But the Arad memorial that will be unveiled this week won’t look quite like the model we saw in November. The jury knew none of the eight schemes was perfect–so they insisted the front runners get outside expertise. Arad was told to find a landscape architect–he chose the established modernist Peter Walker–and the spartan plaza will now include “teeming groves of trees,” said jury chair Vartan Gregorian in a statement. Without Walker, who’s been working quietly with Arad for weeks and who joined him in the final presentation to the jury, “Reflecting Absence” wouldn’t have won. But that’s not to take away from Arad’s achievement. He’s now been catapulted from obscurity, like the young Maya Lin, who was a Yale undergraduate when she created the Vietnam Memorial in 1981. (Lin, a member of this memorial jury, was a champion of Arad’s design.)
Arad, 34, is an Israeli citizen who’s lived in the United States since 1991. “We are thrilled and very proud,” says his father, Moshe Arad, Israel’s ambassador to the United States from 1987 to 1990. A graduate of Dartmouth, young Arad got his architecture degree from Georgia Tech. “He’s a wonderful kid,” says Arthur Spector, an architect in Jerusalem for whom Arad has interned. “He’s very serious and mature.”
The day Arad learned he won, he met Libeskind for the first time. Arad’s design had ignored much of Libeskind’s master plan: Arad’s plaza is at street level, not in a 30-foot pit; the “slurry” wall of the old foundation isn’t visible and he put a narrow cultural building along the western edge of the site, not on the northeast corner. But Libeskind is sanguine. “Mr. Arad chose to take the 30-foot void in the footprints themselves. I don’t see any contradiction,” he says. “He’s very personable and a sensitive young architect. I look forward to working with him.” They began last week, when both Arad and Libeskind flew to California to work in Walker’s Berkeley office. For now, let’s commend the jury: they pushed a design that not only honors the dead but will create a place for the living that knits together a tear in the heart of the city.
