Individual acts of civilian heroism pass unrecorded except on exploitative TV awards programmes. Although here, someone once tried. If you go to the tiny open space known as Postman’s Park, just near the Museum of London, you will find an arcade of ceramic memorial plaques dedicated to heroic self-sacrifice - acts such as someone dying while trying to save someone else from drowning, from falling under a train, or whatever. It was the work of the sculptor G.F. Watts, and later his widow. Nobody added to it, after her death. It was a good idea.
And now what? How to make a physical reminder of what happened at the World Trade Centre on September 11? No-one has yet thought of an appropriate way of memorializing mass killing by terrorist action. Not only did no battle take place, not only were no conventional weapons used, not only was this a civilian affair, but even the enemy was uncertain. So all the usual supporting elements needed to generate a memorial are missing, though the central disastrous act demands one.
Perhaps for this reason, architect Ian Ritchie’s tall shining needle of a monument, shortly to be built in Dublin’s O’Connell Street on the site of that city’s IRA-demolished Nelson’s column, is being put forward by some as a monument to acts of horrific terrorism and their victims. Neither the city nor Ritchie saw the monument as anything other than a peaceful and inspiring urban marker at the time of the design competition. Dedicating it as a memorial will give it a layer of meaning not originally intended, but which, it might be argued, was latent in the pure form of the structure itself.
In New York, the authorities have put aside the last remaining section of the towers to remain upright - the buckled metal latticework section that stands in so many photographs of the aftermath - in case it is needed to make a memorial later. That seems appropriate. But someone will eventually be needed to create the setting for this fragment that fully encompasses the nature of the tragedy. Once again, a means must be found to express the previously unimaginable. Lutyens could have done it. So, surely, can Libeskind.
