It’s a tourist attraction now; they queue for hours to walk up the viewing platform, buy pictures of the burning buildings from street vendors. They look up into the clear blue sky and find the strangest part of the whole experience - that there is now nothing to look at. The long, dreadful task of sifting through the remnants of the World Trade Centre is nearing completion.
Fundamentally, they are looking at an empty hole in the ground and empty space in the air. In downtown Manhattan that, in itself, is unusual; to see the damage to the surrounding buildings, some eerily shrouded, silences the observers. The collapse of the Towers has left a void in many people’s lives, and it has left many people - particularly many in the arts fields - feeling useless, their skills and talents not the practical skills of the fire-fighters and workmen who have worked at the site ever since 11 September.
Now the artists have found a way to contribute: the Tribute in Light, two giant, square columns of light situated one block north of Ground Zero, re-creating the geographical relationship of the Towers, filling the void in the skyline while extending higher than the physical towers ever could. That was partly their intent, yet they are redolent of so much more: of the floodlights that have lit the site every night since September, of World War Two searchlights, even of another icon of America, the giant light signal that summoned comic-book superhero Batman - but this is real life; in a real catastrophe the superheroes turn out to be real people. The lights are a tribute to those people.
Despite taking time to become reality, switched on six months to the day after the attacks, the concept for the Tribute came very quickly to artists Julian LaVerdiere and Paul Myoda - who, until shortly before September 2001, had been part of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s World Views artist residency programme housed on the 91st floor of Tower One. The two described their proposal as being "an emotional response more than anything . . . the towers are like ghost limbs, we can feel them even though they’re not there anymore."
Co-incidentally, a similar scheme was independently proposed by architects John Bennett and Gustavo Bonevardi; the two groups were brought together by Creative Time, a public arts body, and the New York Municipal Art Society. MAS brought in architectural lighting designer Paul Marantz of Fisher Marantz Stone, who became the ‘godfather’ of the team.
"I think they wanted someone to say whether all of these ideas were actually possible," Marantz recalls. "We did some computer modelling and could show that the concept would work, though we didn’t have a location then. One early plan was to put the lights on a barge moored off Battery Park City, but we realised that however well we restrained it, it would always have some movement and that wasn’t really the desired effect!"
The lantern of choice for the project is the Space Cannon Ireos Pro, fitted with 7kW Xenon lamps. The decision was based on artistic and practical sensibilities: the lamps needed to be bright, they needed to have a searchlight-style parallel beam, they needed to be weatherproof - and they needed to be available in sufficient quantities. "The light towers re-create the layout of the Towers at one-quarter scale," Marantz explains, "and even for that we’re using 44 Space Cannons per tower. Space Cannon were very supportive, bringing in units from all over the place."
The lanterns are arranged on two platforms built on a sliver of clear land between a tent being used by the Environmental Protection Agency, a food tent, and a hotel which is currently not in use - but which is providing the power feed to the tribute. Marantz’s greatest co
