Ground Zero: Memory sites in the focus of architecture

The dealing with memory sites poses many important questions, most prominently how to process what has happened? And in connection to that, what to do with the site on which a traumatic event has taken place? Should it be left untouched, as a reminder for following generations? Or should it be converted into a museum? Another opinion may even be that its traumatic past should be left behind and it should be transformed into something that points towards the future. These questions and the different answers given to them, not only give us indications of how to deal with the memory site, but also allow insight into how people chose to cope with traumatic events. In this context, the examination of Ground Zero is very interesting. After 9/11 there was a debate, of what and how to do with the site. A competition was set out and the project of Daniel Libeskind won. He is also the author of another important object in respect to this consideration, the Jewish Museum in Berlin (on which Sara Tanderup has written in the forum discussion: http://moodle.ucl.ac.uk/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=68910). 
As he himself states: "When I first began this project, New Yorkers were divided as to whether to keep the site of the World Trade Center empty or to fill the site completely and build upon it. I meditated many days on this seemingly impossible dichotomy. To acknowledge the terrible deaths which occurred on this site, while looking to the future with hope, seemed like two moments which could not be joined. I sought to find a solution which would bring these seemingly contradictory viewpoints into an unexpected unity.” (http://www.daniel-libeskind.com/projects/show-all/memory-foundations/) The project with which Libeskind tries to accomplish this unity is very complex. Here I would like to refer shortly to two aspects of it: Firstly, the fact that he leaves the space in which the Twin Towers were standing empty. Thus, he leaves a negative of what was previously standing in this space, to always remind us of what has been there and what has been lost. But he also includes gardens into his project. He explains this decision as follows: "The sky will be home again to a towering spire of 1776 feet high, an antenna Tower with gardens. Why gardens? Because gardens are a constant affirmation of life. A 1776 foot skyscraper rises above its predecessors, reasserting the pre-eminence of freedom and beauty, restoring the spiritual peak to the city, creating a building that speaks of our vitality in the face of danger and our optimism in the aftermath of tragedy. Life victorious." Thus, Libeskind uses the possibilities of architecture to bring the commemoration of the past and a look towards future together at this memory site.