Aerial artwork recreates the Twin Towers to commemorate 2,977 lives on the 25th anniversary of 9/11
On September 9, 2026, 2,977 points of light rose above New York Harbor and gradually assembled into the full-scale outlines of the Twin Towers. Titled 2,977 Lights Over New York Harbor, the commemorative public artwork was presented ahead of the 25th anniversary of September 11. Each light represented one person who died in the 2001 attacks, turning an individual count into a temporary architecture visible across the city’s night sky. The project was developed with members of the 9/11 family, survivor and responder communities and presented as a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts.
The work begins not with the towers, but with movement. The 2,977 lights gather into a helix, rising and circling through the air before finding their positions within two familiar vertical forms of the Twin Towers. For a brief moment, absence becomes volume again. The buildings return without mass, surface or weight, held together only by thousands of illuminated points suspended above the harbor. The sequence was designed in dialogue with Tribute in Light, the annual installation that has projected two vertical beams over Lower Manhattan since the years following the attacks.
The spiral preceding the reconstruction carries another architectural reference. Its form recalls the THINK team’s World Cultural Center, an unrealized proposal submitted during the process of rebuilding the World Trade Center site after the destruction of the Twin Towers. The scheme imagined two open lattice structures rising around the original footprints, with cultural and civic spaces extending vertically through their frames. 2,977 Lights returns part of that unbuilt idea to the New York skyline, not as permanent architecture but as an image made from light, motion and memory.
The aerial artwork was developed through a collaboration spanning art, production, architecture and the communities directly connected to September 11. Addison Mehr served as creative director and producer alongside Sky Elements, with Yan Paul Dubbelman as designer. Studio Drift joined as artistic advisor, together with architects Shigeru Ban and Dean Maltz. Brenda Berkman, Tim Brown, Terry Strada, Jim Smith and Genevieve Siller were among the voices from the 9/11 community involved in shaping the work.
The installation also incorporates a musical layer, with recorded works by Philip Glass accompanying John Adams’ On the Transmigration of Souls, composed in memory of the victims of September 11, alongside music by Max Richter including On the Nature of Daylight. Light, movement and sound are developed as part of the same sequence, allowing the memorial to unfold gradually across the harbor instead of presenting the towers as a single static image.
By assigning one light to every life lost, the scale of 2,977 Lights Over New York Harbor remains both collective and individual. From a distance, thousands of separate points resolve into the monumental outlines of the Twin Towers, while each light still corresponds to a single person. Twenty-five years after the attacks, the artwork uses contemporary aerial technology to return the Twin Towers to the New York skyline for a brief moment before the image dissolves back into the night.
Credits:
Creative Director: Addison Mehr
Producer: Sky Elements
Designer: Yan Paul Dubbelman
Artistic Advisors: Studio Drift, Shigeru Ban, Dean Maltz
Developed in collaboration with 9/11 families, survivors and responders
Music: Philip Glass; John Adams, “On the Transmigration of Souls”; Max Richter, “On the Nature of Daylight” from The Blue Notebooks.
