Peter Walker talked about his experiences as the co-designer of “Reflecting Absence,” the National September 11 Memorial design at the site of the fallen World Trade Center in New York City, during his Feb. 22 appearance at the 37th annual Aggie Workshop.
Walker, a fellow in the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) and one of the most lauded names in landscape architecture, was the keynote speaker at the two-day event, hosted by Texas A&M University’s student chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects.
“An awful lot of this work has been about a feeling of reverence,” he said about the design.
Walker said he was in Europe when the jury for the memorial design contest asked to see him and his co-designer Michael Arad. He hurriedly caught a flight to New York and met Arad, with whom he’d worked on projects before.
“I hadn’t met Michael face to face,” he said. “We’d always worked by fax.”
After the jury named Walker and Arad the winners of the competition, Walker said he traveled to Europe to see how he could incorporate design ideas from European tree gardens at the Sept. 11 site. Also, since the memorial will be open around the clock, he said he had to pay special attention to what the memorial will look like at night as well.
Walker’s design calls for 300 oak trees in an eight-acre Memorial Plaza that the contest jury said, “will create a contemplative space separate from the sights and sounds of the surrounding city. The design is unique in its use of ecological considerations which exceed sustainability standards.”
As the work on the site continues, Walker said he and Arad face enormous pressure from all sides.
“It’s exasperating to try to hold this (his design) in place,” he said, noting the pressures from the mayor’s office, governor’s office, the port authority, families of the deceased, and groups representing the firefighters and police officers, among others.
“But every September 11, the tape of the airplanes crashing into the buildings plays over and over, and you remember what you’re working on and why you’re working on it.”
The workshop offered students a chance to hear from Walker and other nationally acclaimed landscape architects and get a taste of what it’s “really like” once they begin working in the field.
The Aggie Workshop, which took place at the Texas A&M College of Architecture’s Langford Architecture Center, explored landscape architects’ accomplishments and revealed innovative opportunities and available career paths.
Other speakers included Ed Garza ’92 of EDAW, Dwain Scott of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Jean Kavanaugh, past Texas president of the American Society of Landscape Architects.
Rounding out the two-day conference were two discussion panels, one with recently graduated landscape architecture students at A&M and another featuring established professionals in the field.
