Crescent marks the spot.Since Gale Norton announced last week that the crescent would be taken out of the design, the protests have pretty much died down.  It's old news.  As is typical, yours truly, all fired up and behind the curve, wrote a lengthy but not comprehensive critique of the design apart from the abhorrent crescent.  I summarize:

Dear ----------:

I wholeheartedly agree with your general assessment of the state of memorials today.  The emphasis on the mournful, tragic aspects of memorials and making them "interactive" (rubbings, flower holders, tribute niches, etc) are regrettable trends generally.  They began with the Vietnam Memorial and the Flight 93 Memorial is its direct stylistic descendant.

Two points:

The process for selecting the memorial was controlled (really, rigged) to emphasize these aspects as the grieving relatives were given enormous say in the process.  This isn't wrong but I can hardly imagine a group that could be more easily manipulated by the Leftist Art/Design Cabal that controls nearly every creative field except writing. Between the Foundation people (who control by setting up parameters about how their money is spent) and the Bureaucrats (the president of the Advisory Board in charge of judging  is a career bureaucrat with the National Park Service) and the Shadowy National Figures (is it just me or does no one know who's on this board?), the design of this project was pretty much doomed.  That being said, I actually liked much of the design's hardscape (exception: the creepy "Tower of Voices").

Lost in all of this is the fact that the landscape design, the plant choices and placement, really sucks.  It's clear to anyone who knows plants and is familiar with this environment that Paul Murdoch used the plant choices to sell the project (red, white and blue flowers, leaves that supposedly turn red on or about September 11, "Resurrection Lily"...[psycho scream here])  without much care at all for whether they would (a) survive and (b) do what he says they are going to do.  It's all tug-at-the-heartstrings stuff to sell the project and apparently he gambled correctly that no one would look out a window on September 11 to see if red maples really are red in September.  He uses hundreds of them in his design (another problem);  they will be the most prominent feature of this memorial for which he will be awarded a huge, prestigious contract.  There is much more evidence that this is a big snow job- read  below for my critique if you're interested.

I'm feeling rather ripped off by this, and I'm not even someone whose loved one is out in that field.  I am totally disgusted by people who would play on the vulnerabilities of grieving widows and children in this way.  It's despicable.

Yours sincerely, 

Quid

Anyway, what follows is very long but highly informative and of course, written in the scintillating prose style you've come to expect here.  In a previous life I was quite the nature girl and even did a stint as a graduate student in Botany, so the deficiencies of this design were obvious to me. 

There was one landscape in the 5 finalists that was very good, at least from what I could ascertain.  It's here, but if you have a hard time reading it, I guess you'll have to take my word for it. 

(The following is part of a longer critique of the proposed Flight 93 Memorial design by Paul Murdoch)

There are other difficulties with this design that point to lack of critical views and expertise on the part of the judging panel, which is distressing.  The hardscape (the buildings and walls) of the design is quite striking, though minimalist, and calls to mind the velocity of the doomed plane on its trajectory toward the corner of this rural field.  The use of lighting, frosted glass and translucent marble will be visually pleasing.  One aspect of the hardscape that has come under harsh criticism is the “Tower of Voices” at the entrance of the park.  In the outcry about the crescent, the minaret comparison was bound to come up as people began to look for other signs of rampant Islamophilia.  A more objective take is that it is simply creepy.  Forty chimes clanging as the breezes waft through sounds ghostly, which is undoubtedly intentional but not appropriate to this context.  Furthermore, the name and purpose call to mind the Towers of Silence in India.  Followers of Zoroastrianism customarily dispose of their dead by placing them atop high towers for the vultures to consume.  It goes without saying that this is a grotesque image, and while probably unintended, is sadly consistent with sensitivity displayed to this point by the design team. 

As a point of detail, the chimes are one of the few things left to Nature’s control in this design.  It would have been more Western, indeed more American, to have a bell tower instead, but this would undoubtedly be deemed too reminiscent of say, Christian churches and that other Pennsylvanian icon, the Liberty Bell.

The other half of the design, the landscape, is mediocre on its face, sloppy and fraudulent.  The first indication of a shoddy design job is to be found in the slide show of the project on the Flight 93 Design Competition website.  Thumbnail photographs of various plants adorn the side of each slide as a visual aid.  They are labeled with their common and scientific names.  In at least two cases, the scientific names are spelled incorrectly.  This may seem an arcane criticism to the average person, but in the world of landscape architecture, and architecture generally, precision is everything. By attempting to look very thorough, they begin to reveal a certain carelessness. 

The designers use the color of the trees and flowers at certain times of the year to deepen the meaning of the overall plan, even going so far as to show renderings of the site by season.  This conscious choice is legitimate.  It is meant to achieve a certain effect, sometimes referred to in literature as the pathetic fallacy, in which nature seems to echo human feelings ("It was raining as he left the hospital where his best friend had just died.") There apparently was no one knowledgeable enough about landscaping and plants to vet the plant choices and the claims that were made to sell this design.  The worst by far was the assertion that the “allée” of maples would be bright red on September 11.   This is patently not true.  As of this writing (September 18) the forests in the most northerly part of Pennsylvania have just begun to change color and will reach their peak in about three weeks.  This is true every year.  Since this is the most obvious error and a big one, as it involves the principal design element, it begs the question: was there no one on the judging panel who was scrupulous enough to check? Anyone who simply knew? Representatives from the National Park Service were on the panel: they could have checked this information on their own website.  It boggles the mind.  At a minimum, the landscape architects partnering with Paul Murdoch should be fired.  Presumably these were the “experts” and there was no one around to check their work.  There were other dubious claims: red, white and blue flowers in the meadow, again, timed to bloom.  Some of the wording is appropriate (“will be in bloom on July 4th,” or “blooms all summer”) but then there is the thumbnail of Rudbeckia hirta: “blooms on September 11.”  At this point, all of the landscape choices should be put under a microscope.  That there was no one around to catch the errors, large and small, reveals an astonishing lack of expertise and quality control in the judging process.

As to the landscape design itself, it relies rather monotonously on two different trees: White pine (Pinus strobus) and Red maple, for which they use two different species (Acer saccharum and Acer rubrum).  The pines are used at the entrance and are planted “in resonating rings around the “Tower of Voices,” a tall structure housing wind chimes.  This concept looks fascinating from the air, to some, but will be completely lost on the ground.  In a mixed forest environment this tree is called “super-dominant,” it juts above everything else, so a large stand of these will be very imposing but we question its use in this context.

The use of the term red maple to refer interchangeably for two different species is also misleading.  The designers give no indication where they will use each or even that they will not commingle them.  This is very strange.  The two trees have slightly different growth habits, are different sizes and turn different colors in the fall.  Calling them both “Red Maples” indicates to the reader that the designer is looking for uniformity, yet they are not similar enough for that.  If the designer is looking to break up the monotony, they aren’t dissimilar enough for that purpose.  Again, a knowledgeable critic of this design would be left with serious questions about the intent and and perhaps the competence of the designer.  As a matter of personal taste, the maple does not seem to be majestic enough for the scale and purpose of this project to merit such prominent use.  A much better choice would be the American elm (Ulmus americana), which, at maturity, is a graceful vase shape and is monumental in size.  It is also an appropriate sentimental choice.  Earlier in the last century, the native population of American elms was almost completely wiped out by Dutch elm disease.  The elms that lined Constitution Avenue in Washington D.C. were saved by the heroic efforts of the scientists at the National Forestry Service and the National Arboretum.  Since then, the National Arboretum has developed a disease resistant cultivar, “Valley Forge.”   It seems very fitting that the nation’s capital, which was spared attack thanks to the heroism of those here memorialized, should give the scions of these magnificent trees to this spot.  To some, this symbolism would even redeem the loathsome crescent.

The reliance on only two types of tree for the principal design also seems to be at odds with one of the goals of the design “to preserve the rural character of the setting.”  So while the hardscape design is relatively harmonious (with the exception of the
Tower of Voices) the vast groves of these two trees are the landscape equivalent of Crystal City in the middle of a Pennsylvania meadow.  They abut surrounding forests and will be very jarring visually.  There are ways to have a thought out, organized, planned landscape that brings the best of the surrounding countryside to this memorial, to make it a truly wonderful place to contemplate the deeds of our heroes and their final resting place.  It will apparently take someone else to achieve this but there are many designers, landscape architects and others who are up to the task.  It begs the question: what were the judges’ qualifications for judging?

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the competition process was seriously flawed and showed an offensive anti-Western, anti-American tilt.  Certainly, there is an extreme disingenuousness in the claim that the crescent is a “healing embrace.”  The crescent aside, the quality of the design, especially the landscape design, is not of the caliber to merit such a prestigious contract.  It insults the intelligence to be presented with a final design that has spelling errors and ludicrous claims about major features of the design.  When one examines the composition of the panel of judges, it becomes clear how the process was so easily manipulated: there are those who are there for sentimental reasons (the relatives) and for practical reasons of geography (the locals), the bureaucrats (National Park Service) and The National Figures, who shall apparently remain nameless. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king and in the world of art and design, the one-eyed man is always a Leftist.  In this case, a Leftist who doesn’t know much about landscape design.