en of Responsibility' Michael Araci is creating one of America's most important memorials E3y John Dunn
"he horror of 9/11, the tremendous sense of loss and the devastating void left in the ruins of the twin towers of the World Trade Center drove Michael Arad to react as an architect. "I was very influenced personally by what happened on September 11," says Arad, M Arch 99, who lives in New York City and saw the second tower hit by the commercial jet plane. "I felt a need to address it in some way, to relate to it as an architect. I thought about an idea for a memorial fairly early on — a few months after the event." Arad's design, "Reflecting Absence," was selected for the World Trade Center memorial in January over 5,201 entries from 63 countries. Arad, 34, was on campus March 22 when he spoke to a class of architecture students that filled the room and spilled into the hallway. "Not that long ago, Michael was sitting where you are," Doug Allen, associate dean of Tech's College of Architecture, told the students. In a soft-spoken voice, Arad gave a slide presentation and reviewed the process that led to the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. jury awarding him the commission to build one of the nation's most important memorials. Arad's original concept was to create a memorial in the Hudson River "that would make very present and visible the absence of something," he says. The idea was to carve two
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voids in the river. Although the flow of water was continuous, the voids "could never be filled, could never be forgotten." After building a model of the Hudson River memorial, Arad says he "put it aside and forgot about it for a year or so" — until the design competition for a memorial was announced. Arad was at home on Sept. 11, 2001, when he heard on the radio that one of the towers had Gary Meek been hit by a plane. "I thought, like so many other people, that this was a freak accident involving a small plane," Arad remembers. "I went and peeked out of the window from my bedroom and saw smoke rising through the tower. I went up to the roof of my apartment building and saw the second tower get hit by an airplane. It was a very difficult thing to see." He attempted to phone his wife, Melanie Fitzpatrick, CP 97, who worked downtown. "I couldn't get her on the phone, so I went downtown to find her. It's not far from where we live. People were streaming uptown. I found her and we were walking back home. We were on Fulton Street by the East River when the first tower came down. I didn't realize it at the time because where we were, you couldn't see the tower. "All of a sudden people started running around and there was a big cloud of smoke. We were by the Williamsburg Bridge by the time the second tower fell," Arad says.