9/11 Memorial Needs a Heroic Touch

Sharing a sentimental preoccupation with "loss," "absence," "tears" and "memory" -- in the words of their creators -- these designs range from the stark to the bizarre. In the latter category, we have a vaulted, cavernous space shaped by thousands of vertical translucent tubes, which creates a roof that resembles a skating rink perched on a surrealistic honeycomb.

Other schemes are cluttered with gimmicks like images of victims projected against glass walls with water streaming down them. A depressingly minimal design leads visitors down a long, tilted, confining corridor to a space where they watch waterfalls feed into an "abyss."

None of the schemes offers figurative sculpture -- little or nothing, in fact, is modeled by the human hand. We are left with abstractions, concepts: The art is mostly in the artists' head, the architecture is rudimentary. Nothing soars. Nothing stirs the soul. These are anti-monuments.

What went wrong?

To start, the competition program tried to be all things to all people. It was cluttered with unfocused demands. The requirement that the huge twin tower footprints be preserved, for example, was a nod toward the victims' families, but it nurtured a gaggle of disjointed designs spread over the 4.7-acre site. Memorials tend to move us when they're compact -- symbolically as well as spatially.

But the big problem was the choice of jurors -- rather than representing our artistically pluralistic culture, the majority fall into the modernist camp. Not surprisingly, the finalist schemes reflect the minimalist, abstract idiom in civic art that has been in vogue for a little more than two decades -- since Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial. (Lin herself is on the jury.) But the schemes do not speak well for minimalism as the default idiom for memorial design.