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This is an artifact/artifice constructed by Americans to mark, without specifying the trajectory or singularizing the impact of the deeds of others/outsiders. At the Pentagon, as opposed to the conditions of other terrorist incursions, the consecration of the site is not a monument to heroism; it is an acknowledgment of an act of malice and a senseless loss of life. Existing U.S. monuments serve the purpose of tribute/summary to a cause or an undertaking; particularly exemplary specimens of this function are the icons of Vietnam war, Iwo Jima, and Lincoln. At this site, however, there is no underlying theme or moral for Americans to concretize for the benefit of posterity. This is no place for the gaudy celebration of ourselves or our accomplishments. It would be an affront to the future memory of the event to ascribe, as a nation, a history and a direction to the 184 individuals who died at the Pentagon.
The mourning of the family and friends should be allowed on this spot, as many of the victims may otherwise have no traditional ‘resting place’ where their survivors may visit them in peace. However, the mourners should be able to visit this site and pay their respects in peace, without having their moments of grief intertwined with those who were not so intimately connected with the event, who may visit out of curiosity rather than catharsis. There is air between the private and the collective, the visible and the tangible, there need not be a perpetual sealing.
The need for a variegated interactive experience and the desire to enact something more poetic than symbolic, more affective than provocative, leads to a constructed landscape that can facilitate both public and private uses. This is manifest in a sort of hollow rolling knoll in the landscape. Both surface and void are occupiable toward different ends. The visitor to the site has two possible narrative sequences when engaging the memorial. The knoll may be ascended as a public, open, visible act. This great sloping grass expanse is punctuated by a field of 184 slender spires that pierce the surface and glimmer against the sky but are not rigidly connected to the earth. These spires may be rotated and leaned by visitors as they ascend the knoll, leaving a trace of their trip behind them. Rather than weigh in the loss of life as a weighty monolith inscribed with list of names, the 184 spires stand as commemorative and connective markers for the individuality of the victim and the individual sensation of the visitor. At the crest of the knoll visitors descend into a series of tine-like corridors that slip beneath the grassy surface. From here the public visitor gets a new perspective on the knoll as they see the feature slope back down away from them over the eye-level walls, the spires breaking through to be read as spindly legs, shifting from above and glimmering with the light from the surface.
The more private and reflective experience begins from the same point at the foot of the knoll where a ramp leads down past the rising turf. The surface is quickly below grade and the sparkling undersurface of the knoll arcs forward overhead through a dense field of spires. Once even with the crest of the knoll a series of tendril-like corridors open and pass beneath the knoll. These spaces wind through the spires as they are turned gently from above and cool shade is cast from the swooping landscape. At the ceasing of the space the reflective visitor mounts a ramp back to grade level and finds themselves in a anthropomorphic saucer-like pad amidst a forest of whispering spires and an expanse of water that had just unknowingly been traversed. Here the survivor, mourner, dreamer can rest back in the curve of the pad, gazing up at the darkened solid firmament shimmering and descending to meet the earth beyond. Their experience is wholly separate from the public visitor, yet engaged and reliant upon them, through the spires and sunlight, for vitalization.
