Pages

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

"communal, intimate space, designed for eye contact, like a Quaker meeting house"

A gorgeous new  article on the new 9/11 Museum by Cliff Kuang in WIRED Magazine is online here.
Several quotes that I marked in the print edition are pasted below; implications for architecture, postmodernity, curation (pastor's job) physics, etc.

But this one? Talk about implications for ecclesiology:"The entire space is designed for eye contact, like a Quaker meetinghouse: On the perimeter, you meet the gazes of the other visitors. The experience is communal—but also intimate."


  • “Conventional narrative wouldn’t cut it,” says Alice Green­wald, director of the museum-----------------------

    "Usually, as designers, you try to create meaning. Here there was almost too much of it,” Barton
    -------------------

    “The room tuned us in to what trauma means,” Hennes says. “Time had stood still.”
    To the designers, the very rawness and variety of expression suggested an answer to a central challenge: how best to present events when, as William Faulkner once wrote, “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Instead of providing its own interpretive explanations, the designers realized, the museum could focus on direct testaments from the ­people who had experienced it. The hope was to avoid a ­single story line and instead allow visitors to reconstruct narratives on their own, using the artifacts on display. “Witnesses are the way into the museum,” Green­wald says.
    ----------------

    But the same intimacy that makes all these voices so powerful can also make them overwhelming
    ----------
    Visitors can see and hear materials from an ever-­expanding archive in an inner chamber designed to encourage eye contact among visitors.
    -----------------

    The most difficult alcove to design was the one dedicated to the ­50 to 200 men and women—the exact number is not known—who, overwhelmed with heat and smoke, jumped or fell from the buildings. “Those ­people were on a ledge and feeling like they had no option but to step into a sky that would not support them,” says Joe Daniels, president of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. “It is so unbelievable. Maybe you don’t show it.” And yet, after much intense debate, the board overseeing the museum, including Daniels, voted unani­mously to dedi­cate an exhibit to those victims.
    ------------

    The exhibit that finally emerged after dozens of prototypes is so artful that it seems almost totally undesigned.
    _------------

    On the walls surrounding you are quotes from ­people who witnessed victims jumping or falling:
    They were ending their life without a choice, and to turn away from them would have been wrong.
    This woman stood there for what seemed like minutes, then she held down her skirt and then stepped off the ledge. I thought, how human, how modest, to hold down her skirt before she jumped.


    This woman stood there for what seemed like minutes, then she held down her skirt and then stepped off the ledge. I thought, how human, how modest, to hold down her skirt before she jumped.

    --
    here, 3 feet above your head, are projected a series of five still photographs of ­different people falling from the towers. They fade from one to the next, in a slow progression that gathers no rhythm. --

    ----

    At times it looks like a spray of data points charted against two axes: time versus frequency.
    ---
    He doesn’t believe museums should be venues for education but rather places of encounter--------------

No comments:

Post a Comment

Hey, thanks for engaging the conversation!