Michael Arad is an Israeli citizen and architect who was selected to design the World Trade Center Memorial in New York City.
Arad was born in Israel but he has lived in the United States, Britain, and Mexico because his father, Moshe Arad, was an Israeli diplomat and, at one time, Israel's Ambassador to the United States.
Arad completed his service in the Israel Defense Force in 1991. He received a bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College, and a master's degree from Georgia Institute of Technology's College of Architecture. He moved to New York City in 1999 and worked as an architect at Kohn Pedersen Fox for three years. He recently joined the Design Department of the New York City Housing Authority and has been working on the design development of police stations for the New York City Police Department. He lives in the East Village of New York City with his wife, Melanie Arad Fitzpatrick, and his son, Nathaniel.
Arad was selected from 5,201 competitors as the winning designer of the World Trade Center Memorial with "Reflecting Absence" - a pair of pools set 30 feet deep in the "footprints" of the downed towers, with cascading waterfalls surrounded by the names of the dead, areas at bedrock level where the public can mourn and family members of the victims can grieve in private, a space for 9/11 relics and a "living park" at ground level meant to symbolize life and rebirth.
Unidentified human remains recovered from the World Trade Center site would be interred at the bottom of the north tower footprint at the site's deepest point, 70 feet underground. At street level, with the help of landscape architect Peter Walker, Arad proposes a cobblestone plaza with moss and grass and planted with eastern white pine trees.
"This design proposes a space that resonates with the feelings of loss and absence that were generated by the death and destruction at the World Trade Center," Arad said in the statement.
Initially criticized by both architects and victims' families for his design's starkness and failure to differentiate the civilian victims from those who died in the line of duty, Arad presented a revised version in conjunction with landscape artist Peter Walker.
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