MEMORIES.(The Talk of the Town; Lower Manhattan Development Corporation competition for World Trade Center site memorial)

The most famous image from the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was a photograph of a fireman holding a dead baby pulled from the wreckage. So when the architectural competition for a memorial to the victims was held, the guidelines stipulated that designs avoid representations of a "known person, living or dead," thus heading off at the pass any twenty-foot-high statues of firemen. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which is in charge of the memorial to the victims of the attack on the World Trade Center, didn't rule out that sort of statue, but the judges who were assembled made it highly unlikely that a sentimental or kitschy design would be chosen. Anita Contini, a well-known curator who had run an alternative arts project called Creative Time, managed the process, putting together a jury that included Maya Lin, the designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington; Susan K. Freedman, the head of the Public Art Fund in New York; Michael Van Valkenburgh, an avant-garde landscape architect; the artist Martin Puryear; and James E. Young, a historian who was involved in the city of Berlin's choice of Peter Eisenman to design a Holocaust memorial. You couldn't imagine a group with better artistic credentials.

Eight designs were chosen from 5,201 submissions--a record for an architectural competition of this type--and all were abstract. It is clear that Maya Lin was the dominant figure on the jury, although we don't know what went on in the meetings. But she didn't have to say a word. Her Vietnam memorial, the nation's first really abstract monument, has been enormously influential. It made the notion of modern design accessible to many people and insured that in the future tragic events would be marked as commemorations of individuals, not as collective disasters. The rules for the World Trade Center memorial competition stipulated that the nearly three thousand victims be recognized specifically. The competitors were urged to "convey the magnitude of personal and physical loss at this location," and also "encourage reflection and contemplation" and "create an original and powerful statement of enduring and universal symbolism."

Every one of the final schemes, which will be on display in the Winter Garden in Battery Park City, across from Ground Zero, for the next few weeks--until the jury selects a winner--is intelligent and fairly sophisticated, but they have all been received lukewarmly by critics and by the public, not least because, in the post-Vietnam-memorial age, we may have come to expect too much of a memorial. Maya Lin was an undergraduate architecture student who created a brilliant scheme that won out over hundreds of other entries, some from well-known designers; she got it built, and it succeeded beyond anyone's imagination. The L.M.D.C. understandably hoped that ...