The 9/11 Memorial in his own words: Michael Arad

In his own words: Michael Arad, the architect of the 9/11 Memorial, on the project.

On September 11, 2001, "… in an instant I became a New Yorker and felt this tremendous sense of kinship and connection to other people in the city, and wanted in some ways to capture that in the design of the memorial, a sense of place that is of New York and that is there for New Yorkers to bring them together, a place of assembly," says Michael Arad, the architect of the 9/11 Memorial.

"I started thinking about a design in the months immediately after the attack. I started sketching this idea, it was sort of this image in my head of the surface of the Hudson River being torn open and two square voids that the water would rush into and they wouldn’t fill up."

To liven the design, Mr. Arad came up with the idea of abacus-like bands - paving bands that would unite the plaza from curb to curb, from edge to edge. Some would be wider, some narrower, and along the length of the band, like beads on the wire of an abacus, trees would rise.

And then Mr. Arad built a Plexiglas model and photographed it on the rooftop of his building in the East Village against the Manhattan skyline.