Drawing on deep emotion to design the memorial to those killed at the Pentagon - TheDay.com
For Julie Beckman and Keith Kaseman, Sept. 11, 2011, is not a 10-year anniversary of a day that forever changed their lives.
Instead, the tragedy that has altered the course of American history has allowed Beckman and Kaseman, in the intervening years, a bittersweet opportunity to make something beautiful out of the remnants of something so awful.
The time has ticked by, and Beckman says it's "both sides of coin: (Sept. 11) feels like yesterday and it feels like ages ago."
Nine years ago, the couple, who married in 2006, learned about a design competition for a Pentagon memorial for the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. They entered, not expecting much to come of it.
Eight years ago, they learned that their design - one of more than 1,100 submitted from around the world - had been selected the winner.
Five years ago - the year the two architects married - groundbreaking began on the 2-acre site that would commemorate the 184 victims who died at the Pentagon: the 59 people on American Airlines Flight 77 and the 125 who were working in the defense building that day.
On another Sept. 11, in 2008, the Pentagon memorial was dedicated with much fanfare, the first of three memorials at the sites of the terrorists attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
This year, the 10th anniversary, "we'll be off on a beautiful hike somewhere," Beckman said last week. "We'll be by ourselves, enjoying each other's company."
A personal quest
Beckman and Kaseman were living in Manhattan that day. Beckman was blocks away when she saw the explosion from the second plane hitting the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
"It was beginning to feel like I was watching an action movie play out," she recalled. "What was going on was outside of anything I could ever imagine."
That day had a huge psychological and emotional impact. When Beckman and Kaseman heard of the Pentagon memorial competition the next year, they saw it as a chance to express the feelings that day brings forward.
"The contest was calling for something that makes you think, not telling you what to think or how to feel," Beckman said. "Not one person had the same experience that day. There were people who ran for their lives, people who witnessed it and those that were 3,000 miles away. The relationship people have with that event is so wide, you can't sum it up in one image."
When they learned they had won the competition, Beckman said it was a huge honor, but not something she and Kaseman "high-fived over."
Instead, they got to work, turning their dreamed-of memorial into a $22 million reality.
The park features a bench, tree and small pool of water for each of the 184 victims. The individual monuments are ordered by victim's age, from the youngest, 3, to 71-years-old.
Beckman said she's heard the memorial receives 250,000 to 300,000 visitors annually.
The dedication of the memorial was "one of the top five days of my life," Beckman said.
"It was the first time we felt we could celebrate something that was connected to something that was so tragic," Beckman said. "It was a bittersweet day, too: There were a lot of tears, but lots were tears of pride.
"Watching people use the place the way it was intended had a pretty profound effect on both of us. There were beautiful little moments, and it was kind of the culmination of six years of work."
'Generations to come'
Beckman and Kaseman now live in Philadelphia, and keep plenty busy.
Their architecture firm, Kaseman Beckman Advanced Strategies, has done well, and they both teach graduate architecture students at the University of Pennsylvania. Kaseman teaches at Columbia University as well.
The couple has been asked to take on designing a memorial in Nacogdoches, Texas, to commemorate the Columbia space shuttle disaster.
"We're waiting for that to move forward," Beckman said.
The Pentagon memorial was the first of the three sites of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to have a memorial in place.
The other two - the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pa., and the New York City Ground Zero 9/11 Memorial - are both to be dedicated today, the 10th anniversary.
The 2,220-acre Shanksville site, where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed into a field, killing 40 passengers, is the only site that has not been fully funded.
Located 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, the memorial features a visitors' shelter, a memorial wall of names of the victims and a ceremonial gateway and flight path walkway.
The New York City site, where thousands were killed in the attack on the World Trade Center's Twin Towers, will most certainly attract the most attention and visitors.
Hundreds of trees will surround the enormous, man-made waterfalls filling the 1-acre squares where the towers stood. The names of the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six are inscribed in bronze panels.
Beckman and Kaseman visited the Pentagon memorial a few weeks ago. Because they visited during a rainstorm, Beckman said, they had the place to themselves. It still brings forth powerful emotion, she said.
"I think to be able to create a place that brings solace and contemplation is beautiful in its own way, that it acts completely counter to everything that 9/11 was all about, like the fear and confusion and suffering and sadness," Beckman said.
"If we were able to create a place that allows all that emotion to naturally come forward in the moment or in memories, then that's the definition of not telling (visitors) how to feel. The park strives to tell a story and hopefully for generations to come, we'll be touched by that story."
An Associated Press report was included in this story.
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Source: http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNGH6-FzRcCSZ5DNgVgEJaWAJYXv-Q&url=http://www.theday.com/article/20110911/NWS01/309119984
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