The design, Reflecting Absence, by Michael Arad and new collaborator, Peter Walker, was selected to be the WTC Memorial. This design incorporate two submerged pools in the space where the towers once stood. Arad, an architect with the City Housing Authority, worked with Walker, a landscape architect who formerly headed the Harvard Landscape Architect Department; the Times has more about both designers. Mayor Bloomberg is especially proud that Arad is a city employee.
The Daily News has some highlights of the design at the end of their article. The Post's Steve Cuozzo hates the design. Newsday thinks it's generic and oppressive. Gothamist thinks this is the design that the Times' Herbert Muschamp liked the best, but because of the Times' annoying pay for old articles system, we're not sure.
And greg.org: Not such a fan of the design.
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From reader Jessica B., who confirms that Muschamp did like Reflecting Absence best:
"Seen as a group, these finalists make the strongest possible case for simplicity as the most suitable aesthetic for ground zero. None of them deserve to be built in their present form. A few of them, however, have the makings of a good beginning. If one of these, titled "Reflecting Absence," enjoys an advantage over the others, that is because it has the greatest potential to be the least.
Designed by Michael Arad of New York, the project features two reflecting pools, situated within the footprints of the fallen towers. There's more -- too much more, by far -- but the design has the signal virtue of focusing the viewer's attention where we want it to be focused: on the symbolic pair of shapes that have come to represent the simultaneity of public and private loss.
The design has problems, too. There's a surfeit of hard paving in the plaza surrounding the pools. The pools are flanked by low buildings that appear visually irrelevant to the memorial task. They enclose steps that lead down into subterranean galleries for viewing cascades of water that flow from voids in the pools above.
It will not be possible to judge how these underground spaces would work until more is known about plans to install a shopping mall at ground zero. All of us have been to suburban malls with waterfalls. I wouldn't object to being remembered by one when I die, particularly because they do have a tendency to dry up after a few seasons. The question is whether we have the right to choose that fate for others. I'd be reluctant to.
I do appreciate the idea of descent into the earth, though, even if a mall awaits us there. For some people, shopping is heaven, for others hell. In that sense malls are universal. But the fact that we should have to ponder the eschatology of retail points up, yet again, the frustration of trying to appraise pieces of the ground zero plan in isolation from one another, and in illogical order."
No offense to the deceased, but I wonder how many homeless people are going to use the memorial as a huge toilet. It would be a shame for a family to pay their respects poolside only to be interrupted by a turd lazily floating by.