The widespread dissatisfaction with the LMDC proposals for Lower Manhattan may be explained in part by their tepid approach to the essence of the problem of civic commemoration in Manhattan: Simply stated, the City is itself a monument, and any memorial conceived as such in the traditional sense is destined to be peripheral, redundant and ultimately unsatisfactory.  Perhaps this is why the LMDC has chosen to treat the design of a Memorial as an exercise that occurs after the site planning phase, a mistake whose implications could severely impair the power of the future memorial to communicate.  When a monumental edifice is conceived as separate from its site, it is likely to remain so indefinitely (the U.N. complex comes to mind).  A monument in Manhattan that does not address its environs threatens to evaporate completely.  With his Irish Famine Memorial, Brian Tolle has provided us with a timely and succinct demonstration of this phenomena.

A curious inversion of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial, Mr. Tolle offers us not a volume of space carved from the earth, but rather a volume of earth floating in space.   Despite its intricate topography, meticulous plantings and resonant archeological tracings, the piece disappears entirely within the enormity of its immediate surrounds.  At the perch of this tethered knoll, I wondered if I had not in fact wandered into the precinct of the Embassy Suites Memorial by mistake.  How could this plot of old sod possibly compete with the elegant repose of a multi-story, translucent curtain-wall for the attention of its viewers?  Likewise, the incessant construction activity in all directions, (whose scale Mr. Tolle could hardly have anticipated) ensures that respite and silence will remain elusive.  As my anger and frustration began to mount at the failure of this pile to illicit a semblance of emotive transcendence, I realized I had fallen into the same trap that had ensnared its creator: The city itself had defeated any chance that serenity or introspection – so critical to the conventional memorial – would actually occur here.  It was not until I had reached the climax of the piece that realized I had completely failed to understand the nature of the problem, and perhaps the unintended emotive power of the solution.

At its terminus, The memorial places you in the Harbor, with the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island as points of reference in this sweeping vestibule to a Great City.  For hundreds of thousands of desperate immigrants, including my grandparents, this was a threshold to a new life, a new nation.  As one beholds these testaments to Exodus, from this perch at the edge of a teeming metropolis, one grasps the enormity of their accomplishment.  The true roles of the characters in this spatial drama are thus revealed – the mound of sod has receded entirely, and the Metropolis reveals itself for what it is – a heroic and soaring monument to the human spirit and the boundless power of the human will for re-invention and self-betterment.  Indeed, the relative humility of the memorial is perhaps its greatest feat.  The surreal juxtaposition of this turf to the vast city beyond, whose sewers, subways and streets were built with Irish hands, traces an arc in time of The Irish Diaspora.  Defeat, devastation and subsequent, improbable rebirth are all a part of this narrative

The central point here is that the City does not tolerate competition for its insatiable attention.  It is an incessant festival of demolition and reconstruction, surging frenetically upward, giving physical form to the heroic aspirations of its minions.  Perhaps Mr. Tolle understood this.  Osama Bin Laden certainly understood this.  Our planners, who have provided us with cautious preliminary visions, do not. 

A traditional memorial is a place of serenity and introspection, where the participant engages spaces and objects that are didactic.  Washington is replete with such experiences, of which Maya Lin’s is only the most formative recent initiate.  Manhattan by contrast has always devoured its civic monuments.  Manhattan does not have time for such memorials.  How many people know what event is commemorated by the noble stone carvings at the southwest corner of Central Park?  Perhaps a few maritime historians at Columbia.  Though a rare and splendid example of neoclassical sculpture, one can only focus on the piece for a brief moment before ones’ attention is made captive to the monstrous steel skeleton rising on the western edge of Columbus Circle, crawling with a thousand ants and reaching each day a step closer to the stratosphere.  To mourn the relative silence of this exquisite carving is to miss the point - In Manhattan, the real memorials are above the 100^th floor. In a culture whose creed is Liberty through Capital, the speculative office building is the Cathedral, whose size is the measure of its sanctity. The Empire State Building is our Parthenon, the Chrysler Building our Chartres.  The Twin Towers were to us what the Pyramids where to the Pharos:  Testaments of civilization designed to challenge the limits of time and space.

We can, and do, mourn the inversion of Sacred and Profane that we Americans have achieved.  Our conscience troubles us when faced with proposition that we have replaced conventional religious belief with a system that appears to value materialism above all else.  This is a central contention of our enemies, and the reason they seek to raise our temples of commerce and individualism.  However, we must not forget that material wealth is but the physical manifestation of individual liberty and self-determination.  It demonstrates a refusal to accept given conditions and a determination to transcend the boundaries of circumstance in search of a better life.

Like all religions, Prosperity is hardly perfect.  It provides a refuge for greed, materialism and alienation to fester.  Economic inequality is its basic premise.  However, unlike the World’s other religions, it does not provide a safe haven for intolerance, violence and the ethnocentricity that are necessary components of all tradition-based value systems.  Neither does it institutionalize class privilege by virtue of some golden calf of ancient, transphysical origin.  Fascism and Marxism, the twin children of Utopian collective thought, have also demonstrated a reliance on violence and coercion, and therefore an inability to provide for individual liberty and opportunity on a large scale.

What conclusion should we then draw from the performance of the Irish Famine Memorial?  Simply this: the greatest possible monument for those killed on September 11 is a Manhattan more spectacular, more breathtaking and more sublime than the one they left behind on that day.  Nothing short of a stunning display of technological prowess and gravity-defying structural acumen will be sufficient.  The more astounding the architecture, the greater the homage to the fallen.  The higher the rental cost per square foot, the more satiated our tears to our lost ones become.    

We must Build, Build, and Build again. One hundred Empire State Buildings, one hundred Chrysler Domes, a Guggenheim at the 250^th floor, a sky bridge to Governors Island where a plan grid should be superimposed and radical speculative building should be encouraged. We should internalize monumental voids at the footprints of the Twin Towers, and provide Pirineasean vertical circulation to a vast Observation Deck, whose iconographic profile should be instantly recognizable from miles around, in the manner of the former Towers.  As such, we demonstrate to the world, in steel and stone, how we refuse to be bowed – and we show our enemies the futility of destroying our temples.  For every tower leveled, three should rise it its place.  We answer our enemy’s greatest accomplishment (destruction and death) with a frenzy of heroic collaboration (construction and growth).  We must use the galvanization of city’s workforce, so evident in the extraordinary site-clearing efforts at Ground Zero, as fuel for an historic Building Boom.

The kind of introspection and silence demanded to commemorate both our extraordinary achievements as a nation, and the enormity of our loss on that day, can only occur on the roof of the world, miles above New York Harbor, with the enormity of Manhattan Island spread out before the viewer.  We must think vertically – in section, rather than plan, as per architectural parlance.  Let us honor our loved ones from the heavens, far above the caves of the pathological, life-hating creeds of our miserable attackers.  Let us raise the mantel of Human Achievement to the next level, as our forbearers, many of whom faced famine, persecution and disease, did in their time.  This is both our challenge and our responsibility.  We owe this much to those who fell on 9/11, as well as those of all nations and creeds who continue to seek the opportunities that our nation and our city embody. Let us now to Build.