LESS OR MORE.(discussions over building a monument at the former World Trade Center site in New York, New York)

When it comes to Ground Zero, just about the only thing that everyone agrees on is that there ought to be a memorial to the people who died there. No one, though, seems to have the slightest idea what this memorial should be, or whether it should be a physical structure at all.

The issues have been fought over at countless public hearings and forums, but last week Diana Balmori, a landscape architect who teaches at Yale, and Marian Imperatore, an architect and consultant, decided that it was time for a private forum, out of range of some of the more passionate constituents. The women, who head the memorials committee of the Civic Alliance, a consortium of civic groups active in the planning process, invited a group of writers and scholars to Balmori's loft, high above Broome Street in SoHo, to talk about what kind of memorial they wanted.

"This began with the idea of raising the discussion to a higher level than whether or not the footprint of the towers should be preserved," Balmori said.

Thirteen people gathered around an elliptical table, in a room with spectacular views both south and north. "The real question we have to start with is how you can express what Tony Hiss calls 'a place of hurt,' " Balmori said, looking across the table at Hiss, the author of "The Experience of Place," who was one of the guests. "Is it morally right to show scars? Or is the better thing to rebuild as if nothing had happened?"

Among the other guests were Kate Cooper, an American who teaches history at Manchester University, in England, and who studies how the dead were memorialized in classical times, and Kenneth Jackson, the president of the New-York Historical Society. For the first few minutes, however, the conversation was dominated by Nikki Stern, whose husband died in the Trade Center attacks, and Tom Roger, whose daughter was a flight attendant aboard Flight 11, which crashed into the north tower. Stern and Roger, unlike many of the victims' families, are reconciled to the idea that Ground Zero should have plenty of other things besides a memorial. "It will be for the living," Roger said.

"This is not Gettysburg to me," Stern said. "It is not a battleground."

"People believe that there is a clean sheet of paper here, and it has driven ...