Tribute in Light
Dispersed Memorial references the iconography of the missing towers as
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This dispersed memorial intersects the everyday activities of the city as an organizational pattern that engages daily life. In the surrounding urban landscape, anyone can engage with the seemingly infinite memorials that populate spaces of the city. A space of meditation can occur at any time and in any place.
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orienting devices. It also pays homage to each life lost, 3,022 viewing plates are dispersed throughout an 8-mile radius, the distance from which one could see the towers with the naked eye. Each glass plate is placed at a moment where the towers would have been visible and is positioned to frame the missing view, the absence. Each is inscribed with a different profile of the lost towers and with the names and biographies of each lost life.
Looking through the transparent plate, one engages that which is no longer there physically yet continues to exist in memory. These engraved images and texts, embody and celebrate these lives. Every night, the plates light up one by one in a constellation-like choreography. Like lanterns lit from within, the plates illuminate the inscriptions‌ cityscape and biographies transforming into luminous, delicate, yet determined lines decorating the city in celebration and remembrance. On the anniversary dates of the various events that took these lives, the light emanating from the plates alone lights the entire city for a brief moment of remembrance. At these times, the city is in darkness, yet is full of light. The organization of this memorial makes permanent the ephemeral and impromptu events in which people lit candles simultaneously in the days following the events that took these lives.
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Every night, the plates light up one by one in a constellation-like choreography. Like lanterns lit from within, the plates illuminate the inscriptions‌ cityscape and biographies transforming into luminous, delicate, yet determined lines decorating the city in celebration and remembrance.
The site of the former towers, the “footprints,” are left as voids in the ground (70 feet below ground), one a large ceremonial space and a burial ground, the other a large map locating the individual sites of the 3,022 memorials. Visitors enter these two spaces descending slowly by ramp to this depth. The ramp, narrow and dark, leads to the vast open space of each footprint. Upon entering one encounters the light of the immense and tall sky above. We propose collaboration with the memorial that has already been proposed and temporarily instituted “the towers of light”. As individual memorials on the urban landscape during the day and a constellation of lights on the city’s fabric at night, the plates institute a dispersed monument. At night another monument emerges from the “footprints” of the twin towers site - “the towers of light”. A ghosted lantern composed of 3,022 individual lamps together, side-by-side re-institute the towers as light that disappear into the sky - an awesome space to inhabit in ceremony. With these two conversing monuments, the twining of the towers is re-instituted as one memorial – dispersed and centralized, ephemeral yet permanent, lost yet ever more present.
Each glass plate is placed at a moment where the towers would have been visible and is positioned to frame the missing view. Each is inscribed with a different profile of the lost towers and with the names and biographies of each lost life.
Like lanterns lit from within, the plates illuminate the inscriptions of missing cityscape views and biographies of each life lost. On the anniversary of the events that took these lives, the light emanating from the plates alone lights the entire city for a brief moment of remembrance. At these times, the city is in darkness, yet is full of light.
In the void of the towers “footprints� are a vast ceremonial space and a large map locating the individual sites of the 3,022 memorials. These viewing plates are dispersed throughout the city and are placed in locations in which one would have seen the missing towers.
Dispersed Memorial references the iconography of the missing towers as orienting devices. It also pays homage to each life lost, 3,022 viewing plates are dispersed throughout an 8-mile radius, the distance from which one could see the towers with the naked eye.
Each glass plate is placed at a moment where the towers would have been visible and is positioned to frame the missing view. Each is inscribed with a different profile of the lost towers and with the names and biographies of each lost life.