It was announced today that the under­ground memo­r­ial for New York City’s fallen World Trade Cen­ter could cost upwards of $1 bil­lion. That cost is roughly com­pa­ra­ble to the orig­i­nal con­struc­tion price of the twin towers.

One of my favorite Ben Katchor car­toons, pub­lished in Metrop­o­lis a few years back, clev­erly explored the uncom­fort­able pos­si­bil­ity that Amer­i­cans have got­ten a lit­tle car­ried away with their memo­ri­als. In it, a man walks down a city street of the future. An elab­o­rate plaque or marker lies at nearly every cor­ner, denot­ing the pass­ing of peo­ple or places that no longer bear any great significance.

I’m not sug­gest­ing that the ter­ror­ist attacks of Sep­tem­ber 2001 do not merit a memo­r­ial. But this project is plagued with a ridicu­lously overblown sense of scale. It clings to the mis­guided and macabre notion that a proper memo­r­ial must lie within the foot­prints of the orig­i­nal tow­ers. Its design relies not on sim­plic­ity, but on tremen­dously com­pli­cated feats of engi­neer­ing. Most dis­turbingly, it is a memo­r­ial meant not to remem­ber the lives of those who died, but to ven­er­ate the lost build­ings and encour­age vis­i­tors to wal­low for­ever in the mem­o­ries of their destruction.