The Freedom Tower

This is from Phillip Nobel, a writer for Metropolismag.com:
“Even after several years, many of them spent at Ground Zero among the strange tribes concerned with the site’s reconstruction—even after at no little pain turning that immersion into an account running 85,000 words—I maintained that I was at home with the aftermath. The instant memorials had not gotten to me, neither massed candles nor vain posters of the “missing.” The Tribute in Light, that importunate civic grandiosity, left me blank when it made its debut the first spring after. And none of the formal memorial designs, professional or amateur, ever impressed me as the least bit fitting, let alone moving or, god forbid, “healing”: it was processed, I was done.

“So imagine my surprise when I first found myself in tears at the site as late as the summer of 2006. The catalyst was not a vision of the still distant shrine-pools conceived by Michael Arad and Peter Walker, still less those dual-role future memorials—Calatrava’s train station or what’s left of Libeskind’s master plan—the effects of which, through careful imagining, I had long ago dismissed as emotionally neutral. Instead the artistic team that finally cut through my cynicism was the comparatively humble duo of David Childs and Jenny Holzer—an architect who builds with little pretension to transcend and a now hackneyed artist of the severest sterility. I should add the great E. B. White too, since it was his Here Is New York, scrolling in huge white letters on Holzer’s screen in Childs’s lobby at 7 World Trade, that finally broke me down.”
Real grief sometimes takes time.