Man of the Month: Michael Arad

Esquire, May, 2004 by Andrew Goldman

BECOMING AN OVERNIGHT SENSATION in the sober world of memorial design may deliver you from a life as an obscure city architect, creating police stations that only streetwalkers in handcuffs would ever pause to consider. And it may validate your decision to forsake the advice of your dad, the former Israeli ambassador to the U. S., who really, really wanted to see his Dartmouth-educated kid in law school and back in Jerusalem. But without 2,979 deaths, there is no memorial, no fame, no family vindication, and so you can't exactly go on Leno and do the architectural equivalent of an end-zone dance.

Still, the annoyances of fresh fame are there for Michael Arad. In January, in the days after his design was selected for the four-and-a-half-acre World Trade Center memorial site,...

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