Confederate Yankee has some thoughts on the matter. He thinks it should have some lasting tribute to the people who actually died to save the Capitol and White House from a devastating attack.
Crescents don't cut it - as Paul Murdoch realized a day late and a dollar short.
corbusier had some other thoughts on the matter, including the fact that many architects consider memorials to be little more than landscape architecture.
UPDATE:
It's not as though we haven't seen this debate before. This is the same kind of debate that people got into when Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans' Memorial was unveiled. People considered it to be shocking, sparse, and didn't look anything like a memorial. However, the power of that memorial comes from the way it incorporated the names of the service members killed in a chronological order as a lasting tribute. The problem with the Ground Zero memorial and the Flight 93 memorial is that they fail to achieve that goal. The committees that chose these plans liked the design, but have failed to see that they do not actually commemorate the reason why these people were murdered. They've taken the context out of the memorial. At Ground Zero, we have a reflection of memory, and the memorial is supposed to remind people that the Twin Towers aren't there anymore. Why aren't they there? Why isn't that better integrated into the memorial? A fountain doesn't explain that. This isn't something that should need an interpretive center to figure out.
The same thing goes for Flight 93's Memorial. Yet, that's exactly the kind of memorialization we've gotten thus far.
Technorati: World Trade Center, WTC, Pataki, LMDC, urban policy, Freedom Tower, Flight 93.
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