The 9/11 Memorial Museum is now open to the public. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

Many New Yorkers, still trying to make sense of the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center, have had a single question as a museum was being built at ground zero: Too soon?

Now that the 9/11 Memorial Museum, as it's officially called, has opened to the public, they and others may find themselves asking something else: Too much?

The museum is an overstuffed answer to the appealing minimalism of the 9/11 memorial and its cascading pools, which opened in 2011.

It extends deep below the memorial in a series of cavernous, hangar-like rooms. Its galleries contain crushed fire trucks, mangled steel, multimedia displays, a torn seatbelt from one of the airplanes that hit the towers, clothing and bicycles covered with ash from their collapse, photographs, architectural models and literally thousands of other pieces of dark memorabilia.

The intensity, scope and sheer unrelenting literalism of this approach marks a significant change in how we choose to mark national trauma. No longer do we see memorials as capable of commemorating an entire war or attack on their own.

Though there are now plans to add one, there was no museum accompanying Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial when it opened in Washington, D.C., in 1982. Nearby, Friedrich St. Florian's neoclassical National World War II Memorial, completed in 2004, also stands by itself.

These days we see the symbolic shorthand that art and architecture have always relied on to deal with violence and tragedy as wildly insufficient.

Instead we've embraced some crowd-pleasing mixture of authenticity, easily digested narrative and insta-history. We want to see and touch the Real Thing, and we want somebody to explain to us what the Real Thing means.

New purpose

The entrance to the 9/11 museum sits inside a two-story pavilion in the middle of the ground zero plaza, in the narrow space between the memorial's twin pools. (Together the museum and memorial cost $700 million.) The pavilion was designed by Snøhetta, the busy Norwegian firm that is also working on a major expansion of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Like many elements of the rebuilt ground zero, the building is a remnant of an earlier version of Daniel Libeskind's master plan for the site. It was originally going to hold galleries for New York's Drawing Center and something called the International Freedom Center, which would have told the story of struggles against totalitarianism around the world and was backed by George Soros and the historian Eric Foner, among others.

Later Snøhetta was asked to reconfigure the building as the entry hall for an underground museum dedicated to the events of Sept. 11....Continue Reading

> via latimes.com