A Vision
~ an architectural design in prose–in response to 9/11~
I have a vision of you once again holding up our sky.
In this I can see you, lost husbands and wives coming home again, sons, daughters, friends and lovers reuniting somewhere beyond time, as if this memorial is only a weigh station, a beacon from where you’re waiting, watching over us.
For I do not want time to take you from me the way it washes away pain.
For I do not ever want to forget that you existed for me.
All the sweetness of you.
For I cannot hold back these tides.
So I harbor a dream that the twins will be reborn in glass, two monoliths of pure light.
Without walls or floors, only transparent elevators rising up their steely spines, and those precious stairs climbing their ribs, their hollow cores, into the clouds.
And I shall walk down those thousand steps that kept you away from me, those stairways that took you to the farther shores.
And I suspended in air shall think of your courage and your beauty as the Earth tilts.
The radiating streets, the gleaming buildings, the bridges, the rivers all spinning away from me.
As you have, I shall behold the roaming cities, the distant ocean, the blurred seam of sky.
I shall stand proudly beside your names, floating in the space where you have been, where I can summon your images, your voices, your smiles.
I shall see you glorious in sunlight. I shall find you wreathed in fog, moonbeams in your bones, through your skin.
I shall like to see sunset shimmer playfully on your faces, all saying that our loves, our lives, our dreams can never be wholly stolen from us.
When night falls, our towers shall stand like bright brothers in the darkness, guiding us, uniting us.
And you, our dear ones, now belong not only to us, but also to all the world.
– Andrew X. Pham, 15 Sep. 2001
National Public Radio, 17 Oct. 2001
~*~
Like most people, I saw the horror of 9/11 on TV and spent the next several days in a state of shock. I couldn’t work and couldn’t think of anything else. I took long walks in the mountains and composed a poem and this design for a memorial and the reconstruction of the WTC. Five days later, I finished the design poem and contacted my good friend Dr. Pamela Andreatta about how we could contribute to help this national tragedy. Over the next two weeks, we discussed various methods, including her making a computer animated 3D model for my design and approaching some architects to donate our ideas.
But in the chaos of those days following that tragedy, I realized it was important just to get my words out there in hope of helping those who lost love ones. I emailed my design poem to Susan Stamberg, who had interviewed me for one of her shows. She called back and asked me to read it for NPR, which I did a week later.
The broadcast of the poem was national, reaching over 20 millions. Many other independent stations re-broadcast the poem at later date (from what I was told).
The first round of proposals for rebuilding the WTC had several finalists. The public and the selection committee rejected all four and asked for another round of proposals. In the second round, there were four (or six, I can’t remember) finalists. Two of them had incorporated my design. One was exactly as I proposed–two glass-and-steel towers. The other was more financially practical, featuring a single glass spire. In functions and aesthetics, both were perfect realizations of my design poem.
Although I have never been credited for the design by the architects, people have emailed to congratulate me for inspiring it through my poem.
I’m just happy to know that my words have gone on to do great things.
