Saturday (10/8) and Sunday (10/9)
Justin and I watched the final 2 episodes of "The Rising - Rebuilding Ground Zero". What an incredible series.
Ep. 5) Stories from the Pile: The National September 11th Museum has a nearly impossible task: to tell the definitive story of that devastating Tuesday morning 10 years ago. For visitors next year and a hundred years from now, this will be the place to go to understand what happened. In order for one museum to shoulder such a massive responsibility, its builders and curators will have to meet some incredible challenges. The first challenges are both logistical and technological. The plan calls for an above-ground entrance pavilion in Memorial Plaza, which sounds pretty straightforward. But from there visitors will descend below the plaza into a vast underground exhibit, down into a 100,000-square-foot museum space. The museum proper will be built underneath half of the entire 16-acre World Trade Center site, alongside the Path train, beneath one of the world's largest fountains. It will not just be constructed underground - which is hard enough - but be completely enmeshed in one of the largest and most complicated construction projects in history. The degree of construction difficulty here is unprecedented, but it is necessary. Only underground can visitors experience the full measure of what the towers were and what happened to them. Underground, visitors will be able to see the foundations of the original World Trade Center and even part of the massive slurry wall that holds back the force of the Hudson River, a wall that just barely held up as the towers fell. And only underground can the museum claim the vast space it needs to explore its subject fully. Some of the 9/11 artifacts the museum will display are enormous: crushed firetrucks and taxicabs, the impact steel that took the hit from one of the planes, even the staircase survivors used to flee the North Tower. They require space. They also require ingenuity to transport them, carefully, sometimes in pieces, from their current home in a hangar at JFK airport. These engineering challenges, great as they are, will be rivaled by the challenges the curators face in telling the 9/11 story. When someone says "Sept. 11" or "World Trade Center," it conjures up so much: the horrific attacks of that day, the concentrated hatred behind them, the deaths of almost 3,000 people, the rubble at the heart of the city, the worldwide outpouring of support, the "post-9/11" shift in U.S. policy and self-image, the geopolitical tremors that shook the world. The museum has not one story to tell but a dozen, a hundred, even thousands, as it seeks to do justice not just to grand historical and political themes but also to the intensely personal experience of the victims. Visitors will be awed by the two giant tridents that formed the base of the fallen towers, but they will also be moved by handmade signs of families searching for loved ones in the aftermath. Half of those loved ones were never found; they disappeared on that day. But it's still possible that they didn't disappear without a trace, and one part of the museum will actually contain a working DNA lab whose mission is to give closure to the families of more than 1,200 victims who never had remains to bury.
Ep. 6) A Place to Mourn: On Sept. 11, 2011, President Barack Obama and the victims' families, together with thousands on site and millions watching around the world, will gather in Memorial Plaza to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center. There they will consecrate the memorial to the fallen - a structure that honors the dead, inspires hope in the living, and stands as a symbol of both immense loss and courage. Some of the world's most stunning new skyscrapers are rising at ground zero today. They represent boundless optimism for the site's future. But the memorial - which seeks to preserve the solemnity of the site's tragic past - stands in stark contrast to its towering neighbors. Its design, chosen from among more than 5,000 possibilities, is simple in concept: two enormous square holes, voids in the exact footprints of the previous towers, into which flow the world's largest fountains. A brass railing around each will be carved with the names of the victims of both the 1993 and 2001 terror attacks. A forest of 400 trees native to the attack sites in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania will offer visitors shade and peace and the solace of nature. It will be beautiful, devastating, inspiring. But it won't be easy to build. Those fountains will pour down 40,000 gallons of water a minute, not a drop of which can threaten the Path trains or the museum beneath the memorial. Those trees, transplanted into acres of urban concrete, have to flourish as if in Eden, symbols of the stubborn persistence of life. Not one of them can die, since once they are in they can't be replaced. Can the engineers and builders solve every problem and test every solution by the time the memorial opens to public view? And if it works on a sheer physical level, will the structure work symbolically? Have the designers of the memorial answered the emotional needs of the victims' families and of the greater public? Is that even possible? There was a moment after the attacks of 9/11 when our hearts were full of sorrow and of pride - sorrow for the people and sense of security we had lost that Tuesday morning, but pride in the people, city and country that had responded to terror with courage, generosity and strength. That's the moment, the intensity of feeling, that Memorial Plaza has been designed to capture.
Wednesday (10/12)
Today J watched a Great Course on structures. It fits very well in with his OM class.
Understanding the World's Greatest Structures: Science and Innovation from Antiquity to Modernity—a marvelous learning experience that takes you around the world and reveals the stories behind the most famous bridges, churches, skyscrapers, towers, and other structures from thousands of years of history. Delivered by award-winning Professor Stephen Ressler of the United States Military Academy at West Point, a civil engineer and a nationally honored leader in engineering education, these 24 lectures take you on a fascinating and richly illustrated tour that deftly blends history and science to create an unforgettable survey of our world's most remarkable structural masterpieces, one informed by the fundamentals of structural engineering and their underlying scientific principles.
Thursday (10/13)
Co-op day. J and M both enjoyed OM classes and the duct tape art/cooking class.
Friday (10/14)
Today J and M both worked on future school lessons.
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