Scorched car doors, salvaged firefighters' uniforms, banners, toys and the hallowed 'last column' to be removed from the World Trade Center clearance ... the relics of the twin towers have been elevated into art objects at the new museum, which opens this month after years of wrangling

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Rising up like an apparition ... Snøhetta's 9/11 Memorial Museum on the World Trade Center site. Photograph: Jeff Goldberg/Esto

In the middle of the World Trade Center site in New York, tourists squeeze their bodies against the faceted mirror-glass planes of the 9/11 Memorial Museum, eager to sneak a peek at what lies within. Rising up like an apparition behind the reflective glazing, beyond the greasy smears left by noses and sticky fingers, stand two rusted, fire-charred columns, relics salvaged from the wreckage of the twin towers.

"It's proving a popular place for selfies," says the architect Craig Dykers, watching visitors capture their reflected faces melding with the scorched structures inside. "If we can get someone to smile or have a giggle at a place of such sorrow," he adds, "we've done our job."

Almost 13 years since the atrocities of 9/11, when nearly 3,000 people were killed in a horrific moment of televised terrorism, the hallowed site of Ground Zero remains as much a place of spectacle as ever. More than 12 million people have visited since the memorial plaza opened in September 2011, to gawp into the voids of the towers' footprints, where endless sheets of water now spill in magisterial cascades into sunken reflecting pools.

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Surrounded by a grove of 400 oak trees, interspersed with little slivers of lawn, these cubic waterfalls are breathtaking in their vastness, compressing the power of Niagara into stately dark squares. They have a silencing effect, which is just as well given the surrounding din of construction, where a ring of office towers is slowly rising to replace the 10m sq ft of commercial space that once stood on the site.

Finally opening to the public on 21 May, the museum completes the $700m (£415m) undertaking of the 9/11 memorial project, leading visitors on an Orphean descent to the very bedrock below this most charged of sites. With its faceted flanks shimmering above the trees, the portal to this emotional underworld – designed by Dykers' practice, the Norwegian firm Snøhetta – stands as an angular wedge, thrust into the north-east corner of the plaza. A folded shell of metal and glass, inscribed with horizontal pinstripes along its length, the building has ghostly echoes of a tumbling twin tower, a fallen silvery shaft lying kinked and twisted between the pools.

With its angular form looming imposingly into view, it is one of the few remnants of the visual language conjured by Daniel Libeskind in his original masterplan for the site in 2003, which imagined a circle of fragmented towers rising in a spiral up to a great fractured spire. His proposals were drenched with symbolism, from the spire's summit of 1,776 ft, in honour of the year of American independence, to a chink of light that would fall across the site at the same time on September 11 every year. His pitch won the nation's hearts, but not that of the site's leaseholder, Larry Silverstein, who had already hired his own architects and had other plans.

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Snøhetta's building has ghostly echoes of a tumbling twin tower.

Since then, commercial realities have seen Libeskind's crystalline rock formation, which looked like something from the planet Krypton, translated into a more corporate affair of office blocks by a handful of Pritzker-prize winning architects, including Lords Foster and Rogers. Now half-finished, it might have been designed as a vertical exhibition of different curtain wall cladding systems. Libeskind's own jagged spear of a tower, meanwhile, has become a stumpy obelisk by the global giant SOM....Continue Reading

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