| February 22, 2005
Flight 93 Memorial Finalists Named
Final teams include four ASLA members.
Organizers of the Flight 93 National Memorial Design
Competition have announced the finalists who will enter Stage II
of the competition to design a permanent memorial to the 40 passengers
who died on September 11. The victims of Flight 93 fought off terrorists
who were believed to be steering the plane toward Washington, DC,
and forced the airliner to crash in a remote coal mining field in
Pennsylvania’s Somerset County.
The winners were chosen from among 1,011 design submissions,
and two designs were developed by members of the American Society
of Landscape Architects. Laurel McSherry, ASLA, the head of the
landscape architecture department at Ohio State University and a
recipient of the Rome Prize, was named as a finalist for her design,
“Fields, Forests, Fences,” while the team of Frederick
Steiner, FASLA, Jason Kentner, Associate ALSA, and E. Lynn Miller,
FASLA, along with architect Karen Lewis, were chosen for their design,
“Memory Trail.” Steiner is dean of the University of
Texas at Austin’s School of Architecture, where Miller is
a visiting professor of landscape architecture. Kentner is a lecturer
at the university’s School of Architecture.
All finalists were awarded $25,000 to begin work
on Stage II of the competition, which will include a collective
master planning workshop in Somerset County to be held this week.
During this process, the five teams will gather at the memorial
site to create the planning framework for the site. The teams will
then further develop their memorial concepts, and submit 3-D models,
plans, and other materials to the Stage II jury. The final design
will be chosen in early September.
A collective memorial
In forming her design for the competition, McSherry says she was
struck by the vast and barren landscape of the crash site, explaining
that it had once been used for deep shaft coal mining as well as
top mining. The mining left the land barren of trees and created
a “roll” at the middle of the memorial site. She adds
that she was impressed by the collective efforts of those who died
in the Flight 93 crash and those who had come to honor the victims
and leave mementos at a temporary memorial marking the site.
These impressions led McSherry to ask two principal
questions when forming her design, “Is there a way for the
memorial to inscribe the site in a positive way?” and “Is
there a way for people to create the memorial themselves?”
Her answer to these questions is a complex system of trails and
groves that incorporates native plants and local building methods
set in four memorial components.
The first component of McSherry’s design is
a “ribbon of mixed hardwoods and hemlocks that guides visitors
through the approach of the site,” she says. This trail then
disappears over the site’s center roll, where it dissolves
into a ribbon of pure white birch trees that spreads wider with
the contours of the land. These birch trees constitute a “sacred
groove” that only family members will be allowed to enter.
Among the birch are 40 markers placed inside a fence
and reflecting local farming traditions. This constitutes the second
element of the design. The markers carry the passengers’ names,
birthdates, and hometowns, and they face the direction of the individual
hometowns. “Since so many of the passengers were either en
route to or from home and would never make it back, I felt it was
important to connect their final resting places spatially with their
loved ones,” McSherry says.
The third element of the memorial spans the area
between the sacred grove and the fourth element, a memorial fence.
This third element included individual stacks of stones, each of
which contains a small vessel of mulch from the site. When Flight
93 went down, McSherry explains, it destroyed an orchard of hemlocks
that were then felled and mulched. The mulch will be used in the
final memorial design.
The final element, the memorial fence, is made of
stone pillars and wire and reflects local farming traditions. When
the site is new, the fence will appear transparent, but the intention
is for it to be a place of accumulation. Visitors will be supplied
with tags typically used by forestry professionals to mark trees
and will write messages on the tags before attaching them to the
fence. McSherry says that eventually a hedgerow will grow up around
the fence and the tags will become enveloped in the thicket and
the fence.
|
| The “Memory Trail” design by
Steiner, Miller, Kentner, and Lewis |
40 red maples
The “Memory Trail” design by Steiner, Miller, Kentner,
and Lewis uses similar methods to reclaim the land of the crash
site, and natural elements symbolize the collective heroism of the
Flight 93 victims. Steiner explains that the memorial begins by
taking people into the site through a drive lined by 40 red maples,
standing for the 40 passengers and crew of the flight. The road
takes an abrupt turn, a metaphor for the unexpected events of 9/11.
After the turn, another 40 red maples form a pattern and edge a
unity lake that is a remnant of the land’s surface mining
days.
Visitors are then led to a visitors’ center
that rises up over the roll in the center of the site and has views
of both the earth and the sky. “This is to mimic the feeling
of being in an airplane,” Steiner explains. “Looking
out of an airplane window, you have these incredible views of where
the land and sky come together.” The visitors’ center
also overlooks a grove of aspen trees, which contains the family
trail to the of the crash site. A separate trail ushers visitors
around the grove.
The family trail leaves the crash site through an
allée of 40 red maples and rejoins the visitors’ trail
before it crosses the unity lake and weaves around a natural bowl
that has been planted with 3,021 white oaks—one for every
person who died in the events of September 11. These saplings are
marked by white planting tubes and are backed with hemlock.
The trail returns to the visitors’ center
where people can go to an archive center and view mementos left
at the temporary memorial as well as contribute their own remembrances.
In a final act of tribute to the victims, visitors leave through
a native forest that has been planted with 40 more red maples.
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