visitor from the NYC surroundings. The memorial engages visitors through its design, letting them answer the questions about the relationships it represents through their own interpretation of the environment. The memorial is completed through the landscape, environment, and user experiences of the spaces designed by Kahn.
FIGURE 40,41 Franklin D. Roosevelt 4 Freedoms Park, Entrance and point perspective, 2012
FIGURE 39 Aerial diagram
Abstraction and ambiguity are realized through geometries when implemented within an architectural design, seeeking to create affective spaces that relate to their subject matter. Acknowledging the connection of this thought to the Phenomenoligical perspective of architectural theory, two examples of architecture that employed these types of methods were analyzed, each memorializing, affecting, and informing their visitors in different ways. The 9/11 Memorial Museum to the World Trade Center terrorist attacks in Manhattan and the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. were the two buildings studied for the affective spaces they created through their architecture. The 9/11 memorial museum uses dimly lit spaces and lighting techniques to draw the visitors down a winding procession to the base of the foundation of the World Trade Center towers, placing the visitors in the actual site where so many civilians and first responders died on 9/11/2001. The use of the latest in sensory technology, audio, video and projection draw the the visitors into different zones of the spaces that are filled with wreckage, clothing and other ruins of the 9/11 terrorist attack. The museum is chaos on display, rooms that overwhelm the visitor with audio, artifact and video to stimulate a reaction to the scale of the events that occured. The 9/11 memorial museum is not ambiguous in nature, there is clearly a pro-United States rhetoric behind the items displayed within the museum and the much-lauded gift shop, which is one if not the only space in the museum that is bright, white and clean. The descent into the darkness of the exhibits follows a singular set of ramps that intertwine and twist to show views of different elements of the foundation of the World Trade Center towers, framing views and perspectives to affect its viewers. The return to the surface of the memorial museum, and to the surface of the memorial is achieved through a singular illuminated escalator and elevator, metaphorically bringing the visitor out of darkness and back into the light, which coincidentally, is the gift shop in the lobby. The images in FIGURE 40A show the controlled use of light and material used by the memorial museum architecture. The National Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., designed and created 16 years earlier in the late 1990’s can be seen as a precedent for many of the tools that the 9/11 museum implements. Ambiguity again is not at play in its design, but the architecture of the spaces created affects the visitors through disorientation and display of the sheer amount of artifacts of memorabilia from the Holocaust. The architecture assists, through the display of this information, in creating an affective environment that communicates the scale of the Holocaust. 21