Experiencing the Void

When WaterShapes went all-digital back in July 2011, there was one big story looming in the print-magazine horizon: That summer, as finishing touches were being added to the National September 11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan, we were all set to offer a behind-the-scenes look at the fountain portion of the project in a September issue that never materialized.

This missed opportunity with the memorial has been somewhere in the back of my mind ever since, and visiting with two of my daughters in New York last fall finally let me see the space for myself.

Designed by Michael Arad of Handel Architects (New York and San Francisco) in concert with the landscape architects at Peter Walker & Partners (Berkeley, Calif.), the fountain composition is called “Reflecting Absence” and may well be the most profound, meaningful use of negative space I have ever witnessed.

There are two fountains here – one in each footprint of the two towers destroyed on September 11, 2001. They cover an acre apiece and descend to a depth of 30 feet as vertical surfaces lined by falling water. These flows fill twin basins that empty into wells whose depths can’t be perceived from deck level, adding to the sense of the immeasurability of the loss and the horrific personal voids created on that awful day.

The fountain weirs are bound by angled panels incised with the names of those who lost their lives on that day nearly two decades ago – or, in the case of first responders, subsequently passed away as a result of injuries and illnesses related to their experiences at the site.

In walking around the composition, I was struck by the range of ethnicities and nationalities represented on the panels. I had traveled the full perimeter of one of the fountains and was most of the way around the second when I spotted a name that stopped me in my tracks: Katie Marie McCloskey.

I had no idea who she was at the time, but I later read that she had been 25 years old and had just recently taken a job in one of the Twin Towers when she lost her life on September 11. Having grown up in South Bend, Ind., she had attended Indiana University with the goal of making her way to New York. I know of no family ties beyond the coincidence of our surname, but I have to say that I was moved more than I had expected I would be – physically arrested by a nominal connection to 9/11 that I had never known.

The odd thing is, I had been having mixed feelings about the overall space before the encounter with Katie’s name, mostly a disconnect I perceived because of the nearby placement of Santiago Calatrava’s glass-and-steel Oculus, a transit hub/shopping mall whose unusual appearance distracted me as I tried to process my thoughts about the nearby 9/11 memorial.

To be sure, Calatrava’s soaring, cathedral-like structure exudes strength and introduces a rising, sweeping drama that some might see as complementary to the memorial, but there’s also an element of excess and spectacle to it that I perceived as conflicting with the mood so artfully encouraged by Arad’s fountains and the grove of swamp oaks planted around them: To me, the sound of water, localized and focused by the trees, successfully creates a level of solemnity that doesn’t need amplification or resonance. So while the Oculus is an amazing achievement on its own, I wanted and still want it to be somewhere else.

Yet in a flash, seeing Katie McCloskey’s name snapped me back to attention and humbled me: I set aside my critical observations and returned, warmly, to the sort of meditative, communal experience Arad and Walker had striven to create.

For the best part of an hour, I lingered by the fountains, mostly studying the way wind influenced the water’s flow and watching it cascade in fascinating patterns that were never monotonous – which, given the steady breezes generated by Manhattan’s concrete canyons, had to have been part of the plan?

Perhaps an examination of that detail will be part of a behind-the-scenes story on the fountains to be written up for WaterShapes someday, as there will be future anniversaries that will bring the memorial back into discussion. But for me, the technical achievement that had sparked my curiosity for so long will now be linked to seeing Katie’s name alongside more than 3,000 others to whom I now felt an obligation of memory.

This is a powerful space and one that must be seen in person for awesome simplicity to do its work. So go: It’s already a pilgrimage site, but that urge should be doubled for watershapers who know the capacity of water to conjure emotional responses. Just outstanding.

To see a brief video of water interacting with a breeze, click here. (Apologies for the glare, but there’s also an agreeable rainbow!)