Jake Barton Designed the 9/11 Memorial. One Photo Still Makes Him Cry.

The Messy Parts

Designer Jake Barton joins the show to reflect on his unconventional career arc, from an outcast middle schooler and theater major to the creative force behind the 9/11 Memorial Museum. He

Key takeaways

• Barton was 29 when he won the 9/11 Memorial Museum commission with a three-person team, directly competing against his former mentor Ralph Applebaum.
• The museum opens entirely with survivor oral histories to function as a 'chamber of memories' rather than a top-down institutional narrative.

Main topics

• 9/11 Memorial Museum design philosophy
• Mentorship dynamics and professional fallout

Notable quotes

"If you try and make a standard museum where a curator, well-paid, well-intended, tries to tell you about 9-11, It's going to utterly fall apart."

Conclusion

Barton's journey highlights that sustainable creativity requires balancing

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) This one particular photo really struck me because it's so emotional. It is in the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. People are in a traffic jam trying to get away from the World Trade Center. And there's a picture of a firefighter. super young, making his way. And he has this sort of like panicked determination and... It's intense, right? Because you know he's getting hit to the World Trade Center. So I took note of the photo at the time. We published it along with all these other ones. And then we got this, I think, email from the parent just thanking us for the photo. They're like We lost our son. Speaker 2 (0:46) And this is the last image we have of Himalaya. Speaker 1 (0:58) Today on The Messy Parts, we have on Jake Barton. He's a designer who's behind the 9-11 Memorial, Tulsa's Greenwood Rising, among many, many other things. The thing that makes him interesting is that he is not afraid of jumping off cliffs. He's changed and pivoted careers. There's a lot of really interesting tidbits. You're going to want to listen. Okay, so Jake, welcome to The Blue Couch. Speaker 2 (1:20) Pleasure to be here. Speaker 1 (1:21) Feels design appropriate for you. Speaker 2 (1:23) Yes, fantastic. Speaker 1 (1:24) Okay, perfect. I thought given that 9-11, you know, 25 years after 9-11 was just a few days ago, that we should start with the fact that you worked on the 9-11 memorial. Speaker 2 (1:35) Yeah. How Speaker 1 (1:36) old were you when that happened? Speaker 2 (1:38) Well, let's see. I am 53 now, and it's 25 years. So it's 2001, so I was 29. Speaker 1 (1:46) And when you took on that project, I remember listening and you did not think you had a chance in hell of getting that project. But you did. Speaker 2 (1:55) Yes. Speaker 1 (1:56) When you reflect back 25 years later, what is it that you think about now that you didn't think about then? Speaker 2 (2:02) Such a great question. I mean, I think the things that I reflect on now are the ways in which the choices that we made in the moment have both lasted well and created lasting impact. Speaker 1 (2:15) Like what? Speaker 2 (2:16) Well. Originally, it seemed like the way to make this project happen was really about the politics of the moment, right? You had all of these different factions in New York, all of which were totally traumatized to different degrees and for different reasons, at odds with one another. And in fact, the first day I started that project, we had a huge kickoff, you know, like little one-hour slots. And then there was like a weird little 15-minute slot that was coffee with Joe. Joe was... not the museum head, but the head of the whole foundation building everything. And in 15 minutes, he said, you know, congratulations. This is the project of a lifetime. I think we all recognize that. But I have some, you know, really insanely bad news for you. No matter what we do, people are going to hate it. Speaker 1 (3:03) And Speaker 2 (3:03) I just know that, he said, because I've only been here 18 months and it's just like a never ending onslaught. of challenge, right? There's so much trauma going back and forth. So it seemed like, oh, what we need to do is solve for the victims and the families, the people who ran out of the burning buildings, the neighbors, national security, et cetera. It was all about like sort of negotiating between those factions and telling stories that we thought could work for them. That said, in reality, it was sort of moving through that to think about future generations that have no memory about 9-11 whatsoever. So really trying to understand how to make a story like that day that so many people had such a personal traumatic experience with resonate for somebody for whom they don't know anything about 9-11. Speaker 1 (3:53) When the anniversary of 9-11 came, I always post about an exhibit that happened almost immediately after 9-11, which is Here is New York. Speaker 2 (4:03) Yes. That Speaker 1 (4:04) Gilles Perez and a bunch of other people did. Totally. Gilles had been one of the first photographers to cross the bridge and... capture some of those images. And I remember that space, which showed up almost immediately, impromptu, participatory. Speaker 2 (4:17) Totally. Right. Speaker 1 (4:18) So anybody could have a photo. They would post it on, you know, wires with clothes hangers. So no artifice and no hierarchy and no names. Speaker 2 (4:28) Yes. Speaker 1 (4:29) So it really struck me that as you were. Building this memorial and this opportunity for people to reflect on everybody's memory, but also create their own. There was a real need to be in community with each other. Speaker 2 (4:43) And Speaker 1 (4:44) people got to participate in the grief. in many, many different ways and levels, kind of in the way that you're describing. Speaker 2 (4:52) I love that you say that because you may not know, or obviously you don't, the person who organized that became the creative director for the museum and played a role in us being hired because we pitched them a similar notion to actually win the project. We said, look, if you try and make a standard museum where a curator, well-paid, well-intended, tries to tell you about 9-11, It's going to utterly fall apart, right? Because you've had so many New Yorkers have such a tight grip on their own story and need to commune with other people to connect around their story. And so we said, let's make a chamber for memories. Let's make a space where we both tell people's stories, but also gather stories. We reveal that many people's memories are faulty and shifting and changing. And we reveal the way in which. Those memories were starting to become history. Speaker 1 (5:45) So first of all, I agreed with whoever told you that you weren't going to satisfy everyone. It definitely feels like a project with lots of potholes waiting for you to fall right in. Speaker 2 (5:55) But Speaker 1 (5:56) one of the things about museums is that it is always this institution from on up high. And, you know, that comes with its own baggage. Speaker 2 (6:04) That's very problematic, especially for an event like 9-11. You have 10,000 people who ran out of the burning buildings. What are you going to tell somebody who literally saved their own life about that event? Like you can't add meaning to their own personal experience. And so we instead inverted the idea of a museum. We said, no, no, no, no. We should take those people and have them speak directly to new people going through the museum. Typically with a museum, you'll have like, here's the story and we're going to give you an art. Like the first thing that happens when you walk in is you just hear all of these. excerpted oral histories that we captured in the museum captured both in New York and around the world with people just like telling their story. That's literally how we open the entire museum is just with other people's memories. And that signifies the whole tone, which is that a it is a chamber of memories and B, it's going to be messy, chaotic. It's not on purpose. rigidly organized. It feels very much like you're traveling through that day. You're piecing together information. You're trying to understand what's happening. Speaker 1 (7:12) What would you have done differently now, looking back, that you didn't have the opportunity to do then? Speaker 2 (7:18) That's super hard to answer. I'm not sure I would do things terribly differently, Speaker 1 (7:22) to Speaker 2 (7:23) be honest. I think there's sort of a raw simplicity, both in terms of the storytelling, but also in terms of the way that we do it, that has... frankly, you know, made the museum quite effective and hasn't, you know, led to any changes or shifts in terms of the exhibition. So I would say that the things that I'm more interested in now, which are quite evolved from a 9-11 standpoint, are about how entertainment information and meaning can sort of come together and break through people's attention. But that's very different than the 9-11 Museum because it was a moment of, frankly, unprecedented global attention. Speaker 1 (8:05) And Speaker 2 (8:05) it's not a moment that we've repeated since then. That's the crazy thing. Like, it was singular both because it was the apex of all the interconnectedness of the world, but a moment where there wasn't nearly as much distraction. So the whole world, a third of the world watched it live, right? Two-thirds knew about it within that day. You get the penetration now, but you don't get the duration. People just don't pay that much attention. I was Speaker 1 (8:30) listening to you on an interview saying people didn't have iPhones, so we don't have a lot of pictures of people within the building, which is hard to even imagine. It's insane Speaker 2 (8:39) to imagine. We have like, I think, eight photos. That's just from memory from 25 years ago. But like, I think literally one amateur photographer happened to have his camera that day and brought it with him down the stairwells. There's literally nothing else from inside the actual buildings. It's crazy. I Speaker 1 (8:58) think you said there was a father who saw a picture of his Speaker 2 (9:01) son. Speaker 1 (9:02) And it was, he thinks, the last image captured of his son before he climbed Speaker 2 (9:06) and passed. Yeah, that's actually from the tunnel. That was from a project that we made leading up. So we were starting the museum. We pitched them on this idea that we were going to gather all these memories. One thing that we did was launch a website called Make History. where people could upload photos of that day from around the world. And you can see a lot of those photos in the museum itself. This one particular photo really struck me because it's so emotional. It is in the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. People are in a traffic jam trying to get away from the World Trade Center. And there's a picture of a firefighter. super young, making his way. And he has this sort of like panicked determination and... It's intense, right? Because you know he's getting hit to the World Trade Center. So I took note of the photo at the time. We published it along with all these other ones. And then we got this, I think, email from the parent just thanking us for the photo. They're like We lost our son. Speaker 2 (10:12) And this is the last image we have of him alive. And it was just unbelievable to have authored an experience that could make that type of a connection possible. And it was a new moment, right? Like this is 2001 when the internet was just really starting to show what it was capable of. And particularly, you probably remember this moment where... It felt like the internet could just do wonderful, amazing things. And this, for me, was like, oh, my God, like, I can't believe that we made this possible, that one random stranger could take this photo and then fulfill a connection with a family in this way. Speaker 1 (10:59) Tell me what happens in your head. This is inside the head of Jake Barton. Speaker 2 (11:04) Sure. Speaker 1 (11:04) When you're trying to process all these competing things, right? Because you're trying to make sense of emotion. You know, I think on your website for your company, which you no longer run, but, you know, you founded, you talk about meaning and impact and innovation. How do you distill all that? Like, how does that work for you? Do you ever sleep? Speaker 2 (11:24) I sleep better now, for sure, than I did then. And I think the job, really zooming all the way, not for museums, but for storytellers, is, in my mind, how to create meaning and impact and emotion. So you have to, it's not just how do you compartmentalize, it's quite the opposite. It's how do you synthesize from the things that are really touching you and that are really impacting you and figure out how to communicate that and embody that for others. One piece of advice that I got while I was