>From 88 Searchlights, an Ethereal Tribute By DAVID W. DUNLAP ot one life will be reclaimed, not one page in the calendar restored. But next Monday, if all goes according to plan, two luminous columns will cleave the night sky over Lower Manhattan, conjuring those pillars that New York took utterly for granted before Sept. 11 and has desperately missed ever since. Aimed straight up from Battery Park City and visible - the designers hope - for miles around, two parallel beams created by 88 powerful searchlights will glow every night from dusk to 11 p.m., cloud cover, helicopter traffic and bird migration permitting. "It's like a votive candle," said Saskia Levy, the project organizer for the Municipal Art Society, the primary sponsor of the installation. "It will have its time and its place. And then it will go out." It has not been easy to light. Originally envisioned as a swift response to the attack, something to lift the city's spirits around the holidays and to proclaim its resilience, the project demanded months of negotiation. Four dozen people have worked since mid-September to create a memorial that will literally disappear into thin air. The project, which Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has said he favors, moved much closer to reality on Friday when the Battery Park City Authority approved the installation of the 88 searchlights in two 50-foot- square arrays on a lot bounded by Murray, West and Vesey Streets. Digital photographic rendering by Charles Nesbit The "Tribute in Light," designed by John Bennett, Gustavo Bonevardi, Richard Nash Gould, Julian LaVerdiere, Paul Marantz and Paul Myoda. The installation will cost about $500,000, Ms. Levy said. That includes construction, two round-the- clock guards and a technician who will extinguish the lights if requested by the Federal Aviation Administration or the New York City Audubon Society, which worries that migrating birds like the American woodcock might die as a result of being drawn to the beacons. The financing is coming from individuals, foundations and corporations, led by Deutsche Bank, AOL- Time Warner and General Electric, which has given both money and 100 xenon bulbs valued at $1,200 each, Ms. Levy said. Consolidated Edison is donating the power. The Alliance for Downtown New York is also making a contribution. The inauguration of the memorial will mark the sixth month since the attack. "We don't want to forget that it's still a grave site," said Kent L. Barwick, the president of the Municipal Art Society. "But it seems like a good time to pay tribute and remind all of us that there's much work to be done." The idea of recreating the towers, at least intimating their presence in spectral form, occurred almost simultaneously to John Bennett and Gustavo Bonevardi of Proun Space Studio in Manhattan, which specializes in architectural computer modeling; to Julian LaVerdiere and Paul Myoda, two artists who had worked on the 91st floor of the trade center; and to Richard Nash Gould, a New York architect. Mr. Gould took his idea to the Municipal Art Society, a civic organization whose concerns include public art and public spaces. On Sept. 19, the society's chairman, Philip K. Howard, wrote a letter to Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, asking him "to consider placing two large searchlights near the disaster site, projecting their light straight up into the sky." "They would be simple, beautiful and fill the void that seems so unnatural," he said in the letter, which was also signed by David Rockefeller and eight others, including Agnes Gund, the president of the Museum of Modern Art. Coincidentally, The New York Times Magazine commissioned an image by Mr. LaVerdiere and Mr. Myoda for its Sept. 23 cover depicting "Phantom Towers," a similar project. The artists had been working with Creative Time, a public arts organization, on a proposed light sculpture atop the trade center before the attack. Set against the debate between those who wanted to build again at the trade center site and those who wanted to leave it as consecrated ground, Mr. Myoda said the proposal "momentarily transcended this dichotomy." "It is a presence," he said, "but ethereal rather than concrete." After Creative Time posted "Phantom Towers" on its Web site, 12,000 messages came in, said the executive director, Anne Pasternak. She learned that a similar "Project for the Immediate Reconstruction of Manhattan's Skyline" was being circulated by Mr. Bennett and Mr. Bonevardi. "This shouldn't be a horse race to see who gets there first," Ms. Pasternak recalled thinking. The same realization dawned on Ms. Gund when she learned of the work by Mr. Bennett and Mr. Bonevardi. Pointing this out to Mr. Barwick, she said, "You've got to get together with these other groups because it's silly to overlap." To bring technical experience to this crowded table, the Municipal Art Society invited Paul Marantz, a founding principal and design principal of Fisher Marantz Stone, an architectural lighting firm. "I thought it was a great idea," he said. "I never thought we couldn't do it." The heart of the installation will be 7,000-watt searchlights made by Space Cannon of Fubine, Italy. They look a bit like stout four-and-a-half- foot cannons. They will be arrayed so the beams collectively form two distinct columns, much as the trade center's twin towers created a colossal gateway. "We're reconstructing the void as opposed to reconstructing the buildings," Mr. Bonevardi said. These pillars will not be nearly as large as the 200-foot-square outlines of the towers themselves. A test run in Las Vegas assured the designers that the beams would not disperse and cast light directly into surrounding buildings. But the actual appearance will be imponderable until all 88 fixtures are turned on at once. "My fear," Mr. Marantz said about March 11, "is that it will be the clearest, darkest, coldest night of the year and the light will be invisible." Without something to reflect it, light cannot be seen. "Fortunately," Mr. Marantz added, "in New York, there's usually a fair amount of atmosphere." A misty fog would offer an ideal medium, though the organizers have agreed not to turn on the lights when the visibility is less than three miles and the cloud cover is lower than 2,000 feet, to satisfy the concerns of the Federal Aviation Administration. Complicating the development process was the change of administrations at City Hall. Susan K. Freedman, the president of the Public Art Fund, championed the proposal before the Bloomberg administration. "There has clearly been a need for a temporary monument to fill a void at the heart of the city," she said. Madelyn Wils, the chairwoman of Community Board 1 in Lower Manhattan and a board member of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, said the organizers had satisfactorily answered concerns about ambient light, dangers to migratory birds and interference with aviation. But that is not to say that the project is universally admired. Some family members of those who died worry that it will merely commemorate architecture rather than the victims and heroes. In part to assuage them, the title was changed from "Towers of Light" to "Tribute in Light." Some Battery Park City residents, eager to get on with their lives after six months of chaotic disruption, resent the creation of another memorial there and the intrusion of what they see as another public spectacle. For its part, the Municipal Art Society plans to recommend viewing points around the city and in New Jersey, emphasizing that 88 industrial light fixtures scarcely constitute a tourist destination. "They are comparable to a fireworks display," Ms. Levy said. "You wouldn't go to the barge to see them set off." And when April 14 dawns, the "Tribute in Light" will be no more than a memory, a votive candle that has flickered out, "a temporal light," Mr. LaVerdiere said, "that helps people come to terms with loss." Roger & Amanda