at once then and I imagine people standing up above looking into these voids are standing behind those waterfalls which would line the perimeter of the void and looking past the names into the void. So this sketch led to this entry. It was a competition was one board not two. And on it you can see this notion of a memorial plaza that set up a grade and all the buildings which had been shown on the master player on the master plan on the site are relegated to the periphery. And down below and these memorial galleries which would surround each voids the names of the victims. One thing that I should actually go back and mention you can't really see the theor the text that accompanied. The presentation. Ended on the Wordplay which I thought was an important way to talk about the site that it is the site from memory but it's also a site for work and play that is the site for every day that you could imagine Aber had residents coming through here that you can imagine office workers coming down here to sit at lunch with a friend and that you could imagine people coming here to morning to commemorate. So as Doug mentioned earlier I was one of eight finalists that were selected by the jury and in two thousand and three. I came to the site well you know the recovery. Work had ended but the construction hadn't really begun yet you could see the slurry wall that Daniel leaves can spoke eloquently above about and there is something very powerful about this trace this wall that had been invisible that had been in a basement wall essentially becoming exposed and I can understand why why. Daniel wanted to make it an important part of this memorial and museum and I thought there might be a way to do that not exhibiting it to the open air as it is seen here but within a memorial museum the plows of which would be up here at street level and so this becomes an internal space again. One other thing that I came across the. Move me very much where these traces of the columns which had been torched cut right at the base of the foundation slab what had been the lowest basement slab within the World Trade Center and these enormous steel columns. Connected the foundations to the tower they held the towers in place and the recovery effort when all the building material was removed from the site. They were torch cut and left this trace this very real scar of what had been there before and I thought they were incredibly evocative in showing you what was here once it is no longer that you don't need to rebuild that column that you can see see it in its absence and in many ways I think this design is about making absence visible and present as a finalist I had about a month to prepare more materials renderings and animations and models. For the jury True View respond to some of the questions in critiques they had one of the questions was where could you put cultural facilities on the site the nature of the plows they felt it was very stark and austere and I remember throughout this period of time consulting extensively with Doug on these questions and one question in particular vexed me was the question of the character of the landscape of this plaza and you could see I had a series of these tall Eastern white pines across the plaza. But the jury. You know they said you talk about this is a place of work of play if every day it in these images and in these models it still looks as if on that spectrum of activities and the activities you could imagine here would be primarily commemoration memorialization in nature. Not that every day that you speak of. And so I could understand where that critique came from by. But I was also uncertain how to respond to that. How do you change the nature of the landscape without changing the direction of the memorial plaza idea. The clarity of that flat plane punctured by these two large voids. And we talked about this for a while and Doug made this very correct for the comment he said well think of it as a table cloth and I said OK. And I wasn't really sure what he meant but I thought about that for a couple of days and I'm sure you've all been in that situation in students where you get a critique and you say OK and then you. Walk away thinking what did I just say OK to you. What I took. Doug's coming to mean was that the tablecloth really takes the shape of the table right now there are tables around for a tangle or square the tablecloth doesn't have that shape in of itself. And so this design element really would conform to that plaza that flat plane in these two voids and it didn't compete with it. So if I would have come across with a strong grid of trees or a very figural form. It would compete with it and so for me I wanted to find a way to do that that would complement it would enter the design language in a somewhat softer lower register. And I came up with this idea they called abacus like bans a series of paving bans which would unite the plaza through. Continuous material treatment from one edge to the other from curb to curb in Southeast bends could be wide some of them could be narrow and then along the centerline of every other then she would have a row of trees on the trees like the beads along the wire of an abacus could travel along that axis and stop anywhere so they might be ten feet apart here thirty feet apart there. And what this did it created a sort of a soft order as you look in one direction you see these trees forming long straight out. Weighs in as your gaze shifts ninety degrees. The other direction that order disappears completely and I think you'll see this idea of this sort of staggered order. Repeating itself elsewhere in the design in their arrangement of the names as well remember sharing this image with Doug and talking about it that well what about orienting the band's east west to follow. The sun in the sky and I thought that that sounds good. And that's how we ended up with the bands around east west and. And here you. You see one of the early sort of interim renderings at this point there were three finalists that the jury was still talking to. And so I had the opportunity to show them a couple more endurance build another model the previous model that you had seen all eight finalists had to show the same extent of the site which was essentially the memorial plaza yet nothing beyond it. And I thought it was important to actually show what was beyond it because this memorial plaza is bounded by the walls of the buildings around it. It's really defined as an urban space by the city. If you think of Central Park Central Park as defined by Fifth Avenue Central Park West and you have these walls of buildings that create such a clear delineation and I think the same thing happens here. If you walk through the surf narrowing crooked. Streets of Lower Manhattan on a street grid that was laid out by the Dutch and over centuries has been built up with skyscrapers you can barely see the sky the skies a sort of sliver at the top of this canyon and then to walk out onto the Sacre clearing is significant. It's a clearing the thing with these two boys are sort of empty spaces that is also an empty space within the city and I wanted to share that with the jury to give them a sense of the scale of the space what looks enormous when all you see on it were tiny little figures off a sudden looked almost like a pocket park when you put tower that's over one thousand feet across the street. So the design was selected in January of two thousand and four and I should also mention that one other question that came out of this process was who would assist me in putting these drawings together and I reached out to Peter Walker and he also was part of the landscape design that you see here and we started to work on all the nuts and bolts details of bringing together this design injury ality things like where should the Information Desk be where are the batteries going to be where will the school groups to and one of the first sort of logistical issues that we had to address was how would these waterfalls be formed this is Paley park on fifty third Street in New York City. It's a tiny little park but in incredible space. And it has a water wall on the back end of the water on this wall is very agitated because it's running across a very rough surface and there's also quite a lot of water running over there's about two three inches of water coming across the top. And that was one direction we could have pursued another direction was down the water for free fall as you see on this fountain at the World Financial Center and we decided to go with this option for a variety of technical anesthetic reasons and started to test it up in Canada in the backyard of our fountain consultant and user to see how it functioned the winter as well as the spring looking at different profiles difference aeration that would form the edge of the we're trying to get the sort of the maximal visual effect with a minimal amount of water. And I think you know this is just one aspect I think everything that we did was tested at length and in my new show and in real life sort of one to one scale with a real materials very often and this design it came out of that I think a lot of things you can imagine. But until you see and try and test the model. You won't know what it looks like. Gave us an opportunity to bring more things into the design process you have a strong direction at the beginning of the design process but then along the way you have the opportunity to actually define it and enrich it. And so here we had. What happens here is the water is separated by these we are fingers you sort of feathered. Fingers about an inch of water coming over the top and then it separates into individual strings that are on one and a half inch centers and the clarity of each individual stream is is beautiful. You can see it as it comes over the edge but by the time it falls down about half way about fifteen feet down that clarity dissipates. And you get the sort of billowing tapestry of water and that sense that these individual strands become this united tapestry I think speaks to that notion of both individual loss and collective loss that will suffer that day we looked at the names. We looked at different materials everything from glass and stone to bronze and I was particularly drawn to bronze and thinking of this as an outdoor memorial an outdoor experience something that really should weather and something that you will have a strong tactile relationship with. And I'll come back to the bronze in a moment but these memorial galleries. I think what their purpose was was to shelter that moment if encounter with the names this photograph from two thousand and six firefighter at one of these temporary memorial pools that were built to Ground Zero. Every year for family members to come to. Captured what I thought would happen within these memorial galleries that sense of a secular but spiritual space a space that would shelter that experience would allow one to open. Oneself to sort of to moment of contemplation of introspection. And for a variety of reasons having to. Do with budget concerns with security concerns with the concerns that some family members had expressed about going below ground to encounter the names. These were more galleries were eliminated from the design and the names were moved from down below up to plaza level and I felt very much like I was standing there at the edge of that void not knowing what are we going to build there. How are we going to address this question. And we spent the next couple of years looking at dozens and dozens of different iterations of bringing the names up the plaza level very different condition than the one that we had previously imagined. But at the same time and I wasn't certain of this in two thousand and six when this change occurred. We were able to hold on to the essence of the design and I think that and I talked with some students earlier today about the importance of not falling in love with one physical permutation of the design idea that it is the idea that you drive the design and that there are many different iterations that one can go through and discover and try and develop and that's easy to say after the fact when you're at the beginning of a process like that there is a little bit of uncertainty and fear as how well will we be able to address this issue but one idea that we did we developed was the idea that the plaza would end and the water feature would begin and then the water would fall down into the void in the names would come out of the surface of the water. So it's really about this continuous horizontal line that then breaks where the void is insight into the plaza. And there's something very beautiful about this idea very moving in fact we heard from some family members that they were concerned it almost looked as if the names were drowning and other people expressed concern that it would be difficult to touch the names or to make rubbings and eventually despite spending quite a lot of time developing this idea. We had to sort of set it aside and move forward in disk and try another idea and another idea was this bronze element to your mocked up in plywood that would surround the void and the names would be inscribed right on it and water would well out of the top of it. And sends tiny little review let's across the names and the torrent across on the other side. So it was something that whispered in one direction and shout it in the other and there is beauty to that design too but that also was sort of set aside and these are just two of of many many many iterations that we went through but I think the process and the end benefited from all of these moments of investigation and discovery. And the design that you see today on the site is very much a product of that long and lengthy process it's not a design that could've. In my mind emerged on day one and it is based on this eight foot wide water table that is two feet high clad in stone and then above it is a floating bronze element wing like shape. Five sided one side has the top of it has the names and sites in it. And during the day these names appear as shadows. They're about that material that's been removed from this this half inch bronze plate. And it night these panels are looted from within. So the names appear as light and the thickness of the plate cuts off that light so that as you're walking around these voids you CNAME in from a few and then as you shift over a couple feet the name disappears and another one appears. And I have some pictures that we took after the opening to share with you how the names would be arranged was probably the most contentious and emotional issue that underpin this entire effort. I think the architects the planners the industrial designers in the room might be interested in this or. The other aspects of the design but family members cared. Almost solely and exclusively about this issue one question was how would we recognize first responders and an early idea was to use an insignia if you can tell the difference between these two. Slides and one of them has a Maltese cross next to it which is a symbol of the F.D.A. and why the fire department and I thought that something like that did not create undue hierarchy within the names yet drew attention in a subtle way of acknowledging that sacrifice that first responders made that day. And of course the firefighters and their families felt that this was not sufficient and other family members felt that this was over the top and created a two tiered system. And this was one of you know a number of issues surrounding the names but in two thousand and four when I was asked how are the names going to be arranged. I suggested an idea that I called meaningful adjacency that there would be a reason why one name is next to another name in the same way that So if you're seated here today chose to sit next to friends next to relatives that there would be a reason why the names are arranged around them or all that way and I didn't think in alphabetical list was the right response. We had three Michael Lynch's two Michael Francis lunches and so the idea of those names side by side felt as if I could imagine their relatives come to the memorial not being able to say with certainty which of those two Michael Francis Lynch is was their name their marker. And so I suggested this idea of meaningful adjacencies that we would actually reach out to family members and ask them are their names of other victims other people who died that day that they would like to see next to the. Name of their loved one and use that information use that input that would everybody would have an equal chance to participate in it as a way for arranging the names and that idea was deemed as unfeasible to logistically complex to operationally complex Phelim D.C. had not had a good year with family members in their groups I mean they felt that they were not being acknowledged and listened to. And so when I see to open a process like this up. They said absolutely not. We can't do that and so this idea of meaningful adjacency which would have underpinned something that looks random with a hidden logic became in fact. A random arrangement of names because I couldn't think of any other way of arranging the names that wouldn't privilege some over others. You know in alphabetical listing would privilege some families by putting them together while other families wouldn't have their names side by side if they didn't share the same last name. And so we went forward for a couple of years with a concept that was truly haphazard arrangement of names and that there was a certain justice to it and yet at the same time it felt very painful and brutal and it angered many family members. And what happened is they got together and over a period of about a year and a half came up with an alternative way of arranging the names instead of a random arranged array of names the names would be arranged by employer and by Tower and so the people who work for a company a would be listed under Company A along with a floor that they worked on and their age. They would be listed alphabetically by company the companies believe would be listed alphabetically by Tower. And I felt that what this did is actually started to divide the names into smaller and smaller groups rather than emphasize both the individual and the collective It sort of started to break the names into groups and to separate them from one each other and even. The arrangement this idea of these sort of stacked columns which would be necessary. Once you start had headings versus a sort of loose arrangement of the names that gave each name a space that was its own its own. Location on the memorial not a location within a list but a place on the panel. And in two thousand and six when so for two years we had this arrangement and there was outcry over it from family members and there was absolutely no fundraising going on for the memorial because of all the controversy surrounding the names arrangement in two thousand and six. Mayor Bloomberg became chairman of the memorial foundation this was one of the first issues he wanted to resolve and met with me or I should say I met with him at Gracie Mansion to discuss this and he's a very data driven guy he thought about this at length and had a number of questions and we came out of that meeting with this suggestion that we would arrange the names into nine broad groups which reflected where people were that day. Geographically. So you would have the four flights the two towers the Pentagon the ninety three bombing victims which all had died near the North Tower footprint and the first responders and the first responders and turned arranged by where they came from from the same firehouse from the same precinct building but amazingly enough the mayor agreed to this idea of meaningful adjacency allow me to bring it back into the design within the framework of these nine broad groups. So for example some of these groups are named that are arranged in the World Trade Center at the North Pole. There are over a thousand names within that group and within that group and these names are not arranged alphabetically they're arranged according to meaningful adjacency and letters went out to family members in two thousand and nine asking them to verify the spelling of the name of the group that the name would be in but also asking them if they had any requests for adjacency and we got over. Twelve hundred responses asking for specific adjacencies between family members between friends between coworkers and over the period of a year we were able to arrange the names to meet each and every adjacency request it was an unbelievable emotionally tasking job and there was one woman at our office that arranged the entire South Pole by hand she had quarter scale cards of each and every name and she would move them around until she found an arrangement that satisfied all of the requirements photograph it transcribe it to illustrator we would put it up on the wall make more changes to make sure that its appearance was also. What we were looking for we were looking for that sort of uniform grain of continuous ribbon if name surrounding them or we don't want breaks from the top to the bottom occurring and so the names had to be staggered some names are much longer than others so that it's evidence had to be next to other names and within certain groups and we had Jason C. request across groups. And in the process of doing this we learned about some of the reasons behind. Jason's requests that we got and their incredibly sad and moving stories. For example a young woman who lost her father that day. Also lost her best friend from college. Her father was on Flight eleven her her friend was working in the north tower that flight crashed into the north tower and so we ended Flight eleven with his name. We started World Trade Center with her name there side by side they don't share the same name or anything like that. And when you come and visit the more you might not be aware of why those names are side by side. But I think it's very meaningful to the family members who will come and visit. But even more importantly there's a way to once that meaning is embedded. Within the design of the memorial there are many different ways to tease that meaning back out and we're starting to do that already the memorial foundation has been working with Story Corps to record oral histories from service from survivors and from family members and some of those recordings can now be heard when you're on site if you have a smartphone. So you can stand a panel and twenty two North twenty two and actually hear the recollections of somebody talking about some of the names that are on this panel perhaps two or three of the names that are on this panel together and why they are on this panel together. And you know some of this information might be relayed in print or on a smartphone or some or in video we don't. There will be ways that I can imagine in which that meaning can be shared with people but I think what is important is that they can be shared and what it does it takes a very difficult number close to three thousand dead and personalize it by telling you one individual story after another and I think that that's very important not to allow that to overwhelm you and become three thousand is a number that's very hard to relate to but when you hear about one brother or one mother or sister or a friend then it's something that we can relate to and I think we will always be able to relate to and future generations will as well. So we're marching towards completion in fabrication and everything seems to be going well. When we got a request from the Mayor's Office of people with disability to address a concern. They had with sightlines and let me click back here for a second. And if you can see here the secondary void at the center of each pool. The name panel is very excessive all you can see it you can touch it. If you're in a wheelchair but it comes to a peak of forty two inches and which has to do with a number of different considerations. But it also created a challenge for a very short statured person sitting in a wheelchair to see the void at the center of each pool and the mirrors off of people disappearing York said you know. We think it's an important part of the experience and whether you're seated or standing you should have an equivalent experience. So how can you modify the design to address that and then a moment like that. Late in the game you can imagine a lot of bad ideas through have come up very quickly from all the participants in the room. Can we put a scissor lift on the plaza and how portion of the plaza go up and down. If you substitute some of the bronze panels with glass could you cut openings between the panels. And for me it was always about creating this continuous flow of names around the memorial the idea of trying to break it up and creating flocks where you could see through every ten feet or so was that if an anathema. And we tried to modify the design in ways that would be organic to to its language but as you can see these attempts were in very convincing. They they met code requirements they met sight on requirements but they did not feel like they were part of the design and design that is minimal. It says it has so few elements every move carries tremendous significance and has to feel as if it's there for a reason. After sort of kicking this back and forth for a week or two I had this idea of chamfering the corner which basically means that from into a ninety degree corner you going to sniff the corner off the two forty five degree angles and what that did it allowed viewers to come closer to the inside edge of that void and in doing so created sightline opportunities. So you can see how that inside edge of the waterfall right here essentially became the sight line cut off and once you were seated much closer and you could see and then I realized a few days later. Or that the towers actually had chamfered corners to felt as a way you know we looked at the proportion of the corner to the long side in a way that would hearken to that precedent and we went back to them opening third if you park your wheelchair at the corner and you look over your shoulder you can see this and the void at the center of each pool and they said well that's great but we want to fund a frontal approach not everybody can bend ninety degrees look over their shoulder and that's when you feel like you know here then if you're over going to tear the hair out of your head and I thought well we cut it in plan let's cut it in section and that's what we ended up doing and I think the design actually is a much better design is a result of all of these changes which when we were first asked to accommodate seemed like a large imposition. But what happened is we were able to go from five rows to three rows across the corner then back to five and instead of stopping the names at the corner and starting back up. We created a closed circle of names which poetically was much more appropriate to the design and sculpture really I think is also much more beautiful. A few pictures of the process of building various mock ups of testing them. Of you know this is the first time I saw the we're in stainless steel as opposed to wood and it was a very very bright silver color which we were able to darken fortunately to a gray. Selecting the panels working on the landscape design the trees. Like this image. It's sort of not as relevant now that the trees are on the plaza. But these trees were assembled in New York New Jersey in Philadelphia and so in Pennsylvania too brought together to a nursery in New Jersey. To to grow there for a few years while work was going on at the Plaza and you had this sort of caravan of trees making their way to. To be planted it was quite beautiful to see the first few trees being brought in under the do. This is an eye and sun rising on been what looks like an Urban Plaza is in fact a green roof. We have about seventy feet of program space below us on four different levels. Everything from the chiller plant the drugs and water from the Hudson River and distributes chilled water to five office buildings into the memorial and a museum and a path train track which you can see here and a subway line. All of these things are kind of integrated below you. But at the end of the day you. Most people will not be aware of that and I think there is a lot of complexity both at the planning level but also the detail level of various elements of the design for example the name panels. That is there but is not celebrated it's there to support something else which is a moment of quiet introspection the moment of sort of looking back and of seeing what is no longer here. And that is normally where I would end my presentation but I have a few images to share with you from the opening in there after. Which was a very moving day and this by the fact that I worked on this project for eight years I felt a little bit like a stranger there that day. The lighting of the waterfall examinator from below. The towers and lights and things. Beyond. The plaza in the morning. So that's it. Thank you thank you so much Will thank you Mark. And not about the Claremont or sorry. You know. Yeah. So as you walk up to the edge of the voids where the names. Are the names are cut out of this bronze wing it seems to float above this water table so you can actually touch the water table we've seen people bottle it in take it home which worries me because it has some chemicals in it because it is a fountain. But that was very important to us that relationship being able to touch water and then trace your hand across the names. And it was so important to us that people have that tactile relationship for them or all that out of concern over the bronze panels becoming too hot to touch in the summer we integrated the heating and cooling system that's concealed within and runs in between the rows of names so you can. In the winter i thousand for mine it it's actually a little warm in the summers or cool to the touch and that of course is there by completely invisible. Yeah yeah. So the first mock up that we did in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Using real materials was a ten foot panel made of bronze and that panel. Was quite complex. I don't know that I explained in detail the various types of letters that we have the names are enciphered out of the bronze panel. So they're essentially stencil letters and we used a font little they very much Optima for that but optimize not a stencil font it's meant to be printed on a page or seen on a screen. So I had to decide where the stencil arms would be that would support these letters the counters so that I learned within a no or within a D. or B.. And those are pinned from behind there actually those counters are extruded sliced and pinned from there. Thousands and tens of thousands of fasteners that you don't see underneath there. We wanted to draw a distinction between the names in the group markers when that might say Flight eleven. So those letters actually prismatic raise letters that in the first pass were cast. So you had to patch in any area that had prismatic letters to whereas the rest was water jetted out. So the two different machines into different processes and trying to marry them together seamlessly. And then finally a different lip of each ten foot panel there is a panel numerator So if you're looking for a particular name. You can find it on one of seventy six panels that surround each pool so might say and twelve North Pole panel twelve. And that's the group in size and so we had to go through we designed at length changes to the farms to take something that's two dimensional and make it three dimensional. But that first pass every facet of that five sided wing was essentially cast welded I'm sorry welded together. We worked with a very intelligent team fabricators out of New York and New Jersey and they had this idea to. Five. It's a five sided shape four sides of which are actually one continuous plate that's been back cut and bent. So if you think about mending a half inch play you need quite as substantial break to do that but using it then if they just three machines break waterjet and a C.N.C. mill they were able to form all these panels with all the letters whether raised or recessed or stenciled by for example where we have raised letter is they used to break to blister the material up. So if you have a little blister pack which fills come in. Think of blistering up half an inch of bronze and then taking a C.N.C. mill to remove that little payload material up through feel a letter that's within that is going to hidden within it and they had this enormous chop that was a former train shed and that they basically set up these machines side by side and operated there and and made them. You know one after another. You could see like twenty of these panels sitting there next to each other. Waiting to be shipped out and they were shipped upstate where they were had finished the sanding the Pitino that supplied by hand. So it was a combination of incredible craftsmanship using computers and using hand technique side by side and the same thing occurred with the names I I kind of lost. I didn't give you the full story on the name so one pool was done by hand the other pool was done together with a group of software writers that tried to come up with a program that would optimize the names arrangement based on the requests that we got so you could keep a running tally of how many requests were met. So in this sort of configuration ninety six percent of the requests are met and if you drag and sort of pull the name off one panel onto another panel in between two other names maybe that would change it so you can see what it might look like that it had the right as. Appearance but also how compliant it was with the underlying program of meeting all these adjacencies requests. So I think that was something that underpinned this project in many ways it was high tech and low tech ways to whatever the means were to achieve the end. I think I did and I think it was very difficult at times and I think I might have alluded to the changes that occurred in two thousand and six or that was one of the very difficult moments of wondering do you stay on board with a project. Can you keep it on track through a change like that and I did and I'm glad I stayed involved in it and I think we were able to end of the day. Hold on to the ideas that were there at the the very beginning. Not in the exact same shape but the character of this memorial didn't change. And it could become something altogether different. It could have become very shrill or or self pitying or bellicose and I didn't want that to be I wanted to be a place that that had that sort of quiet and stoic defiance to it and I think it has it but it it's not cold Either it's there is compassion there and. And these are all intangible qualities so it's very hard to know what moves are going to are going to keep that as you're developing different ideas you can tell if something feels right. It's like writing dialogue for a character you know if you're going to some dialogue feels natural to that character and some doesn't. So as a designer. It's not just what and what you are doing. It's a sort of a dialogue with the design with its own character. Well. Persistence and fear of failure on a national stage are. Just so she was on the jury that selected the design and in fact. There were a number of times where I presented again to the jury when I was down to three finalists and at the end of one of these presentations the grazing action they broke into applause which completely. Kind of threw me I wasn't expecting that and I noticed one person wasn't coughing there him. It was violent. I was like well it got everybody off the guy completely misread her she was a huge advocate for the design and pushed very much for it but I did not have any clue. And in fact I thought that she wasn't impressed with it so. There you go. Yeah yeah yeah. So we started with Easter my pines and I thought there is something beautiful about these trees. I mean there. When you read about in the described sort of the giants of the forest and there is something about drawing I up and. For me it was always whatever tree we picked it was about creating those open sight lines across the plaza so when you stand at one end of it you can see clear across to the other and so I didn't want to be branches which would interfere with that. And that I'm to see had horticulturalist on that they were paying to look at some designs he said no problem with these are my pines but then some day the New York Times said that's a terrible idea. And so they said well we can't have Easter my parents over and for me was you know. I like those trees. But that wasn't what was driving their selection was more how they would work with the plaza. So the next tree that I think I picked where London Plane trees. I don't know if you're familiar with cabin Plaza or Bryant Park in New York. But there have Those are very tall attenuated shaped sort of very diffuse white under their canopy there's something very beautiful about them. The bark is all it looks almost like skin. And then those apparently were on a do not plant list because of some pests in New York. And for a while we had it was actually Peter's suggestion that we go with swamp white oaks which is what we have on them while also today. With the exception of one tree which is the survivor tree which is a calorie pear tree which was actually on the World Trade Center Plaza in two thousand and one and was pulled out of the rubble looking completely dead. I mean everything from about six feet up with shorn off there. The trunk was burnt and it was nursed back to help in Van Cortlandt Park by the New York City Parks Department and it was suggested that it would should come back to the site and I was a little apprehensive about that idea at first but I actually think it incredibly beautiful story of survival and of caring of nurturing and it blooms much sooner than all the other trees about a month before all the other trees and it has these tiny little white flowers so the whole tree becomes this beautiful white ball. Except for the fact that it's sheared off on one side so it's round on one side and then on the other side sheared out because of what happened to it the way it had been injured. And there's something quite moving about that and it's become this tree that people leave objects that you know homeless offerings cards money. Can the teddy bears. It's odd people want to leave something there and that feels like the right place to do it you know now we're being asked to define a way of acknowledging that tree with some sort of inscription for your. What the words should be and how should we have a railing around it or not we currently have a railing around the but it's there to stabilize to protect the tree until it's it takes root it has these guy wires that are holding it in place and the railing is to prevent people from tripping over the wires but in fact there's something kind of beautiful about this very minimal ring that surrounds the tree. There's an illustration Myra column and did in The New Yorker a few months ago of that tree with a ring around it and I'm trying to think Is there some way that weekend modify that to remain part of that. Yes. There were people who lost family members or that day and I didn't know that in that sense it felt like. Like a slight intrusion. Especially when the only other people that you see there are elected officials. You know. So you don't want to to color that but I have to do that a lot of I have made some incredible friendships throughout this process for people who lost loved ones that day and have been sort of persistent advocates for the for building a memorial and in times of but it heads with me in a Times have supported me over the last eight years and that's also part of I think a process like that. I think we're architects and designers always engaged in our projects is a very vicarious profession. So I think we always bring passion to our work and I hope to continue doing that. It's not going to be with the same sort of emotional death if this has but I think with the same commitment. If that makes sense. Last question. It's. Yeah it's. Odd. So the question alludes to last week I chaired the jury for the design of a moral park in the west village across from the former St Vincent's Hospital and it's the site that carries significance. In that St Vincent's was one of the first hospitals to treat AIDS patients never turned anybody away and the disease and that was one of the epicenters of a global epidemic but it started very much with consciousness there and over one hundred thousand New Yorkers have died of AIDS and there's no memorial in New York that acknowledges that. And so I agreed to chair that jury and we looked at four hundred seventy five entries. And one thing that I thought was how odd the architects are when you see our work product how we communicate how we break things down and even as an architect you know I found it a times hard to turn to stand. Some of these entries and I think we need to find a way to be less insular and more communicative. But it's also part of what we do and so you know we can't change that too much but it's it's a very different way of looking at things in this jury was a very mixed bag. I mean it was designers. But also people from other. Unrelated fields and so I think it was interesting to see that how people who are not. Architects or designers read these entries and how collectively we as architects try to communicate ideas and what ideas we think are great and some of them. There are though there are a few ideas that repeated themselves again and again and you kind of wonder like what you know why is that in this I strike now what is that many different minds. Come to almost a very similar conclusion or idea. And thank you. It was.