Michael Arad

Michael Arad
Michael Arad, 2012
Born	1969 (age 47–48) London, United Kingdom
Nationality	Israeli
Occupation	Architect
Spouse(s)	Melanie Arad Fitzpatrick
Buildings	World Trade Center Memorial

Michael Arad is an Israeli-American architect who is best known for being the designer of the World Trade Center Memorial. He won the competition to design the memorial in 2004.

Arad, an Israeli citizen, was born in 1969 in London. London was where his father, Moshe Arad, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States and Mexico, was on a diplomatic mission. Arad lived in Jerusalem for nine years. He did his military service in a Golani Brigade commando unit.

Arad received a bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College, and a master's degree from Georgia Institute of Technology's College of Architecture.

He moved to New York City in 1999 and worked as an architect at Kohn Pedersen Fox for three years. After KPF, Arad briefly worked for Leclere Associate Architects. When he submitted his design to the competition for the World Trade Center memorial, he was working for the New York City Housing Authority, designing police stations for the New York City Police Department. Arad now works for Handel Architects, which has offices in New York and San Francisco.

Unidentified human remains recovered from the World Trade Center site would be interred at the bottom of the north tower footprint at the site's deepest point, 70 feet underground. At street level, with the help of landscape architect Peter Walker, Arad proposed a cobblestone plaza with moss and grass and planted with eastern white pine trees.