NEW YORK (Reuters) - A design featuring two reflecting pools where the World Trade Center's twin towers once stood was chosen as the winning design for a memorial to the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, officials said on Tuesday.The design called "Reflecting Absence" was selected out of eight finalists by a 13-member jury after a marathon meeting on Monday, said a spokeswoman for the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., which is overseeing rebuilding the devastated site.
The design, as originally submitted, featured two pools below street level, an open plaza of cobblestones and pine trees. The names of the 2,752 people who died in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as well as the six people who died in the 1993 bombing of the Trade Center, would be engraved on stone parapets surrounding the pools.
The names of the deceased appear in what seems to be no discernible order to reflect the haphazard brutality of the victims' deaths.
Changes will be made to the original design, an LMDC spokeswoman said, but those changes will not be made public until next week.
The memorial is the centerpiece of the World Trade Center rebuilding project that is expected to cost up to $12 billion overall over the next decade.
The selection contest began eight months ago and drew more than 5,000 entries from around the world.
