Above all, the World Trade Center Memorial must be lapidary, a useful term that literally means the terseness appropriate to carving on stone. It would be wrong to communicate anything other than the simplest of declaratives: We mourn, we persevere, we continue.



Michael J. Lewis, chairman of the art department at Williams College, writing in OpinionJournal today. And noted at Armavirumque.



Professor Lewis, whose scholarly work on Philadelphia architect Frank Furness has been widely praised, also wrote Glass Walls to Bunkers: The New Look of U.S. Embassies, an essay published in the New York Times on 27 July.