"At that time, my idea for the World Trade Center site was a large green mound of grass," he continued.
And by partly burying the auditorium, library and secondary galleries in back, underneath a mound of grass, Mr. Piano keeps his building from dominating the site.
The tough exterior, as it turns out, protects an inner sanctuary: a large courtyard centered on a big mound of grass.
Closer, Espeseth saw that the birds were trapped on an island, a neat-mowed mound of grass ringed with a small fence and signs saying "Please Do Not Feed".
Roughly two-thirds of the exhibition includes art made before the attacks, and only one work — a collage by Ellsworth Kelly, who envisioned turning ground zero into a simple mound of grass — was made in response to 9/11.
Bilbao set the building on a big mound of grass and then stacked the floors, several at a time, in alternating bands of green, blue and bronze glass, some on a north-south axis, others facing east-west, so that their ends jut out in four directions.
The giant white monument in the middle of Pearl Roundabout was brought down during Friday afternoon and the mound of grass that had been home for most of the last six weeks to thousands of demonstrators is now a pile of brown dirt.
A root house was "partially dug into the ground and roofed with a sloping mound of grass-covered earth".
The living room window looks out over the abrupt end of the road and a mound of grassed-over rubble at the edge of waste ground where the boulevard was meant to be.
