The public got its first glimpse of the eight finalists in the World Trade Center Memorial Competition November 19 in New York City as the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation opened an exhibition at the Winter Garden in Lower Manhattan. The designs reveal memorials that honor the dead with elements of light, trees and gardens, reflecting pools, and quiet open spaces. The designs will be on display until the jury makes its final decision and a winner is selected, perhaps by the end of the year.

The LMDC launched the international competition in April 2003. It received 5,201 submissions from 63 nations and 49 states, making it the largest design competition in history, according to rebuilding officials. The eight finalists, ranging from young artists to international architects, all include interpretations of the competition guidelines, including delineation of the tower footprints, recognition of every individual killed in terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and February 26, 1993, and a final resting place for unidentified remains. The designs also all incorporate space below ground level.
The eight selected finalist designs are:

• Votives in Suspension by Norman Lee, and Michael Lewis
• Lower Waters by Bradley Campbell and Matthias Neumann
• Passages of Light: The Memorial Cloud by Gisela Baurmann, Sawad Brooks, and Jonas Coersmeier
• Suspending Memory by Joseph Karadin, with Hsin-Yi Wu
• Garden of Lights by Pierre David, with Sean Corriel and Jessica Kmetovic
• Reflecting Absence: A Memorial at the World Trade Center Site by Michael Arad
• Dual Memory by Brian Strawn and Karla Sierralta
• Inversion of Light by Toshio Sasaki

The finalists include college students, architects, designers, and artists, many from New York, but also from around the globe. One design weaves the names of the emergency personnel who died around the names of the other victims, while another lists the names on a weeping wall, and a third features a light for each of the 2,982 victims all of which would be illuminated each day at 8:46 a.m., the time the first plane hit the towers. Finalists and jury members have agreed not to speak publicly about the designs or the competition until a winner has been announced.

More information about each of the proposals and project teams is available on the LMDC’s Web site.

During the first stage of the competition, members of the jury, including architects Maya Lin and Enrique Norten, Hon. FAIA, and landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh, reviewed the submissions anonymously. During the second stage, finalists were given a stipend to further develop their design proposals.

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