PROVIDENCE
-- The spheres would sparkle across ground zero like the stars in the sky over Manhattan on Sept. 11 -- stars obscured that night by the thick black smoke pouring out of the crumbled towers.
On each glass sphere would be the name of one victim. Light would stream through from underneath, and the texture of the glass would change the shape of the letters, depending on how you looked at it.
The names would be scattered over two acres, and two spiral paths would run through them. Water would flow under visitors' feet, and the memorial would slope gently, inviting them to go further, until they reached a circle from which to see it all.
This is how four Rhode Island School of Design students would honor the victims of the World Trade Center attacks. Their vision is one of many conceived since the tragedy, and until this week, it existed only in their minds, not as a firm design, or a model you could see or touch.
But on Monday, six months after the hijacked planes crashed into the towers, TV audiences across the United States will see what the RISD artists have imagined.
Julie Brunner, a first-year graduate student in RISD's sculpture program, will appear on a special edition of NBC's
Today Show
and present a 3-D model and computer renderings of the group's proposal.
The segment will also feature proposals by architecture students from Harvard University, in Cambridge, Mass., and the Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, N.Y. It is schedule to air sometime between 9 and 10 a.m.
For the artists, getting ready for TV has been a challenge.
For starters, they had little more than a week's notice. A producer called RISD asking whether any students had been working on Sept. 11 memorial ideas, and Dean Snyder, a sculpture professor, rounded up four who he knew had given the tragedy a great deal of thought.
Brunner, a native New Yorker, was particularly consumed by the subject.
"I'd been in that building many, many times," she said of the World Trade Center. Her mother used to work on the 85th floor of the second tower. "I saw the Bicentennial fireworks from there, when I was little."
Brunner first visited ground zero on her birthday, Oct. 12. She returned in November, after a public viewing platform was set up. And in the studio, in Providence, she has tried to shape her mourning into art.
"A lot of my work for the last six months has focused on, or been influenced by, the events of Sept. 11," she said. "I'd been thinking that this is something we had to honor."
Snyder also invited Laura Kaufman, another first-year graduate student who used to live in New York; Michele Kong, a second-year graduate student; and Morgan MacLean, a senior.
Each had different ideas for a memorial, but they agreed to build on Brunner's concept. They created elaborate designs on computers, and then they got to work on big slabs of plaster, making the "negative" for the concave fiberglass model they would present on TV.
To mirror the Manhattan sky, they researched the alignment of the stars on Sept. 11. To ensure they'd have the right shape and texture, they made two models simultaneously, each with a different technique.
"I think it'll come down to which one has the feeling of vastness and the scale we're looking for," Kaufman said.
If the memorial were ever built like this, they said, it would be a place of remembrance but also a place to enjoy, a beautiful and inviting space. Each person would see it a bit differently, and it would be a sensory experience as well as an opportunity to think about the tragedy.
It would also, they hope, create "a sense of connectedness," of community, Brunner said.
With so many different visions for a memorial, and with so little time having elapsed, the artists aren't getting their hopes up that theirs will prevail.
Brunner said it's an honor to even be part of the conversation.
"Just to know that [the model] is out there, and that it will receive consideration, is great," she said.
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