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Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images Architect Paul Murdoch talks about his firm's winning design of the Flight 93 National Memorial during a news conference to unveil the selected design for the memorial at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce last Wednesday in Washington, D.C. Click photo for larger image.
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Paul Murdoch, 48, founded his Los Angeles-based firm in 1991. Milena Murdoch, 46, joined the firm as vice president in 2001 after 16 years as a project architect, manager and designer. The firm emphasizes environmental responsibility and sustainability; it specializes in architecture, urban design and interiors for higher education, governmental and residential building clients.
Q. Why did you enter the Flight 93 memorial competition?
A. This project involves so many different aspects of what we would want to address as an architect, so it was attractive from that point of view. And we wanted to be involved somehow in making some kind of statement about the heroism of the 40 who died that day. I was somewhat familiar with the landscape. ... I had done a little camping and rafting in the Laurel Highlands. ...
The whole tone of presentation of [the competition brief] we bonded to well, because of what was being said about what this should be.
Q. How did you prepare for entering the competition, in terms of perhaps reading about or visiting historic or contemporary memorials or the story of Flight 93?
A. We did not read a lot of detail, like the 9/11 Commission report.... We weren't there to tell the story of each individual but what happened overall as a collective act of courage. There was enough description about what happened and enough documentation of the site in the competition brief that allowed us to deal with the fundamental issues.
Q. Which were what?
A. Which were that the site that had been chosen for the park was at a very large scale, 2,200 acres; that the land itself was very open and exposed; that there's a certain kind of raw beauty to the land. On the one hand it had a serene and tranquil quality but on the other it had this power to it. ...
Some of the power of the land had to do with all the mining. The land wasn't pure but had already been violated. You have this industrial-scale operation there, which was enormous, but even more powerful was that the land itself was enduring and would endure even the scale of that mining operation. It had been forested, it had been farmed, it had been mined and now it had taken this violent impact on 9/11. And it had been able to absorb all of this and still had its own tranquil power. And that's the level that we wanted to operate on.
We wouldn't try to re-enact what happened on 9/11. We wouldn't try to reveal the violence of that. We always felt that story should be told in the visitors' center, the interpretive center. The memorial would be the place where all of that is contemplated and everybody would be doing that on their own terms and in their own way.
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| Sisters Theresa Cooke, left, and Germaine Wilson listen to Milena Murdoch, wife of Paul Murdoch, right, describe the Flight 93 National Memorial when it was selected Wednesday. Cooke and Wilson's brother, LeRoy Homer, was the co-pilot of Flight 93. Click photo for larger image. |
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Q. Have you designed other memorials?
A. No. We did do a very quick entry to the World Trade Center memorial. We tried to create a healing experience there. We dealt with the two footprints of the towers and in that case we created a labyrinth in each footprint so visitors could go in. ... What we tried to create there is something similar to what we tried to create in the Flight 93 memorial: People who participate in the future will be bringing their own, hopefully healing, energy to it.
Q. How often do you enter competitions?
A. We try to enter once every year or two. The advantage of a competition, in our case, is that we can push a lot of the concerns we deal with in other projects aside and have a little more freedom in expressing something.
Q. When did you first visit the site and how did that shape your thinking?
A. We first visited after we found out we were selected to be a finalist, in February. That was in the snow, in a blizzard. We realized we had to create something a little more buffered than what we had first described in our ring of maple trees.
We were fortunate to come back in April and see it in an entirely different season, which also helped develop it further. We got a very good feeling for the scale of the site and how clear it was. We could clarify where everything would be. It was a good opportunity to analyze the scheme and test it against the site and make adjustments accordingly.
Q. Could you talk about the evolution of the thinking that led you to the design?
A. The very first sketches that we did were dealing with land forms. It was apparent right away that at the scale of this site, we weren't going to create a monument, a built object that would be able to make a heroic statement. And we wanted to make a heroic statement. We were going to have to use the land to do that. The land was somehow the key to creating a memorial here. ...
The idea of a gesture of embrace was one of the first impulses that we wanted to express -- the act of collectively coming together and honoring the sacred ground. The idea of embracing arms around that site was important. It was the final resting place of these 40 people.
Q. Where did the inspiration for the Tower of Voices come from?
A. Probably from two points. We understood there was wind always coming across the site. The last contact that many families had [with the deceased] was through their voices, on cell phone calls. We wanted to do something with sound that somehow acknowledged that. Because the wind was there, we thought of wind chimes that would continue to resonate in the place and carry a living memory of the passengers and crew. And we found how important the sound was [at the site]. You can sit in the temporary memorial and listen to the wind go through the flags and walk through the hemlock grove and hear it in the trees.
Q. Did you look at precedents for the chime tower? Are there any that you are aware of?
A. We presented the idea not knowing about any precedents. Then we did a little research on carillon towers and there didn't seem to be any that just had wind chimes. They all seemed to be played electronically or manually. ...
We are working with Gary Kvistad of Woodstock Chimes in Woodstock, N.Y., on the design. ... [His chimes] seemed to have the nicest-quality sound that we could find. They have done two memorials in the past ... but what we have in mind is a larger scale. We want to have chimes that are anywhere from 10 feet tall to 12 to 18 inches [tall]. The artistry here is in getting those to be in harmony rather than cacophony. It's like we're building a 93-foot-tall instrument.
Q. Why that height?
A. For Flight 93, and that height will allow it to be a marker on the highway above the trees we will surround it with. We wanted something to help screen the tower from the entrance so it wasn't just in your face as you entered and there was a certain mystery to it. So there are rings of white pines that seem to resonate out from the tower metaphorically.
Q. Will they also buffer the sound?
A. We want the sound to resonate farther but not go off site too strongly and too far beyond the area of the tower. The tower is in the form of a shell. It curves but is open on one end. So the chimes are animated but not swinging in the wind wildly.
Q. How did the first jury's comments shape the design?
A. One of the comments was we may want to consider bringing the maple trees and the walkway down from the ridge itself and in our February visit that comment became validated in a strong way. Our initial reaction was to come down 80 feet or so. We ended up coming even farther because we wanted to create not just the ring of maples but we added 40 groves of red and sugar maples. We have a roadway that allows you to come around it, and behind that we have more trees, a lot of which are evergreens. There's a lot more layering than we initially had, so it's more powerful and more buffered and protected. And you would have the evergreens in the winter, so you would still feel the curved form.
Q. When did you first learn of concerns that some people were interpreting the open circle of red maple trees with the red crescent associated with Islam?
A. I believe it was mentioned in the second stage jury report.
Q. Did it occur to you in the initial design phase that this might be an issue?
A. No, this is not in any way a derivation of what we came up with. I think it's an unfortunate misinterpretation of what we've generated, which we feel is very unique. The generation of this form came from the place and the intention of this memorial.
Q. Will the site's two draglines [large excavators used in surface mining] be included?
A. That decision has yet to be made. ... I think there needs to be some record of the mining era but there could be a record of that in the visitors' center. ... I think the sites of the draglines are important because you get good overlooks from them and our trails go to them. ... We decided to propose keeping the draglines' buckets -- they can stand up over a long period of time without a lot of preparation work. [As artifacts], the draglines would have to be preserved and restored, and what resources would go into that as opposed to staffing and maintaining the park?
Q. How did you find out that you had won and what was your reaction?
A. Don Stastny, one of the competition advisers, called us about two weeks ago. It's so gratifying that something we believed in strongly has been accepted. It wasn't a whoop and holler moment; it's deeper than that. I told Milena and we just kind of looked at each other and just big smiles. After so much work and so much emotional outpouring, it's sort of beyond the wahoo. It's really deep gratification.
