The entrance to the 9/11 museum sits inside a two-story pavilion in the middle of the ground zero plaza, in the narrow space between the memorial's twin pools. (Together the museum and memorial cost $700 million.)

Like many elements of the rebuilt ground zero, the building is a remnant of an earlier version of Daniel Libeskind's master plan for the site. It was originally going to hold galleries for New York's Drawing Center and something called the International Freedom Center, which would have told the story of struggles against totalitarianism around the world

The exterior is sleek and angular, wrapped in glass and shiny aluminum panels. Inside the spaces are calmer and will look more familiar to Snøhetta's fans, with narrow slats of blond ash on the ceiling and concrete floors.

The high concrete slurry wall that stayed intact after the towers fell, keeping the Hudson River from pouring into the site and giving Libeskind a ready-made symbol for New Yorkers' resilience, makes up one side of the huge room below.

Members of the Memorial Jury, which included family members of 9/11 victims, NYC officials, and noted artists, issued a statement in 2004 about the winning design. The following is an excerpt:

Of all the designs submitted, we have found that “Reflecting Absence” by Michael Arad, in concert with landscape architect Peter Walker, fulfills most eloquently the daunting but absolutely necessary demands of this memorial. In its powerful, yet simple articulation of the footprints of the Twin Towers, “Reflecting Absence” has made the voids left by the destruction the primary symbols of our loss. By allowing absence to speak for itself, the designers have made the power of these empty footprints the memorial. At its core, this memorial is anchored deeply in the actual events it commemorates-connecting us to the towers’ destruction, and more important, to all the lives lost on that day….

While the footprints remain empty, however, the surrounding plaza’s design has evolved to include beautiful groves of trees, traditional affirmations of life and rebirth. These trees, like memory itself, demand the care and nurturing of those who visit and tend them. They remember life with living forms, and serve as living representations of the destruction and renewal of life in their own annual cycles. The result is a memorial that expresses both the incalculable loss of life and its consoling regeneration.