Idiocracy

Back in the days when any Tom, Dick, or Harry with a crayon box could scribble out a design for a 9/11 memorial, there was one particular design that struck me as the epitome of American stupidity. Someone with perhaps just a moment's exposure to real-life architectural principles decided that since the Twin Towers were constructed from positive space, the memorial should be the same two Twin Towers constructed out of negative space. That is, since the originals were stacks of matter erected into air, the memorials should be shafts of air excavated out of matter.

Yes, someone actually proposed digging two 400 meter shafts with offices hewn out of the sides on the World Trade Center site. At the time, it seemed like the most crazy ass proposal imaginable.

The time passed. A dissertation was written. A job was hunted for. Then one day, I wake up and discover that negative space won the memorial competition after all! Apparently, the winning design decided that the single most important aspect of 9/11 to memorialize was the concept of two big craters with broken street mains dumping water into them. Now we're stuck with two geometrically shaped craters with highly stylized broken street mains elegantly dumping water into them.