Port of NY and NJ Memorializes 9/11 With the Permanence of Sunlight
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has taken a new step to build remembrance of the 9/11 attack into its infrastructure, creating a permanent reminder for all generations. Inscribed into the floor of the Oculus - the transportation hub designed as a memorial for 9/11 - are the azimuth and altitude of the sun at 1028 hours on September 11, 2001, the moment that the North Tower collapsed.
The inscription and accompanying inlays amplify and explain the Oculus' defining feature. When architect Daniel Libeskind was commissioned to design the monolithic main hall of the building, he oriented its entire shape and orientation so that a "wedge of light" sweeps the hall with sunlight from 0846 to 1028 hours each day.
The newly-installed floor inlay includes a line subtly inscribed in the marble across the west and east ends of the space. The line follows the path of the sun throughout the time of the attack on that fateful morning. It is inscribed with the words "Azimuth 128.45 to North - Altitude 41.33 to the Sun - At 10:28 AM on September 11, 2001.”
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"Permanently weaving that wedge of light into the literal foundation of the Oculus is a fitting tribute to the memory of those first moments of the attacks and to the master design vision that our redeveloped campus is built around," said Port Authority Chairman Kevin O’Toole. "Future generations will be able to follow the path of the wedge of light across the campus using these markings to connect with how the events of that day and those terrible moments in time are with us still, woven into the campus itself."
The use of the sun's position as a marker of time and space will be intimately familiar to mariners as the underlying principle of the noon sight. It is also part of a long architectural lineage of using the sun to mark important moments in time: Stonehenge is the best-known example of a monumental sundial, built to indicate the seasons, but there are many more. At the Selinente ruins in Sicily, the Temple of Apollo - the Greek god of the sun - is aligned with the sun's position at the spring solstice. Similar sites from entirely different cultures exist in present-day Egypt, Malta and Jordan, and have outlasted the civilizations that built them. By structuring a monument-scale 9/11 memorial to mark a moment with ageless sunlight, the design sits within a practice measured in millenia.
