Remembering September 11
On this day of national mourning and remembrance, our team leader delivers this message:
“Twenty-five years ago this morning, 2,977 people went to work, boarded a plane, or answered a call for help, and did not come. We remember them today. The passengers and crews of four flights. The workers in the North and South Towers, at the Pentagon, and the men and women whose resistance ended a fourth aircraft in a Pennsylvania field. The firefighters, police officers, and paramedics who climbed while everyone else descended. And the families who have carried every day of the quarter-century since - for whom this is not an anniversary but a Friday, and a birthday missed, and a chair that has been empty.
There is now a generation of engineers and students old enough to join this profession who have no memory of that morning. They know it as history. That is exactly why it must be spoken about carefully, and often, and by people who are willing to say plainly what was lost: not only lives, though that first and above all - but a silhouette, a skyline, and the confidence of a country that had built the tallest thing in the world and assumed it would always stand.
The World Technology Center does not build in New York, and it is not a memorial. That ground is hallowed, and what stands there now is theirs to keep. What we propose in Chicago is something different: a working campus of laboratories, workshops, classrooms, and public space, carrying a silhouette the world already recognizes, given over entirely to discovery. A spiritual successor, not a reconstruction. We chose that form because architecture carries meaning, and because the most complete answer to an act of destruction is not a replica of what was destroyed, but proof that the ambition behind it survived.
When the towers stand, September 11 shall be observed on this
campus as it should be. The flag at the spire will be lowered to half-staff, and the exterior lighting lowered with it, to the level of mourning. The campus will close to all but essential personnel. No lectures, no laboratories, no business. One day each year, the work stops, and the buildings speak only in the language of remembrance. On the anniversaries of great achievement, the light rises again.
That is the whole argument of this project, written in a single day of the calendar: that a nation can grieve honestly and build anyway. That the two are not in tension. That the reaching spire and the lowered flag belong to the same building.
To the families, the survivors, and the first responders - including those who have died in the years since from what they breathed on that pile - we hold you in our thoughts today, and we take our instructions from you about how this memory is handled.
We shall never forget. We shall rise again.”
— Raphael J. Chryslar
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