Twin Towers memorial needs 'great vacancies' to reflect losses, winning designer says

Utah State University President Kermit Hall addresses the Tanner Symposium Wednesday. / Photo by Josh Russell

By Loni Stapley

November 8, 2004 | Peter Walker, the landscape architect working on the new World Trade Center Memorial, spoke Wednesday at the Eccles Conference Center as a part of the Tanner Symposium put on by the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Utah State University.

Walker, 72, graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and the Harvard School of Design. His career has spanned four decades and taken him from the United States to Japan, Australia and China, designing landscapes for everything from small gardens to new cities and academic campuses. He was awarded the American Society of Landscape Architects Medal in Salt Lake City two days before speaking in Logan.

Walker's lecture, "Preparation for the World Trade Center Memorial," chronicled his background as a landscape architect and the things that have influenced him as a designer and led to his design for the Memorial.

"I can't imagine attempting this with any less experience than I have," Walker said.

Walker's career began in the 1960s, his first project being at Foothill College. He was only 23 years old when he and his partners won an award for their design at the college. Walker said his first success gave him confidence, but didn't guarantee further accolades for his work.

"Our egos were pretty pumped up," he said. "I didn't win another award for 10 years."

After 20 years of architecture, Walker said he began to have a problem with what they were doing and the types of materials they were using. He began collecting and enjoying minimalist art (basically art made in landscape) by artists such as Carl Andre. He couldn't quite figure out how to relate what he saw in this type of art to landscape architecture, but was struck with how particular images created by these artists had the ability to stick in one's memory.

"I hadn't done any landscape up to that point that was that powerful," he said.

Walker left his practice and took a job teaching at Harvard, wanting to be closer to these minimalist artists and "think through what I was doing."

He and his students traveled extensively to different sites where famous ancient gardens were located and a light bulb went off in Walker's mind, allowing him to see how he could create gardens in a different way.

"The strength of the gardens really affected me," he said.

Walker used inspiration from these ancient gardens to change his designs. He began noticing how shadow and the sun changed landscape and incorporated that into his creations, gradually becoming more sophisticated with the way he utilized natural materials to make his designs richer and more beautiful.

The key idea of the World Trade Center Memorial is to have "great vacancies" representing the absence of the buildings as well as the absence of the people who died in the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Walker said the design process for the memorial was extensive and included meeting with survivors as well as family members of those killed to get an idea of what they wanted the memorial to be like.

"When you see that hole and you talk to the families, it is very emotional," Walker said.

For that reason, he wanted his design to be meaningful and powerful. Walker used lots of trees as a symbol for life.

"I want the trees, the living part itself, to be something that you focus on," he said.

The memorial, "Reflecting Absence," essentially has two different "worlds" – one representing death and one representing life. According to the official statement written by Walker and Michael Arad, the architect of the site, the memorial is inside a field of trees interrupted by two large holes containing recessed pools. The pools, Walker said, are fountains cut down into the landscape to serve as waterfalls. Bordering each pool are ramps that take visitors down to the actual memorial spaces, where the names of those who died in the World Trade Center attacks both in 1993 and 2001 will be arranged on plaques. Traveling from one world to the other will hopefully give visitors the ability to move past the terrorist attacks and heal.

"You leave the world of life and go down and face death," Walker said. "That process gives you a boon, that you can go back up to life."

Nine months into the project, Walker said he anticipates physical and technical complications to arise, but feels they will be relatively easy to solve. It's the "spiritual problems" he spends most of his time thinking about.

"It isn't the story that's in my head, it isn't the sequence that I know about which is important," Walker said. "It's the sequence and the story that someone [who] comes there [has], that knows about the awful experience but doesn't have this redeeming quality . . . of going to the depths and then coming back up to the life again. That's what's important. That's what I spend most of my time thinking about."

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