9/11: Pentagon Memorial opens today

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon Memorial was designed in a studio on Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan, but not the kind with skyline views or a brass nameplate on the office door. No, the 280-square-foot studio apartment where Keith Kaseman and Julie Beckman were living at the time was decidedly more modest than that.

Kaseman and Beckman were a young couple barely out of graduate school in 2002 when they made the rough sketches of what would become the nation's first major Sept. 11 memorial. Their lone architectural collaboration to that point had been a loft bed, which let them cram their desks and computers into their apartment's shoeboxlike confines.

Their imaginations, though, had moved on to bigger things. The still-raw images and emotions of Sept. 11, 2001, that had hung over the city and their lives since they watched the towers fall. A Web site they had seen about a worldwide design competition for a memorial at the Pentagon, one that would consider any entry and judge blindly, unconcerned with famous names or industry status.

Beckman and Kaseman's proposal landed in a pile with 1,125 other entries from more than 65 countries — big firms and unproven dreamers like them. Where death and anger and sorrow had left deep scars, Beckman and Kaseman envisioned something redemptive, a memorial that could be at once collective and individual.

A place like no other, they told each other.

Beckman got the phone call in late February 2003 from the Army Corps of Engineers. "You guys are the winners," the woman on the phone told her.

Beckman couldn't remember anything she said after that. And it would only get more surreal.

Within days, they were en route to meet with Pentagon officials and stand before the TV cameras for a news conference. They did not even have a name for their design firm, so they thought of their tiny apartment and called it Kaseman Beckman Amsterdam Studio, KBAS for short.

Nearly six years later, Kaseman, 36, and Beckman, 35, are married and living in Philadelphia. Beckman teaches at the University of Pennsylvania; Kaseman teaches at Penn and at Columbia University. They still call their firm KBAS, only now it is an abbreviation for Kaseman Beckman Advanced Strategies. They can't even use the word architects in the title of their firm because they never finished their formal internships.

Still, their careers have come a long way from Amsterdam Avenue, professional growth commensurate with the responsibility of a $22 million project involving dozens of companies, hundreds of workers and countless incremental advances.

And today, their longshot idea is a real, physical place. Today at 6:37 a.m. PDT, seven years from the moment American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon at 550 mph, Kaseman and Beckman's 2-acre, parklike memorial will be dedicated at the site of the impact.

The ceremony is expected to draw 20,000 invited guests, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who is the keynote speaker, members of Congress, military personnel, survivors of the attack and family members of the victims. And when the memorial opens to the general public this afternoon and visitors begin to stream in, they will find a place unlike any other in the Washington region.

As intended, the central feature is not a single object but the repetition of one: 184 cantilevered, stainless-steel memorials, one for each of the victims, rising up from the ground as if taking flight. Kaseman and Beckman call the 14-foot, 1,100-pound objects "light benches."

Each bench is mirrored in a pool of trickling water that runs its length and contains an underwater light to shine on its steel underside at night, setting the entire site aglow. Visitors will walk among rows of memorials on a bed of fine gravel, hearing each footstep, as they wander among paper-bark maple trees that will grow to form a light-filtering canopy.

Kaseman and Beckman wanted to create a place where families could be comfortable, where they could sit for hours and find solace.

The couple's decision to enter the memorial design competition was no academic exercise. Beckman watched from the sidewalk at Union Square on Sept. 11, 2001, as the second plane exploded into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. She met Kaseman at his office in midtown shortly after, and by the time they made it home along Amsterdam Avenue, the streets were so empty they could walk right down the middle. That night, they watched TV and wept.

When the Pentagon design competition was announced, it gave them a place to channel those swirling emotions. "It was like therapy in a way," Beckman said. It gave their grief an outlet, a purpose.

After they'd won, they quit their jobs and went on a vacation to Belize, knowing it would be their last chance to breathe. And when they got back, they packed up the studio apartment on Amsterdam Avenue and moved to Alexandria, Va., to get started.

In their design, Beckman and Kaseman have oriented all of the benches along the exact path of Flight 77, arranging them according to whether victims were killed in the plane or in the building. If a visitor is reading the steel nameplate and the Pentagon is in the background of their view, that person died in the building; if the sky is in the background, the person died on the plane.

Some may be troubled by such reminders of the attack and by the grim memories they trigger. But Kaseman and Beckman consider it essential to the tribute. "Part of paying respect is to understand and remember what happened," Beckman said.