Brett Fugate was confident he and his company, Fugate Inc. of Morton, Ill., could create the 40 wind chimes that would turn the Tower of Voices into a 93-foot-tall musical instrument. For help with the proposal to the National Park Service, Fugate consulted the Turner Center for Entrepreneurship’s Illinois Procurement Technical Assistance Center. Once the proposal was accepted, the company began work on the polished aluminum chimes, which range from 8 to 16 inches in diameter and are 5 to 10 feet long. Built near the entrance of the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pa., the tower honors the 40 heroic passengers and crew who died when they battled hijackers and the plane crashed Sept. 11, 2001. The memorial’s architect, Paul Murdoch, envisioned the tower as “monumental in stature but intimate in experience.” The site — a former strip mine — takes visitors through a series of open spaces defined by site walls, plantings, walkways and courts, gateways and building elements. The $5 million tower, which completes the 2,200-acre national park, was dedicated in September.
Listen to the chimes at bradley.edu/magazine/memorialtower.
ABOVE: Illustration courtesy Murdoch Associates
