9·11紀念館揭幕，The 9/11 Story Told at Bedrock, Powerful as a Punch to the Gut

The 9/11 Story Told at Bedrock, Powerful as a Punch to the Gut
Museum ReviewBy HOLLAND COTTERMay 16, 2014


Airplane fragments displayed at the Sept. 11 museum.

Damon Winter/The New York Times



NEW YORK — After a decade marked by deep grief, partisan rancor, war, financial boondoggles and inundation from Hurricane Sandy, the National September 11 Memorial Museum at ground zero is finally opening ceremonially on Thursday, with President Obama present, and officially to the public next Wednesday. It delivers a gut-punch experience — though if ever a new museum had looked, right along, like a disaster in the making, this one did, beginning with its trifurcated identity.

Was it going to be primarily a historical document, a monument to the dead or a theme-park-style tourist attraction? How many historical museums are built around an active repository of human remains, still being added to? How many cemeteries have a $24 entrance fee and sell souvenir T-shirts? How many theme parks bring you, repeatedly, to tears?

Because that’s what the museum does. The first thing to say about it, and maybe the last, is that it’s emotionally overwhelming, particularly, I expect, for New Yorkers who were in the city on that apocalyptic September day and the paranoia-fraught weeks that followed, but almost as certainly for the estimated two billion people around the globe who followed the horror unfolding on television, radio and the Internet.

Anguished, angry questions about the museum, raised by families of some of the 2,983 people who died on Sept. 11, 2001, and in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, have been widely reported. Debates over purpose, propriety and protocol are still in the air. At times, they have threatened to derail the project, or delay it indefinitely. But the work inched forward, and the museum that emerged is true to its initial and literally fundamental goal: to tell the Sept. 11 story at ground zero bedrock.

While the accompanying National September 11 Memorial — two granite basins of cascading water that fill the twin tower footprints — is viewable from a street-level plaza, the museum is almost entirely subterranean. The bulk of it, some 110,000 square feet of gallery space, is 70 feet below ground, where the foundations of the towers met raw Manhattan schist.


Inside the Sept. 11 museum.

Invisibility can make for strong drama. A descent into darkness is the stuff of suspense. It’s also the classic route of religious ritual and regeneration, bringing images of the tomb and the seedbed to mind. The museum makes full use of these associations and reveals itself slowly.

The drama starts, low key, on the plaza level with an aboveground entry pavilion midway between the memorial fountains. Designed by the Norwegian architectural firm Snohetta, it’s a glass box set at a sharp, dizzy tilt, like a tipping building or a listing ship. The blond-wood atrium, with its coat checks, a small cafe and a closed-off room for the use of Sept. 11 families, is atmospherically neutral, even bland, but offers an unmistakable sight: two of the immense steel trident columns that were the signature features of the twin tower facades.

Recorded sound, once inadmissible in conventional museums, plays a major role in this one. So does scale. You emerge from the corridor’s close, oppressive aural cloud onto a platform overlooking a yawning space and an archaeological monolith: a 60-foot-high exposed section of the World Trade Center’s slurry wall. This thick, foundational barrier of poured concrete, laid before construction began in 1966, was, and is, the bulwark between the trade center and the Hudson River.

When the twin towers collapsed, there was fear that the wall would give, flooding the site. It didn’t give. It cracked, but held, and was quickly claimed as an emblem of indomitability and resilience. Daniel Libeskind, when he was hired as master planner for a new trade center complex in 2003, spoke of the slurry wall as the soul of his design, and by then it had already served as a multipurpose symbol of urban recovery, democracy, communal strength, the human spirit, not to mention the virtues of sound engineering.




泥灰牆局部



 

Metaphorical thinking was rife in the days and months after Sept. 11. Everything was framed in terms of darkness and light, wounding and healing, death and rebirth. The interior design of the museum, by the New York firm Davis Brody Bond, preserves this kind of thinking in several of its features, notably in a long, descending ramp that leads visitors down seven stories, between the gigantic sunken cubes of the memorial pool basins, to true ground zero.

The ramp was inspired by an access road that was created during the early recovery phase and eventually took on a sacral aura. But in the museum context, the ramp becomes a processional path, lined with anticipatory vistas and projected versions of the “Missing” posters that papered the post-Sept. 11 city for weeks.

And when the path finally ends at bedrock, it leaves a choice of ways to go, toward a subdued exhibition commemorating those killed by the terrorist attacks or toward a disturbingly vivid evocation of the events themselves. It’s at this point that the conflicted character of the museum starts to become clear.

The commemorative display is, basically, the equivalent of a communal, life-honoring memorial service perpetually in progress. Photographs of nearly 3,000 people cover the walls of a gallery. The same faces, along with biographical portraits and spoken reminiscences, can be pulled up on touch screens and projected large in another room. Some 14,000 still unidentified or unclaimed Sept. 11 remains reside, unseen, in an adjacent repository, at the request of a vast majority of families.

A smaller group has protested the presence of the remains here. Families of some victims have balked at the idea of a museum — especially one that will inevitably swarm with casual tourists — doubling as a mortuary. Others fear that a building that took on 11 feet of water during Hurricane Sandy could flood again. Finally, the fact that the remains are not technically entombed but in storage, and subject to removal for testing, under the auspices of the city’s chief medical examiner, inevitably compromises any sense of repose.

Repose is the last word you’d associate with the museum’s other, larger exhibition, addressing that September day itself. Winding through several galleries, it calls on videos, audio recordings, photographs and hundreds of objects to document, minute by minute, the events of that Tuesday, from 8:46 a.m., when American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the north tower, and on past 10:28 a.m., when that tower fell, by which time three other planes were pulverized, the Pentagon was in flames, and thousands of people were gone.

The prevailing story in the museum, as in a church, is framed in moral terms, as a story of angels and devils. In this telling, the angels are many and heroic, the devils few and vile, a band of Islamist radicals, as they are identified in a cut-and-dried, contextless and unnuanced film called “The Rise of Al Qaeda,” seen at the end of the exhibition.

The narrative is not so much wrong as drastically incomplete. It is useful history, not deep history; news, not analysis. This approach is probably inevitable in a museum that is, to an unusual degree, still living the history it is documenting; still working through the bereavement it is memorializing; still attached to the idea that, for better and worse, Sept. 11 “changed everything,” though there is plenty of evidence that, for better and worse, this is not so. The amped-up patriotism set off by the attacks has largely subsided. So has the tender, in-this-together generosity that Americans extended to one another at the time.

Still, within its narrow perspective, maybe because of it, the museum has done something powerful. And, fortunately, it seems to regard itself as a work in progress, involved in investigation, not summation. I hope so. If it stops growing and freezes its narrative, it will become, however affecting, just another Sept. 11 artifact. If it tackles the reality that its story is as much about global politics as about architecture, about a bellicose epoch as much as about a violent event, it could deepen all our thinking about politics, morality and devotion.

The National September 11 Memorial Museum opens next Wednesday at 1 Albany Street, at Greenwich Street, Lower Manhattan; 212-266-5211; 911memorial.org.

9·11紀念館揭幕，在原爆點講述一場災難

紀念9·11HOLLAND COTTER2014年05月16日

國家9·11紀念館裡展示的飛機殘骸。

Damon Winter/The New York Times

紐約——過去10年，深切的悲傷、黨派矛盾、戰爭、虛假的金融繁榮 和颶風「桑迪」(Sandy)引發的洪水一直在困擾美國。如今，設立在9·11事件原爆點的紀念館終於將在周四舉行開館儀式，屆時奧巴馬總統也將出席。紀 念館將於下周三正式對公眾開放。它傳達了一種震撼人心的體驗——沒有哪個新博物館能像它這樣，從頭到尾如同一場正在發生的災難，從它的三重身份開始。

它將主要成為一個歷史記錄、一座紀念亡靈的紀念碑，還是一個主題公園式的旅遊景點？有多少歷史博物館會圍繞一個不斷有新遺骸被送進來的人類遺骸庫進行建設？有多少墓地會收取24美元（約合150元人民幣）的門票，而且還在出售紀念T恤？又有多少主題公園會反覆讓你落淚？

這個紀念館會。關於它，首先要說的，也許也是歸根結底要說的，就是它具有強大的情感衝擊力，我認為對於那些在9月大災難發生當天——以及隨後痛苦焦慮的幾周里——身處這座城市的紐約人，當然還有全球大約20億通過電視、電台和網絡跟進此事的人而言尤其如此。

喪生於2001年9月11日和1993年世貿中心(World Trade Center)襲擊案中的2983人的親屬，曾痛苦而憤怒地對這個紀念館提出質疑，對此媒體進行過廣泛的報道。關於目的、儀軌和規範的爭論仍在繼續。他們 有時會威脅要阻止這個項目，或者將其無限推遲。但是，相關工作還是在緩慢進行，最終建成的紀念館的確符合它最初及字面上的根本目的：在原爆點的地基處向人 們講述9·11的故事。

雖然人們可以從街面的廣場上看到旁邊的國家9·11紀念館——兩個 花崗岩水池，有水從池壁上流下，它們剛好填充了雙子塔的地基，但紀念館幾乎完全位於地下。它的主體部分，即約11萬平方英尺（約合1萬平方米）的展覽空間 都位於地下70英尺（約合21米）的地方，雙子塔的地基在這裡碰到了曼哈頓地下的天然片岩。

在原爆點訪問9·11紀念館。

這種不可見的效果有助於帶來強烈的衝擊力。沉入黑暗能製造懸念。它還是宗教儀式和重生的經典途徑，能讓人聯想起墳墓和發源地。紀念館對這些因素進行了充分利用，慢慢將自己展示在參觀者面前。

戲劇從廣場上低調地拉開帷幕。人們要從地面上兩個紀念噴泉之間的廳 廊進入。此廳由挪威建築公司斯諾赫塔(Snohetta)設計，是一個大角度傾斜、令人暈眩的玻璃盒，就像一棟倒塌的大樓或一條側翻的船。用亮色木裝飾的 前廳配有衣帽間、一個小咖啡廳，還有一個專供9·11遇難者親屬使用的房間。這裡的氣氛並無特別之處，甚至可謂平常，但是有個景象不可能錯過：兩個巨大的 三叉戟鋼柱，呈現出雙子塔標誌性的外立面輪廓。

文獻錄音在傳統博物館裡曾是不可接受的，但在這裡卻發揮了重要作 用。尺度也同樣重要。你從氛圍封閉而壓抑的走廊走到一個平台上，俯視着一個宏偉的空間，以及一塊考古發現般的單獨巨石：高60英尺的世貿中心地下連續牆露 出部分。這個厚重的地基屏障由混凝土製成，是在1966年建築工作開始前放置的。不論過去還是現在，它一直是世貿中心與哈德遜河之間的壁壘。

雙子塔坍塌時，有人擔心這堵牆會崩塌，從而使這裡被淹。但它並沒有 崩塌。出現了裂縫，但還是挺住了。它很快被當成了不屈不撓和堅韌的象徵。2003年，丹尼爾·里柏斯金(Daniel Libeskind)在受聘擔任新世貿中心建築群總規劃師時說，這堵地下連續牆可謂他設計的靈魂。當時，它就已經具有多種象徵意義，比如城市恢復、民主、 公共力量、人文精神，更別提聲音工程方面的好處了。

9·11之後的歲月里，隱喻思維很流行。一切都被用黑暗和光明、創 傷和康復、死亡和重生這樣的措辭來限定。由紐約的戴維斯-布羅迪-邦德(Davis Brody Bond)公司完成的紀念館內部設計在幾個方面保留了這種思維，最顯而易見的是一條通往地下的長坡道。在紀念池形成的兩個巨型立方體凹陷之間，訪客沿着的 這條坡道向下走七層，來到真正的原爆點。

這個坡道的靈感來自一條進出通道，那條通道是在救援階段的初期修建 的，最後有了一種神聖的氣息。但在紀念館的氛圍下，這條坡道變成了一條儀式性的道路，路兩邊能看到對未來的展望，以及「尋人」告示的投影。9·11公布襲 擊過後的數周里，這座城市裡出現了鋪天蓋地的尋人告示。

坡道的盡頭是基岩，在那裡，遊客可以選擇怎麼走，是去觀看一場壓抑的、紀念恐怖襲擊遇難者的展覽，還是去觀看對那些事件本身的回放。這種回放生動得令人不安。正是在這時，這座紀念館自相矛盾的特點開始變得明顯起來。

紀念展覽基本上相當於一場一直在進行的公共追悼會，表達了對生命的 尊崇。近3000人的照片鋪滿了一間展廳的牆壁。在另一間屋子裡，這些照片，連帶相應的生平和語音回憶錄，可以被轉移到觸摸屏上並被投影放大。應絕大多數 家庭的要求，9·11襲擊中大約1.4萬件到現在依然身份不明、或是無人認領的遺骸被存放在隔壁的儲藏室里，參觀者看不到這些遺骸。

一個較小的團體已經對這些遺骸出現在這裡表示了抗議。部分遇難者家 庭對把太平間同時當作博物館的想法表達了不滿——尤其是考慮到這個博物館勢必會擠滿了順便來觀光的遊客。還有一些人則擔心，一棟在颶風「桑迪」中積水深達 11英尺的大樓可能會再次被水淹沒。最後還有，那些遺骸嚴格來說尚未下葬，只是被存放在那裡，而且可以在紐約首席驗屍員的監督下被取走進行檢驗，這樣一來 就談不上什麼清凈地了。

而在紀念館另一處的一個規模更大的展覽，則是完全想不到清凈這個詞 的，展覽主題是9月11日那一天。在幾個展廳里蜿蜒穿行，你會看到記錄著那個周四從上午8點46分美國航空(American Airlines)11航班撞擊北塔，到上午10點28分北塔倒塌以後每一分鐘里發生的事情的視頻、錄音、照片以及數百件物品。到北塔倒塌時，另外三架飛 機被毀，五角大樓陷入了一片火海，數千人遇難。

就像在教堂里一樣，這座紀念館裡佔主導地位的故事，被從道德層麵塑 造成了天使與魔鬼的對立。在這種敘述中，天使眾多而且英勇，魔鬼寥寥幾個且邪惡，他們是一夥伊斯蘭派激進分子，那部簡明直白、缺乏語境與深度的影片《基地 組織的崛起》(The Rise of Al Qaeda)就是這麼描繪他們的，遊客可以在展覽的最後看到。

這種敘述與其說是錯的，不如說是缺略太多。它是有用的歷史，不是深 刻的歷史；是新聞，不是分析。在這樣一座紀念館裡，這種方式可能是無法避免的。在相當程度上，這座紀念館仍然停留在自己所記錄的歷史裡；仍然掙扎在自己所 紀念的喪親之痛中；它仍然寄託着一個念頭：9·11——不論是好是壞——「改變了一切」，儘管大量證據已經表明——不論是好是壞——事實並非如此。襲擊引 發的愛國主義大潮，現在基本上已經消退。當時美國人對彼此表現出的溫柔的、共度難關的包容，同樣也已經不在。

然而，通過這種狹隘的視角，也許恰恰是因為這種狹隘的視角，紀念館 完成了一件了不起的事。而且幸運的是，它似乎認為自己是一件仍處在創作中的作品，所做的工作是調查，而不是匯總。希望如此。如果停止發展，固定自己的敘 述，無論多麼感人，它都只會成為另一件和9·11有關的人工製品。它的故事既關乎全球政治，也關乎建築，既關乎好戰的新時代，也關乎一起暴力事件，如果能 夠去面對這一現實，它將加深我們對政治、道德和虔誠的一切思考。

國家9·11紀念館將於下周三在位於曼哈頓下城格林威治街的奧爾巴尼街1號開放。
翻譯：陳柳、陳亦亭

一座聖地的誕生
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