Maryland's 9/11 Memorial, Twenty-Five Years Later

Twenty-five years after September 11, Maryland’s 9/11 Memorial remains a place for reflection at the base of Baltimore’s World Trade Center. Completed by Ziger|Snead Architects in 2011 for the tenth anniversary, the memorial brings together artifacts from the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. At its center, steel recovered from the North Tower rests across a bed of massive white marble blocks. But one of the memorial’s most important elements is immaterial: the shadow cast by Baltimore’s World Trade Center.

Each September 11, when the sky is clear, Baltimore's World Trade Center Building functions as the gnomon of a sundial. Its shadow moves across the memorial and a series of inscriptions marking the events of that morning, beginning as it reaches the marble at the time the first plane struck the North Tower. Throughout the day, the names of the Marylanders who lost their lives remain on the east-facing side of the memorial, in light.

In a new feature for BmoreArt, Cara Ober revisits the memorial with Z|S Design Partner Doug Bothner, looking closely at the ideas behind the design, the team’s first encounter with the recovered steel, and how shadow and light connect the memorial to the passage of time.

Read “A Shadow that Remembers: Inside Baltimore’s Own 9/11 Memorial” on BmoreArt and learn more about Maryland’s 9/11 Memorial.