

To understand more about the 9/11 Memorial, look to theperson who designed it:





Ten years ago, Michael Arad was a young, idealistic architect designing police stations for the New York Housing Authority -- the kind of buildings that most people pass by and never really notice. But the World Trade Center terrorist attacks would soon stir a vision in Arad that will forever be part of America and its history.

Arad, now 42, was born in London, lived much of his childhood in Mexico and the United States, and served in the Israeli army. He had moved to New York City in 1999 from Atlanta and says he still felt like an outsider in his new hometown on Sept. 11, 2001.

On the day of the attacks, Arad was working at home when he heard on the radio that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. He assumed, as did thousands of others, that it was an accident.

"I remember walking across my apartment and looking through the bedroom window and seeing smoke billowing up from the North Tower," he recalls. "So I grabbed my camera and went up to the roof of the building to take a picture of that and witnessed the second plane swerve around and crash into the South Tower in this enormous fireball and explosion of glass -- a horrendous thing to behold."

He jumped onto his bicycle to go find his wife, Melanie, who worked in Lower Manhattan. "I remember that morning pretty clearly," he says. "It was almost apocalyptic, the quality of the city, biking through throngs of people, who were all transfixed and staring at the towers and wondering what was going on."

He eventually found his wife. They evacuated the downtown area, weaving through Manhattan’s urban canyons, when the towers began to crumble. "I didn’t realize the tower was falling," he recalls. "I could just hear people yelling, 'It’s falling! It’s falling!' I didn’t know what they were talking about."

The city’s response to the horrors of 9/11 affected Arad deeply. "What really struck me was how New Yorkers reacted to that day, how much courage, and compassion, and care, and love people showed in the aftermath of that attack, how people really came together to support each other in ways big and small."

There were the rallies on the West Side Highway to cheer on the recovery workers; the lines that formed around hospitals to donate blood; the makeshift memorials and candlelight vigils; the impromptu gatherings at Washington, Union, and Times squares. All of these memories and impressions flowed through Arad's growing sense of belonging.

"I think New Yorkers realized that day how much they need each other," he says. "And for me, that was really the day I felt I became a New Yorker, through the crucible of that experience."

Michael Arad at the National September 11 Memorial site, Friday, July 9, 2010. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan) More

In the months after 9/11, Arad daydreamed about a memorial for the city that would honor New Yorkers' shared sorrow and fidelity. He thought about the kind of place he would want to visit, that would nurture the community.

"I started sketching this idea, it was sort of this image in my head of the surface of the Hudson River being torn open and two square voids that the water would rush into and they wouldn't fill up," he says. "It was a very inexplicable image, something that doesn't make any sense. It just kind of stayed in my head."

He made detailed drawings and models. He then set his designs on a high shelf and went on with his life. But a couple years later, a competition to design the 9/11 Memorial was opened to the public. Arad returned to his designs and refined his concepts. He titled it "Reflecting Absence."