The long and short of it is that it is not uplifting because it was not meant to be. The project was geared to making it attractive commercially instead of authentic and stirring. That perverse incentive is evident in the Port Authority’s use of the word “campus” when referring to a site where thousands of people were savagely murdered — as if it were just another Silicon Valley corporate spread.
Architecture critic Paul Goldberger, who later received a Pulitzer Prize for his report on the early rebuilding protocols wrote in his 7/29/2002 New Yorker column “Up From Zero”:
Governor Pataki, who, along with Governor James Mcreevey, of New Jersey, controls the Port Authority, is fond of using words like “hallowed ground” when he talks about the site. But the people who report to him talk about “obligations to leaseholders” and “obligations to bondholders”.
In fact, if there was ever a piece of land that should be treated as part of the public domain, it is this one… the Governor should be pressing the Port Authority to operate with a greater sense of civic responsibility.
The Memorial Plaza was designed to be as generic as possible — a sanitized, bland, suburban plaza with waterfalls, trees, and benches. It was designed to draw the attention down. If not for the overnight vigil kept by 9/11 family members for three frigid weeks in 2006, even the solemnly beautiful parapets of backlit names would be missing from the plaza — because the names were meant to be displayed thirty feet below at the level of the pool bottoms.
That is what was chosen from out of 5,201 memorial entries — because the jury implicitly understood that the people in charge wanted future tenants to forget what happened there — on the campus.
