A new glass-enclosed building for a controversial September 11 memorial might come to fruition thanks to a vote during last Wednesday’s commission meeting.

City commissioner Angelo Castillo asked City Manager Charles Dodge to draft plans to install the sculpture near City Center’s planned amphitheatre after one of the memorial’s sculptors, Benoit Menasche, proposed a 1,400-square-foot green building to house the project.

Menasche’s pitch, created by his son and Davie-based architect Maurice Menasche, features a lone air-conditioned two-story gallery fitted with four double-doors, closet space and two bathrooms.

Since 2006, plans to house the 9/11 memorial have floundered after Pembroke Pines failed to secure developers for the City Center project, a 115-acre mixed-use downtown plaza sitting just west of Pines City Hall. Menasche and fellow co-sculptor Felix Gonzalez showed concern that the monumental steel and marble project would lose its possible permanent home if City Center tanked.

“My fear is that the city won’t be able to use these statues at all since no proper building exists to house them,” Pines commissioner Angelo Castillo wrote in a July 28 e-mail to the artists. “Our city has no money to construct a building around these statues, especially now, no matter the purpose or how impressive the statues.”

The multi-ton memorial, slated to debut on the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 tragedy, was the brainchild of Gonzalez and Menasche. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s donation of a two-foot by two-foot girder to Castillo in May 2005 inspired the artist duo to fashion an ambitious memorial that featured the 250-pound hunk of rusted wreckage yanked from the rubble of the World Trade Center.

He estimates the 40-foot by 40-foot free-standing green building would cost about $300,000, which could be financed through a nonprofit “9/11 Foundation” city staff would create by culling donations from the local community. Menasche also feels the city can divert unspent money from the unrelated Artist Colony project to back its construction.

City commissioners plan to discuss the 9/11 memorial during the Sept. 16 commission meeting.

PHOTO: An artist rendering of a proposed glass building that will house the 9/11 memorial statues, which includes a series of steel twin towers, an imported Italian marble base and four human figures.
PHOTO/Submitted