9/11 Memorial Museum

Jake Barton’s exhibition design for the 9/11 Memorial Museum is dominated by voices: harrowing witness accounts, the shared remembrances of victims’ families – and the ongoing debate about what precisely the museum should be for

How do you make a museum for an event that isn’t over yet, and whose impact we don’t understand yet, and whose theme hasn’t been digested yet by society?” Coming from anyone else, such a question would be rhetorical, but for Jake Barton, it was a genuine quandary.

Eight years ago Barton’s studio, Local Projects, was hired to help design the exhibits for the 9/11 Memorial Museum. From the start, there were conflicting opinions on how to proceed – and whether to proceed at all. When Barton’s team began working on the project, they attended several listening sessions, called the “Conversation Series”, which included financial stakeholders, residents, survivors, family members, historians and museum experts. “At the same time as you’d have people standing up and saying ‘It’s too soon,’ the next person would pop up and say, ‘What’s taking so long?'” he recalls.

Things got more complicated when it came time to develop and fill the museum. “We would ask different members of the community what we should put in – one person would say, ‘Don’t make it so difficult that I would get retraumatised,’ and another would say, ‘I lost my loved one and believe this exhibit should be hard, it should be as hard for other people to go through as for me.’ Trying to judge that mental spectrum is not easy.”

The museum pavilion, designed by Snøhetta, and Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s memorial pools

Despite the hurdles that the Conversation Series seemed to present, discussion has always been both the starting point and the goal for the museum. In its opening pitch, Local Projects noted that at the edge of the core audience were almost opposite groups. “You have survivors, or family members, people who know more about the event than any historian. They ran out of the burning buildings for their lives, witnessed things first hand,” Barton explains. “And then you have people who know nothing about the event, young adults aged 14 or so, with no direct memory, who might not know anything about it. That’s the nature of human memory, it goes really fast.”

To talk to both groups, Local Projects suggested using the stories from one to engage the other. The opening gallery sets up this dynamic. As visitors descend a ramp (meant to evoke the ramps set up both for the original World Trade Center construction crews and the rescue workers who entered Ground Zero after the attacks), they pass floor-to-ceiling panels with projected snippets of text corresponding to audio recordings that turn out to be remembrances of 9/11.

Recorded by 417 people living all over the world, who remember witnessing the attacks either in person or on television or radio, the range of accents is resonant, though the story they tell is painfully familiar. Similar phrases echo one another – “It was a beautiful day” and “mayhem” are two that stand out – and the panels
are interspersed with photos of bystanders staring in doleful silence at the streams of smoke flooding the sky.

Table displays and photographs of the victims

Though a staggering number of artefacts are on view – ranging from the grandly symbolic, such as a battered fire truck, to the startlingly personal, including a pointe shoe owned by one of the victims – recorded voices carry the bulk of the museum’s historical exhibition. The voices you can hear are often in the form of heartbreaking messages left on cellphones and answering machines by victims.

Each of the four attacks – on the two World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and United Airlines Flight 93, the plane that went down in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania – is given what Local Projects calls an “audio alcove” that tells the story of that particular sequence of events. Another is dedicated to those who fell or leaped from the towers’ windows.

The alcoves are separated from the main path of the exhibition to allow viewers to choose what to experience – and the audio recordings are quite harrowing. One reason for the focus on audio is practical: there is a lack of visual documentation of the attacks as they transpired. “There were three or six photographs taken from inside the towers,” Barton says, and a bit of footage of the lobbies. When visitors aren’t hearing from the victims, they are listening to witness accounts or, in the In Memoriam exhibition, to memories of the some 3,000 victims recorded by friends and family.

Fuselage fragment from American Airlines Flight 11

There is also an opportunity to share. While the historical and memorial exhibitions are about listening, a separate chamber with individual recording studios, called Reflecting on 9/11, moves towards telling. “You can share a memory of someone, or share your memory of 9/11. This allows people to think and talk about some of the more challenging aspects. That was a buffer … to be a technique that allows the museum to age and evolve with the event itself.”

But the emphasis on storytelling has another purpose – to highlight the individuals who died in the attacks. “The museum tries to make points about the nature of terrorism but not overtly,” says Barton. “It is not a straight museum telling the story, but has memorial written into its core mission.

If you think about terrorism there’s a strong argument to be made about the horror of abstraction, that to the people who flew planes into these buildings, the people in there weren’t people, they were just an idea, a notion that they hated and wanted to destroy. We spent a lot of time trying to make it what you would think of as a wake rather than a funeral. It’s about these people as little league coaches, or their favourite jokes, or what they were like standing up at their best friend’s wedding.”

Barton’s background made him the perfect candidate to process and handle the number of personal voices involved in the museum. Early in his career, as a designer of interior architecture for museums, he noticed that visitors knew as much if not more than the curators about certain topics. “If you’ve ever been to a car museum,” he says, “the people who inhabit the floor just know everything about this Mustang, but even in a World War II museum, you have veterans going to these museums and sharing their own stories, but only with the people they go with.”

A salvaged trident and other artefacts from Ground Zero

Influenced by playwright Anna Deavere Smith, who works on collaborative theatre pieces based on real-life events, such as the Rodney King beating and subsequent trial, by interviewing people who were involved or invested in the event, Barton began to wonder if a stronger sense of community and collective experience could be cultivated from museum audiences. “I was working on an exhibition for Intel about how the internet worked,” he says, recalling his eureka moment some time around 1997, “and I remember looking at that famous network map of the internet and thinking, ‘This is how it works.’ It occurred to me, at that point when the internet was being used as an information dissemination network, you could create feedback loops inside these exhibition experiences.”

Not everyone was so open to the idea – the head of Barton’s firm said, in response to one of his ideas for an exhibition for Unicef, “What do we care what visitors have to say?” – but Barton saw an opportunity, quit his job and got a degree in art and computer science at New York University. He later went on to join StoryCorps, designing oral history booths for a project that is collecting thousands of personal stories and archiving them at the Library of Congress.

This project has hardly been smooth sailing, however. For some, the museum’s memorial aspect, and the emphasis on grief and mourning, is problematic. It prevents catharsis, and more importantly, forgiveness. Critics have already pointed out the absence of any feeling of “freedom” at a plaza purportedly celebrating the concept.

Words

Claire Barliant

Images: Jin Lee, Amy Dreher