On the evening of September 9, a digitally-controlled field of lights rose over New York Harbor and formed the outline of the Twin Towers, at full scale, for about fifteen minutes.
The piece was called 2,977 Lights Over New York Harbor. There was one light for each person killed on September 11, 2001.
The lights lifted off in a slow spiral before moving into the shape of the towers, which is a reference to the THINK proposal from the 2002 competition for the site.
That design would have built two open lattice towers around the original footprints without touching them. It was never built.
Shigeru Ban worked on that proposal, and he advised on this project along with Dean Maltz and the Dutch studio Drift, whose light and flight work we have covered before.
Addison Mehr directed and produced it, Yan Paul Dubbelman designed it, and Sky Elements flew the drones. The team talked with families, survivors, and first responders while making it.
“The purpose of 2,977 Lights is to acknowledge individual loss within the collective history and memory of September 11th,” Mehr said.
The Tribute in Light has sent two beams up over the city every year since 2002, and it stays abstract on purpose.
This was the opposite. You could see the buildings, and you could see that they were made of separate small lights, one per person.
Images Via Studio Drift+ Dezeen.
