Michael Arad

Michael Arad was a 34-year-old New York City Housing Authority assistant architect who had been designing police stations for the NYPD when the 9/11 memorial design competition jury chose his entry out of 5,201 from around the world. It was called “Reflecting Absence” and sprang not from the site itself but from a stone quarry he’d come across in South Orange, New Jersey. “There was just something very beautiful and evocative about it, because it had that clearly traced-out absence of all the rock that had been excavated out but was softened by the water and by the trees,” he recalled.