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American Morning

Two Columns of Powerful Light Will Rise From Lower Manhattan on Six-Month Anniversary of 9-11

Aired March 08, 2002 - 09:53   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: A permanent memorial to the September 11th victims will be going up at the World Trade Center site right here in New York sometime in the next few weeks, but a temporary one is scheduled to be unveiled this Monday. Two columns of powerful light will rise from lower Manhattan beginning that day, March 11th, the six-month anniversary of the attacks.

Garrick Utley talked with some of the artist who've vision this project a reality.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GARRICK UTLEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It is light that speaks for itself. The hypnotic flickering of a flame. The eternal flame that remembers, and now, there is the soaring light to remember September 11th. Just ask Julian Laverdiere and Paul Myoda. They are artists in lower Manhattan. Following the attacks, they envisaged a tribute rising from the tragedy.

JULIAN LAVERDIERE, ARTIST: We discussed that a lot, and Paul was observing the way in which this haze of work light immediately erupted and had filled the night sky with all of the debris and the fire, and created this halo of horror.

PAUL MYODA, ARTIST: And also, it was such a chaotic halo, and I think the reaction was to somehow control or reconfigure, refashion that ungodly plume into something more recognizable.

UTLEY (on camera): You saw that plume of smoke. There was a void there, and you got to work. What did you come up with?

LAVERDIERE: I remember drawing this picture rather hastily, which was sort of envisioning, you know, that light, or that plume of smoke, perhaps, as though maybe if it was an image of ascension, maybe souls rising.

UTLEY: We started envisioning this as, perhaps, an immense vigil at that rate, so we started developing images similar to this one.

(on camera): Everybody seemed to say, hey, that's right. Light is the answer. Did that surprise you?

MYODA: Yes, very much so. I think because we had quickly found out about other people who had a similar idea, and other people had found out that we were working on it -- so it was almost as if we were midwives to sort of a communal hallucination, or a communal spectacle.

UTLEY (voice-over): Among the others who also thought of using columns of light are the architects John Bennett and Gustavo Bonevardi, who developed this animation. And so what will the tributes of light really look like?

MYODA: This is closest to what you can anticipate seeing, in which the lights will actually be 50-foot squares, and be emanating not exactly from where ground zero was, but adjacent to ground zero.

UTLEY: How high up will these columns of light rise?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They will be visible from space. The astronauts aboard the International Space Station will be able to see it.

One day, there will be a permanent memorial at ground zero, something solid, and lasting, but can it have more meaning than this? It is nothing more, and nothing less, than light?

Garrick Utley, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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