The heart of our proposal for the World Trade Center is a 6-acre Memorial Park extended at grade level from Greenwich Street across West Street to the World Financial Center.  The park is surrounded by a ring of cultural buildings in turn surrounded by transportation and office towers. This open public space would be planted with native trees, in locations determined by the electrifying randomness of the Victim Map, which shows with the terrible precision of modern scientific methods where human remains were found.

Although the origin of the trees’ location would be scientific, the visual effect would be the opposite.  Near the footprints of the towers, these trees would create, over time, a feeling of primeval forest; in other areas, open space would co-exist with individual trees or groves.  In using this unique starting point, the park would be connected to the great nineteenth century tradition of open landscapes in the city, but by means of authentic memory rather than by sentiment.

The ground would rise slightly over the footprints of the towers. At the center of both towers memorial markers would create vertical beams of light. At the center of the North Tower, near the center of the park, would be an 80-foot tall circular memorial hall containing the square footprints of the tower and its foundations that would be lit from the park above. This hall would extend down to the bedrock of Manhattan schist laid down many thousands of years before the rise of the great city, and the fall of its twin towers.