“Seeing, from the roof of my apartment building, the second plane strike the South Tower on 9/11 made me feel like a New Yorker for the first time. Witnessing how New Yorkers supported each other in the aftermath gave me a sense of belonging I could not have imagined prior.”
“I started thinking about a memorial a couple of months after the attack but couldn’t imagine it being located at the site, which at the time was an open wound. I was drawn to the Hudson River and envisioned two voids into which the river flowed but couldn’t fill—a sense of rupture and absence simultaneously.”
“I built a small model of a memorial on the roof of the building where I’d witnessed the attacks, then set it aside. It was kind of cathartic.” “When the competition for the memorial design was announced in 2003, I wondered if I could bring the idea from the Hudson River to the site and mark the footprint of the two buildings.”
“Because I was working for the New York City Housing Authority, due to a delay in the renewal of my H1-B visa, I had more time than I’d had working at a private firm.”
“In the context of the 9/11 Memorial, water acts as a marker of time. We see the flow of it having eternal continuity, yet the absence remains. My design parameters were to create a civic and communal space that made absence visible and tangible.”
“In the Emanuel Nine Memorial, water acts in a very different way. It emanates from a crosscut at the bottom of a bowl and flows over the inscribed names of the nine people killed. There is a religious connotation. It’s a font of faith and belief.”
“It took years to negotiate the ‘meaningful adjacencies’ of the almost 3,000 names on the 9/11 Memorial. The placement of each is part of an invisible web. We honored more than 1,200 requests and drew on additional research.”
“I was young and inexperienced when I won the 9/11 design competition. If I could do it again, I’d try to bring the same passion and advocacy without the fear of the project going the wrong way, but I know that could have happened very easily. It could have turned jingoistic. It could have been self-pitying.”
“I’ve appreciated hearing from people that the memorial is just so New York they can’t imagine it not being there.”
Notable Achievements
- His design for the 9/11 Memorial, opened in 2011, was chosen from among more than 5,000 submitted; other designs include the Emanuel Nine Memorial in Charleston, South Carolina, commemorating the Bible study attendees killed in 2015.
- Graduated in 1994, after three years in the Israel Defense Force between freshman and sophomore years; A.B. in government; M.Arch., Georgia Tech, 1999; partner, Handel Architects, New York City; lives with wife Melanie A. Fitzpatrick ’93 and family in Douglaston, New York
