Memorials as Spaces of Engagement: Design, Use and Meaning [1 ed.] 0415631432, 9780415631433

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MEMORIALS AS SPACES OF ENGAGEMENT Memorials are more diverse in design and subject matter than ever before. No longer limited to statues of heroes placed high on pedestals, contemporary memorials engage visitors in new, often surprising ways, contributing to the liveliness of public space. In Memorials as Spaces of Engagement, Quentin Stevens and Karen A. Franck explore how changes in memorial design and use have helped forge closer, richer relationships between commemorative sites and their visitors. The authors combine first-hand analysis of key examples with material drawn from existing scholarship. Examples from the USA, Canada, Australia and Europe include official, formally designed memorials and informal ones, those created by the public without official sanction. This book discusses important issues for the design, management and planning of memorials and public space in general. The book is organized around three topics: (1) how the physical design of memorial objects and spaces has evolved since the nineteenth century; (2) how people experience and understand memorials through the activities of commemorating, occupying and interpreting; and (3) the issues memorials raise for management and planning. Memorials as Spaces of Engagement will be of interest to architects, landscape architects and artists; historians of art, architecture and culture; urban sociologists and geographers; planners, policy-makers and memorial sponsors; and all those concerned with the design and use of public space. Quentin Stevens is Associate Professor of Urban Design at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, and previously worked at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London, UK. He is author of The Ludic City and co-editor of Loose Space, The Uses of Art in Public Space, and Transforming Urban Waterfronts. Karen A. Franck is Professor in the College of Architecture and Design at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA. Memorials as Spaces of Engagement addresses two topics she has explored previously: uses of public space in Loose Space and intentions and consequences of design decisions in Design through Dialogue and Architecture from the Inside Out.

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“Having long believed that ‘what happens’ in a memorial is the exchange between visitors and the spaces they inhabit, I find this work to be as enthralling as it is insightful. It is the first full-length, in-depth examination of the memorial’s evolution, a brilliant compendium of late-modern memorials and an authoritative analysis of how they work.” James E. Young, Distinguished University Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA, Author of The Texture of Memory and At Memory’s Edge “Memorials as Spaces of Engagement highlights the embodied experiences and creative practices of contemporary memorials. The rich and well-illustrated historical and current-day examples, along with the focus on memorial use, design and responsibility, make Stevens and Franck’s volume a welcome addition to discussions about urban public space in heritage and urban studies.” Karen E. Till, Senior Lecturer of Cultural Geography, Maynooth University, Ireland “Stevens and Franck elegantly situate the complexity of memorials in a clear typology, offering a close-up look at the interrelationships among spatial strategies, cultural meanings and management practices. Memorials as Spaces of Engagement shows these public places in their full intricacy, revealing charged territories that afford multiple and often contradictory opportunities for contemplation, contestation and play.” Lawrence J. Vale, MIT, USA, Author of Architecture, Power and National Identity

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MEMORIALS AS SPACES OF ENGAGEMENT DESIGN, USE AND MEANING

QUENTIN STEVENS AND KAREN A. FRANCK

First published 2016 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Taylor & Francis The right of Quentin Stevens and Karen A. Franck to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Stevens, Quentin, 1969- author. Memorials as spaces of engagement : design, use and meaning / Quentin Stevens and Karen A. Franck. pages cm 1. Monuments--Social aspects. 2. Memorials--Social aspects. 3. Public spaces--Social aspects. 4. Public spaces--Planning. 5. Memorialization. I. Franck, Karen A., author. II. Title. NA9345.S74 2015 725’.94--dc23 2015002410 ISBN: 9780415631433 (hbk) ISBN: 9780415631440 (pbk) ISBN: 9781315747002 (ebk) Typeset in Univers by Saxon Graphics Ltd, Derby

CONTENTS LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ABOUT THE AUTHORS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS CHAPTER 1

PART I:

ix xv xvii

INTRODUCTION Origin and Scope

1 5

MEMORIALS AS OBJECTS AND SPACES

9

CHAPTER 2

FROM VIEWING TO ENGAGING Figural to Spatial Distant to Close Seeing to Experiencing Increased Agency

11 12 18 25 28

CHAPTER 3

FROM STRAIGHTFORWARD TO CHALLENGING Beyond Heroism and Honor Abstraction Inversions and Absence In Dialogue Multiplicity

34 35 38 43 50 54

CHAPTER 4

FROM GENERAL TO PARTICULAR Imagery Text Particulars: Why So Many?

61 62 72 82

MEMORIALS AS USED AND UNDERSTOOD

87

PART II: CHAPTER 5

COMMEMORATING Visiting, Bringing Tributes Expressing, Interacting Holding Ceremonies Inventing Commemoration

89 90 98 105 108

CHAPTER 6

OCCUPYING Observed Uses Understanding Uses

110 111 129

CHAPTER 7

INTERPRETING Engaged Spectatorship Active Performances of Meaning Open and Closed Meanings

139 140 146 152 vii

CONTENTS

PART III:

MEMORIALS AS RESPONSIBILITIES

163

CHAPTER 8

MANAGING Managing Use Maintaining a Good Appearance Keeping the Memorial Relevant Managing Meaning

165 167 175 181 186

CHAPTER 9

PLANNING Sites Differing Commemorative Narratives Planning for Changing Values Cities and History Are Unmanageable

192 192 203 209 217

A SPECIAL KIND OF PUBLIC SPACE Engaging Memorials Making Memorials What Kind of Special Place?

219 219 227 236

BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

238 254

CHAPTER 10

viii

ILLUSTRATIONS FIGURES 1.1 1.2

Diana Memorial Fountain, London, Kathryn Gustafson and Neil Porter, 2004 Admiral David Farragut Monument, New York, sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and architect Stanford White, 1881. Visitors physically engage with the memorial in various ways 1.3 AIDS Memorial Quilt, sections displayed in Winter Garden, World Financial Center, New York. Visitors write messages on sheets of canvas 1.4 Informal September 11 memorial, New York. People left candles, notes, flowers and U.S. flags, and missing person flyers at Union Square 2.1 Victory Avenue, Tiergarten, Berlin, an ensemble of monuments. The monument in the foreground is Markgraf Albrecht II, Johannes Böse, 1898 2.2 Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne, Philip Hudson and James Wardrop, 1934 2.3 Winning design, competition for Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, Washington, William Pedersen and Bradford Tilney, 1960 2.4 National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial, Arlington, Virginia, Julie Beckman and Keith Kaseman, 2008 2.5 Japanese American Historical Plaza, Portland, Oregon, landscape architect Robert Murase, 1990. Children can come close enough to touch the names of the ten internment camps in the US where Japanese Americans were held from 1942 to 1945 2.6 Informal memorial to Steve Jobs, Apple Store, 5th Avenue, New York 2.7 A Walk for Dads, September 11 Memorial, Westfield, New Jersey, 2003 2.8 Bibliothek, Berlin, Micha Ullman, 1995 2.9 Touching names, National September 11 Memorial, New York, Michael Arad and Peter Walker, 2011 2.10 Arlington West, Santa Monica, California, Veterans for Peace. Since 2004, volunteers have set up this memorial before dawn every Sunday 2.11 Postcards, September 11 Memorial, Staten Island, Masayuki Sono, 2004 2.12 Memorial to Victims of Violence, Mexico City, Gaetna-Springall Arquitectos, 2013 3.1 Grieving Mother Homeland statue at Soviet War Memorial complex in Treptower Park, Berlin, Yevgeni Vuchetich, 1949 3.2 Denkmal der Märzgefallenen (memorial to “The March fallen,” revolutionaries killed in the Berlin uprising of 18 March 1848), Weimar Cemetery, Walter Gropius, 1922 3.3 Berlin Airlift Memorial, Tempelhof Airport, Eduard Ludwig, 1951 3.4 Korean War Veterans Memorial, New York City, Mac Adams, 1991 3.5 Reconciliation (Peacekeeping Monument), Ottawa, Jack Harman, 1992 3.6 Outline of former Reconciliation Church at Berlin Wall Memorial, Bernauer Strasse, Berlin, sinai and ON architektur, 2012 3.7 Unbuilt winning proposal for a countermemorial to Richard Kuöhl’s 1936 Monument to the Fallen of First Hanseatic Infantry Regiment No. 76 in Hamburg, Ulrich Böhme and Wulf Schneider, 1982

2

3 4 6 13 15 17 19

21 23 24 26 27 30 32 33 36

39 40 44 45 47

51 ix

ILLUSTRATIONS

3.8 3.9 3.10 3.11 3.12 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5

4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10 5.1

5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9

5.10 6.1 6.2 6.3 x

A House for Goethe, Frankfurt, Eduardo Chillida, 1986 Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, Maya Lin, 1982, including Three Servicemen statue, Frederick Hart, 1984 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Peter Eisenman, 2005 Dignity Memorial Vietnam Wall, displayed on Pier 86 in New York City next to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum Mahnender Mühlstein (Admonishing Millstone), Johannes Heibel, 2008. Displayed in the central marketplace in Trier, Germany Marker at Oldbridge 9/11 Memorial, Oldbridge, New Jersey, Blaise Batko, 2003 National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial, Washington, Julie Beckman and Keith Kaseman, 2008 Trains to Life, Trains to Death, Berlin, Frank Meisler, 2008 Monument to the Great Irish Famine, Sydney, Hossein and Angela Valamanesh, 1999 Korean War Veterans Memorial, Washington, sculptor Frank Gaylord and Cooper-Lecky Architects, 1992. The wall’s polished surface reflects the sculptures of soldiers and visitors Jersey City 9/11 Memorial, Jersey City, 2002 Informal memorial at site of April 2013 Boston Marathon bombing Australian War Memorial, London, Tonkin Zulaikha Greer Architects and artist Janet Laurence, 2003 Detail of text, Spiegelwand, Berlin, Wolfgang Gorschel, Joachim v. Rosenberg and Hans-Norbert Burkart, 1995 Rosie the Riveter Memorial, Richmond, California, landscape architect Cheryl Barton and artist Susan Schartzenberg, 2000 Volunteers carry shirtwaists and photographs in annual ceremony commemorating victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911, New York Visiting the Circle of Friends, National Aids Memorial Grove, San Francisco Memorial Wall, Neuer Börneplatz Memorial Site, Frankfurt, Hirsch, Lorch and Wandel, 1996 Making a rubbing at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington Drawing posted at an informal memorial in New York after September 11 Making origami cranes at interim memorial at World Trade Center on an anniversary of the attack Silent demonstration against Iraq War at interim memorial at World Trade Center on September 11 anniversary Veterans from Wisconsin pose at the Wisconsin stanchion, National World War II Memorial, Friedrich St Florian, 2004 Relatives and friends of police officers killed in the line of duty on National Police Officers Memorial Day, National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial, Washington, Davis Buckley, 1991 Ceremony on Veterans Day, National World War II Memorial, Washington Soviet War Memorial, Treptower Park, Berlin, Yakov Belopolsky with sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich, 1948 Visitor walking up and across the top of the field of stelae, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin People walk along in the water channel, Diana Memorial Fountain, London

52 53 55 59 60 63 64 66 67

68 70 71 77 80 84

93 94 95 97 99 102 103 103

104 106 113 115 116

ILLUSTRATIONS

6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 6.9 6.10 6.11 6.12 6.13 6.14 6.15 6.16 6.17 6.18 7.1

7.2 7.3 7.4

7.5 7.6 7.7 7.8 7.9 7.10

7.11

Children playing on sloping benches, National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial, Arlington, Virginia Diana Memorial Fountain, London, Kathryn Gustafson and Neil Porter, 2004 Visitors photographing friends “up to their necks,” Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin People sit and eat, smoke, drink beer, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin People climb wedged between stelae, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin Boys climbing “cliffs” and jumping, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, Washington. Note warning sign People lie and roll down the steep, grassy tumulus, Soviet War Memorial, Treptower Park, Berlin Skateboarders grinding, jumping and flipping, Bali Memorial, Melbourne, Melbourne City Council, 2005 Visitors posing for photographs, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin Varied seating orientations, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin Copy-cat parallel jumping across stelae, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin A visitor puts her hands out to test the stelaes’ hardness, smoothness and weight, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin Visitors touching water, Diana Memorial Fountain, London Variety of body postures, Diana Memorial Fountain Playing a card game, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin Monument to Samuel de Champlain, Ottawa, Hamilton MacCarthy, 1915, showing original location of Anishinabe Scout, installed 1918, relocated 1997 Vietnam Women’s Memorial, Washington, Glenna Goodacre, 1993 Track 17 Memorial, Grunewald railway station, Berlin, Hirsch, Lorch and Wandel Architects, 1998 Mother with Her Dead Son, Käthe Kollwitz, 1937, copy installed in Neue Wache, Berlin, when it was re-dedicated as the Central Memorial for the Victims of War and Tyranny in 1993 Gay and Lesbian Holocaust Memorial, Sydney, Russell Rodrigo and Jennifer Gamble, 2001 Depression Bread Line, George Segal, 1991, at Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, Washington Visitors at Suffragette memorial Women are Persons!, Ottawa, Barbara Paterson, 2000 Proposed Memorial to Freedom and Unity, Berlin, 2011 Separation version 1, Reconciliation Place, Canberra, Graham ScottBohanna, Andrew Smith, Karen Casey, Cate Riley and Darryl Cowie, 2002 Triumph of Civic Virtue, Frederick William MacMonnies, 1922. Originally in City Hall Park in Manhattan; moved to Queens Borough Hall in 1941; restored and moved to Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn in 2012 Detail of figure Memorial against War and Fascism, Vienna, Alfred Hrdlicka, 1988, covered in barbed wire

116 118 119 121 122 123 124 125 127 128 129 131 132 134 136

142 143 144

147 147 149 150 150 156

157 160 xi

ILLUSTRATIONS

7.12 Nameless Library, Judenplatz, Vienna, Rachael Whiteread, 2000 8.1 Rules at the Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne, prohibiting activities common in public space 8.2 Enjoyable but risky activity at the Canada Memorial, Hyde Park, London, Pierre Granche, 1994 8.3 Sign posted inside the Jefferson Memorial in Washington after dancing took place there 8.4 National Park Service Rangers answer questions and lead tours at Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, Washington 8.5 Bouquet placed by visitors in trough at National September 11 Memorial, New York 8.6 Police and other emergency services staff relocate and arrange bouquets after July 2005 bombings, King’s Cross Station, London 8.7 Ghost Bicycle, Brooklyn, New York 8.8 Anzac Day dawn ceremony, Australian War Memorial, Canberra 8.9 Ceremony on Pearl Harbor Day in the Sanctuary of the Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne 8.10 Plexiglass panel providing additional information at Herbert Baum Memorial Stone, Berlin 8.11 Statue of President Roosevelt in wheelchair by Robert Graham, 2001, added to Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, Washington 9.1 The Reserve and Area 1 on Washington’s National Mall as defined in the amended Commemorative Works Act of 2003 9.2 Australian-American Memorial, Canberra, and wider development of Russell Offices, 2004 9.3 Central Ottawa showing National Capital Commission plan for Confederation Boulevard 9.4 Burke and Wills Monument, Melbourne, Charles Summers, in 1865 at its original location on a busy downtown street intersection. This site now has tram lines running across it and is surrounded by 60-storey buildings 9.5 Indicative view of proposed plan to reorganize existing memorials in Battery Park, New York City 9.6 Hyde Park Corner, London 9.7 Reconciliation Place, Canberra. Aerial view of competition model, 2001 9.8 Two memorials called Separation, Reconciliation Place, Canberra 9.9 Overview of Memento (Statue) Park, Budapest, shortly after its opening in 1994 10.1 The Garden of Peace: A Memorial to Victims of Homicide, Boston, landscape architect Catherine Melina, sculptor Judy Kensley McKie, 2004 10.2 Angel and roses stencil dedicated to young man killed by a bus as he crossed the street, New York, stencil design by Robyn Renee Hasty, 2014

COLOUR PLATES 1.1 2.1 xii

Korean War Veterans Memorial, Washington, sculptor Frank Gaylord and Cooper-Lecky Architects, 1992. Memorial Day tributes left by visitors Spiegelwand, Berlin, Wolfgang Gorschel, Joachim von Rosenberg and Hans-Norbert Burkart, 1995

160 166 166 170 174 178 179 180 182 182 185 188 195 196 197

199 200 202 213 214 215 224 229

ILLUSTRATIONS

3.1 4.1 4.2 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 6.1 6.2 8.1 8.2 9.1

Original competition drawing of proposal for Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, Maya Lin, 1981 Original art work at World Trade Center interim memorial on September 11 anniversary, New York Angels’ Circle, September 11 Memorial, Staten Island, New York Circle of bouquets after July 2005 bombing, Russell Square, London Informal memorial at site of wall collapse, Swanston Street, Melbourne Informal memorial at site of 2009 death of young boy, Berkeley, California Canvas hanging on construction fence at informal September 11 memorial, Washington Square Park, New York Members of Parliament lay wreaths at the Cenotaph, Whitehall, London, during Remembrance Sunday service on 14 November 2010 Ceremony on September 11 anniversary, September 11 Memorial, Staten Island Goths’ birthday party, Diana Memorial Fountain, London Visitors lie sunbathing, Diana Memorial Fountain, London Drawing of proposed Vietnam Veterans Memorial based on Maya Lin’s winning design, Paul Stevenson Oles, 1981 Tributes at National September 11 Memorial, New York, on September 11 anniversary Framework Diagram from 2001 Memorials and Museums Master Plan, showing 20 best sites reserved for major future commemorations in Washington

xiii

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS Quentin Stevens is Associate Professor of Urban Design at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, and previously worked at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London, UK. He is author of The Ludic City (Routledge, 2007) and co-editor of Loose Space (Routledge, 2007 with Karen Franck), Transforming Urban Waterfronts (Routledge, 2010) and The Uses of Art in Public Space (Routledge, 2015). Karen A. Franck is Professor in the College of Architecture and Design at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA. Memorials as Spaces of Engagement (Routledge, 2015) addresses two topics she has explored previously: uses of public space in Loose Space (Routledge, 2007) and intentions and consequences of design decisions in Design through Dialogue (Wiley, 2010) and Architecture from the Inside Out (Wiley-Academy, 2007).

xv

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We would like to thank several individuals who contributed directly to the research presented here: Shanti Sumartojo, Ruth Fazakerley, Tamás Révész and Te-Sheng Huang. We much appreciate the information and interviews the following memorial designers and managers provided: Mary Bowman of Gustafson Porter; Peter Eisenman; Richard Kirk; Simon Kringas; Jennifer Turpin and Michaelie Crawford; Mark Christmanson, Janet McGowan, Lori Thornton, Claude Potvin and Denise Morin-Groulx at the National Capital Commission in Ottawa; Jonathan Kuhn at the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation; Nancy Johnson at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey; Toby Cuthbertson at Westminster City Council in London; Lucy Kempf and Andrea Lytle at the National Capital Planning Commission in Washington; Zsigmond Attila at the Budapest Galeria; Akos Rethly at Budapest’s Statue Park; Uwe Neumärker and his staff at the Foundation for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe; and Andrew Smith and Anton Veld at the National Capital Authority in Canberra. For general advice and encouragement, thanks also to Mathew Aitchison, Uwe Altrock, Patrick Barron, Grischa Bertram, Renate Bornberg, Matthew Carmona, Claire Colomb, Kim Dovey, Claudio de Magalhães, Shanna Eller, Friedhelm Fischer, Craig J. Forsyth, Klaske Havik, Michael Hebbert, Julia Lossau, Ray Lucas, John Macarthur, Andrew Mackenzie, Helen Norrie, Alice Park, Anne Reid, Jane Rendell, Virginia Rigney, Mira Ristic, Russell Rodrigo, Stella Schmidt, Lynda Schneekloth, Harriet Senie, Charles W. Smith, John Stephens, Lee Stickells, Steve Tiesdell, SueAnne Ware, as well as the numerous anonymous referees of various papers and presentations connected with this work. Earlier reports on the research presented in this book were published in the following journals and books: Planning Perspectives (vol. 30, no. 1, 2015), Fabrications (vol. 23, no. 1, 2013), Public Art Dialogue (vol. 2, no. 1, 2012), The Journal of Architecture (vol. 17, no. 6, 2012), Planungsrundschau (vol. 19, 2010), Architectural Theory Review (vol. 14, no. 2, 2009), OASE architectural journal (vol. 77, 2008), The Uses of Art in Public Space (Routledge, 2015), Recovering 9/11 in New York (Cambridge Scholars, 2014), Terrain Vague: Interstices at the Edge of the Pale (Routledge, 2014) and Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life (Routledge, 2007). The research that informs this book was supported by a Future Fellowship from the Australian Research Council, a Small Research Grant from the British Academy, a Central Research Fund Grant from the University of London, a Visiting Research Fellowship from the Humanities Research Center at the Australian National University, an RMIT Visiting Researchers Award, a grant from the School Research Committee of RMIT’s School of Architecture and Design, and a sabbatical leave from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Over the course of researching and writing this book we were fortunate to live in cities with significant numbers and varieties of memorials: Quentin in London, Berlin and Melbourne and Karen in New York. To visit other cities Karen relied on the generous hospitality of friends and relatives: Rosita Hunzinger in Berlin, Teresa Von Sommaruga Howard in London, Philip Speranza in Barcelona, Kim Dovey and xvii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Sandy Gifford in Melbourne, Marianne Franck in Seattle and Berkeley, Galen Cranz in Berkeley, Julia Chusid in Boston, and Elizabeth West Fitzhugh and Mary-Averett Seelye outside Washington. Quentin would similarly like to thank Christoph Meyer and Katja Neumann in Berlin, Dirk and Jasmin Meyer in Mainz, and Bernardo and Rosi Jimenez-Dominguez in Guadalajara. The research for this book and its evolution extended over many years. We are very fortunate to have partners who are patient, supportive and encouraging. Thank you, Dagmar Meyer-Stevens. Thank you, Tony Holmes.

xviii

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION ON A HOT JULY DAY, people of all ages sit or lie on the edge of a circular stone channel. Many have put their feet in the cool, bubbling water. Some are in bathing suits, others simply have their shirts off. Almost all are barefoot. On the lush lawn encircled by this fountain, three young women in bathing suits are stretched out, sunbathing. Nearby, a group of young people in Goth costumes sing “Happy Birthday” to one of their group. Children play a game of chase, circling the fountain. On that same hot day, in the center of another city, a family sits on a gray concrete slab, set low on the ground; the mother hands a sandwich to the small boy; behind them on another slab the father stretches out full length in the sun. Two young people jump from one slab to another. A group of school children run down the slope on a narrow path between the slabs toward the cooler air where the taller slabs cast deep shadows. Further down the incline, a young man stands on one tall slab, gazing outward toward the adjacent park. His friends take a picture of him. Here and there others walk through this field of stones in single file, speaking softly, pausing to look down a pathway or up at the sky or to touch a stone surface. Those who are unfamiliar with these two public spaces may be surprised to learn that each is a memorial. That the first is a fountain might be a clue but people lying on the grass or singing Happy Birthday would seem to contradict that possibility. This site does feature a sign indicating that it is the Diana Memorial Fountain. Located in Hyde Park, London, and dedicated in 2004, it was designed by landscape architects Kathryn Gustafson and Neil Porter (Figure 1.1). Neither the design of the second (an expansive field of stones in the center of a city) nor the playful activities occurring there suggest it is a commemorative space, though a white rose placed on a stele might offer a clue. Located in the center of Berlin, dedicated in 2005, the space was designed by architect Peter Eisenman, However, no sign anywhere announces that it is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Immediately after they were dedicated, the distinctive design and use of these two memorials attracted our attention and inspired this book. In looking at other contemporary memorials, we came to realize that these two cases illustrate, albeit in a dramatic manner, two features that other memorials share. They create spaces people can enter and move through, and they support opportunities for a variety of actions, many of which generate sensory experiences beyond the visual. While searching for a way to characterize these features and to name our book, we came upon Kirk Savage’s (2009) apt description of the transition from free-standing “statue monuments” to “spatial” ones. As the collaborations between sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and architect Stanford White in the late nineteenth century exemplify, statues were designed as integral parts of 1

MEMORIALS AS SPACES OF ENGAGEMENT

Figure 1.1 Diana Memorial Fountain, London, Kathryn Gustafson and Neil Porter, 2004 Source: Quentin Stevens, 2005.

architectural settings: the statue, on a pedestal, graced an elevated platform or terrace that also offered seating (Figure 1.2). “The lead designer of a monument was still typically the sculptor, and the hero remained elevated in the center of the composition, but a space of engagement was also beginning to emerge” (Savage 2009: 198). In describing the first such monument in Washington, the Samuel Hahnemann Memorial (Charles Niehaus and Julius Harder, 1900), Savage writes that the work “sought to guide visitors’ movement and experience in space”(ibid.: 200). These are precisely the qualities that stimulated our interest in contemporary memorials and that form the underlying theme of this book. Once monuments became spatial, they not only embellished the public spaces of parks, squares, and streets, they also created public spaces in themselves. At first, the spaces that people could occupy were relatively small as in the Hahnemann Monument or the Admiral Farragut Memorial in New York (Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 1881). Later monuments became both more spacious and more monumental in scale and form as evident in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington (Henry Bacon, 1922) and the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne (Philip Hudson and James Wardrop, 1934). Eventually monumentality became much less important while the spatiality of memorials and attention to people’s movement and embodied experiences helped generate an increasing variety of memorial designs, which continues today. A notable increase in diversity of designs as well as subject matter began in the 1980s, marked by the selection of Maya Lin’s competition entry for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington in 1981, and the exploration in Germany 2

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

Figure 1.2 Admiral David Farragut Monument, New York, sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and architect Stanford White, 1881. Visitors physically engage with the memorial in various ways Source: Karen A. Franck, 2014.

of novel ways to commemorate victims of the Holocaust. Both circumstances began what became a more frequent tendency to commemorate darker pasts and to recognize individual sacrifice and victimhood through formal, professionally designed and constructed memorials and also through informal ones—which people make themselves with and without coordination or direction. One example from the 1980s that is organized and ongoing is the NAMES Project Memorial Quilt, which began officially in 1987. Friends and relatives contribute individual cloth panels, each 3 x 6 feet, and made by hand to honor friends and relatives who have died of AIDS. The quilt was displayed several times in its entirety on the National Mall in Washington. It is now far too large to be displayed in that manner, but sections are periodically put on show, for example in the atrium of New York’s World Financial Center where people could visit the panels and also write or draw their own thoughts on large sheets of canvas, inviting them to be agents in extending the memorial as well as visitors to it (Figure 1.3). Leaving notes and particularly flowers is a traditional custom at formal memorials, particularly on national holidays at war memorials that recognize the sacrifices soldiers have made (Plate 1.1). This custom grew dramatically in frequency and in the diversity of tributes at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, starting with the first offering––a Purple Heart medal placed in the foundation of the wall when the concrete was being poured (Rawls 1995). The subsequent outpouring of 3

MEMORIALS AS SPACES OF ENGAGEMENT

Figure 1.3 AIDS Memorial Quilt, sections displayed in Winter Garden, World Financial Center, New York. Visitors write messages on sheets of canvas Source: Karen A. Franck, 1992.

tributes at the wall overlapped with an increase in informal memorials that emerge without organization or direction. These are small or large assemblages created in public space immediately following a sudden death. They are composed of flowers, candles, cards, and all kinds of additional tributes, some of which people make themselves, placed in a particular location without official sanction or direction, Creating a memorial from scratch by placing a cross at the site of a roadside death has long been a tradition in Catholic regions. In the southwestern US, this tradition dates back at least 200 years (Collins and Rhine 2003), possibly following the precedent of the Mexican and Spanish descansos (resting places) where a cross was placed to mark the resting place of those who carried the coffin from the village church to the cemetery (Anaza et al. 1995). Now roadside memorials dedicated to those who have died in car accidents, consisting of crosses, artificial flowers and numerous other items, can be seen along roadsides throughout the US and in many other countries. In New York City, the first such memorial appeared in 1980 at the site of John Lennon’s assassination outside his home. The assassinations of Olaf Palme in Stockholm in 1986 and Itzhak Rabin in 1995 in Tel Aviv (Azaryahu 1996; Engler 1999) also generated what Jack Santino has called “spontaneous shrines” (Santino 2004). By 1997, the practice had become well enough known to help fuel the worldwide creation of informal memorials following the accidental death of Diana, Princess of Wales (Phelps 1999; Sully 2010). Since the attack on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001, assemblages of flowers, cards, candles and many other tributes appear even more frequently in urban locations to commemorate the death of a single individual or a group of individuals. These informal, unofficial memorials invite people’s hands-on participation in an intimate way. Through their design and use, informal memorials 4

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

quickly transform quotidian bits of public space into commemorative sites. They too are memorials as spaces of engagement and so we consider them along with their formal counterparts. In Memorials as Spaces of Engagement: Design, Use and Meaning, we explore the wide variety of people’s activities at memorials and the many ways in which the design and management of memorials, both formal and informal, allow and encourage such variety. While traditional monuments are intended only to be viewed, often from a distance, and their meaning requires little thought or interpretation, today officially sanctioned memorials are often designed to invite visitors to enter, to draw close, and even to touch parts of the memorial. And, as the examples of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and the Diana Memorial Fountain indicate, people may pursue activities generally not expected at sites of commemoration. Also, with the absence of symbols or figurative sculptures, the intended message of contemporary memorials may be far less clear than in the past, requiring more intensive cognitive engagement. Informal memorials are even more engaging in the sense of participation, since citizens themselves create them. The ongoing proliferation of informal and formal memorials in many countries suggests that while monuments that are traditional in design, subject matter and use, no longer have a place in the modern city, as commentators such as Lewis Mumford (1938) once predicted, memorials in all their current diversity surely do.

ORIGIN AND SCOPE The idea for the book arose from several sources: Quentin’s sustained observations of visitor activities at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin and the Diana Memorial Fountain in London; his observations of informal memorials in London after the July 7, 2005 bombings; Karen’s visits to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington starting in 1982; and her observations of informal memorials and then interim and permanent memorials commemorating September 11, 2001, in New York and New Jersey (Figure 1.4). Over time, our perspective evolved to become both more inclusive and historically framed. From initial readings, we came to realize that what we had originally considered to be design features of memorials dating from the 1980s had much earlier roots, including some in the late nineteenth century. We realized that key design features of contemporary memorials could best be understood in the context of those earlier precedents. The geographic scope of the book is international but not global. We examine cases from the US, Australia, Canada, the UK and Germany with some attention to France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Russia and countries in Eastern Europe. These are all historically Christian nations that share the tradition of creating formal memorials in public space as a means of commemoration. Some of the countries have historically been subject to totalitarian as well as democratic political regimes. While we acknowledge that ways of commemorating, including the building of commemorative places, differ culturally, such differences are beyond the scope of this book. Since we are interested in urban public space, the majority of the memorials we describe are located in cities; only a few are in small towns. For the same reason, we have not studied cemeteries, graveyards, museums or memorials built at sites of killings outside cities, such as those at concentration camps. The 5

MEMORIALS AS SPACES OF ENGAGEMENT

Figure 1.4 Informal September 11 memorial, New York. People left candles, notes, flowers and U.S. flags, and missing person flyers at Union Square Source: Karen A. Franck, 2001.

size and degree of renown of the memorials we scrutinize vary from large scale, internationally known ones to smaller, less well-known cases. While we are keenly interested in the agency and creativity of people, our long-term concern is with people’s use of actual public space and how design supports that use. Hence we exclude virtual memorials and the frequently ingenious kinds of memorializing that populate the Internet such Maya Lin’s interactive website called “What is Missing?” Although we focus on memorials as public places that have been built, occupied and interpreted, we consider these conditions to be stages in the longer and often complex life of a memorial. The process of realizing a memorial is frequently a contested one with many struggles and compromises occurring along the way. Any memorial can be viewed not only as a realized object or space but also as a process of commemorating that extends over time, sometimes a long period of time, from the initial idea through all the tasks, negotiations and compromises that, in some cases, never result in a built project. This, the making and not making of memorials, is an important topic but we pursue it only briefly at the end of the book. With our focus on memorials as designed and experienced, we do not examine the often complicated, and politically fraught processes which generate them. Intended to be “permanent,” many formal memorials are in fact, modified, moved or destroyed; we briefly address this topic of malleability as an aspect of management and planning. The sources of information we draw upon are varied: lengthy field observations at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and the Diana Memorial Fountain, visits to many other memorials in several different countries; interviews with memorial designers and public officials; and examination of archival records, briefing documents and planning policies that shape the design and use of 6

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

memorials. We have also drawn on the very rich body of empirical and theoretical work about memorials that has accumulated in many different disciplines including thorough case studies of specific memorials. Serguisz Michalski’s (1998) Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage, 1870–1997 and Kirk Savage’s (2009) Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape inspired us to take a historically-framed view of contemporary memorials and gave us clues to significant changes in memorial design and examples of such changes, to which we added our own. Karen Till’s The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (2005) and Jennifer Jordan’s Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond (2006) were valuable, historically grounded guides to memorials in Berlin. James Young’s writings and insightful synoptic studies of memorials in the urban landscape (1992, 2000) and research by German scholars (Heinrich 1993; Hausmann 1997; Mai and Schmirber 1989; Wijsenbeek 2010) led us to re-consider what countermonuments can be (Stevens et al. 2012). We also acknowledge Erika Doss’s (2010) Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America for its encyclopedic account of recent informal and formal memorials in the US. We deeply appreciate the insights and as well as the details of particular cases of memorials that so many other researchers have provided that informed and enriched our own work. While we come from different disciplines, we share a long-time interest in the design and use of urban public space, particularly how people appropriate it in unanticipated and often surprising ways, and how design encourages or constrains such appropriations. Quentin pursued that interest in The Ludic City: Exploring the Potential of Public Spaces (Stevens 2007) and we did so together in our co-edited book, Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Public Life (Franck and Stevens 2007). Following on these earlier works, we view memorials as eminently public spaces where design, use and management come together in varying and complex ways, rich in implications for understanding people’s ways of interpreting and occupying public space as well as for developing future memorial designs, management strategies and planning policies. With this multi-focused perspective, we hope the book will be of value to all those who are interested in public space and public art as well as to architects, landscape architects, artists and all parties engaged in sponsoring, planning and managing memorials. Memorials as Spaces of Engagement is divided into three sections. Part I, “Memorials as Objects and Spaces” centers on design, outlining the emergence of new types of memorials and singling out particular features that distinguish many contemporary memorials from those of the past, features that repeatedly, in a variety of ways and in different countries, serve to engage the visitor physically, cognitively and emotionally. Chapter 2 starts with the earliest changes––in the nineteenth century—that bring the visitor close to a memorial sculpture or into a memorial space. Chapter 3 explores the evolution of abstract memorials in the twentieth century and the move to commemorating darker events as well as victims and acts of sacrifice. Specific design features of contemporary memorials that convey detailed information are the topics of Chapter 4. While the book is not a work of art history, we do adopt an art historical perspective in Part I to contextualize and to trace the emergence of significant changes in memorial design. We also describe the consequences of these changes for how people experience and respond to memorials, topics then developed in Part II, “Memorials as Used and Understood.” In Chapter 5, we 7

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examine the commemorative activities that occur at memorials and, in Chapter 6, the various modes of occupying and experiencing that contemporary memorials afford. Chapter 7 addresses the challenges that contemporary memorials pose for understanding their meaning. While we are keenly interested in design, our objective is not to praise or critique memorials designs but rather to tease out the implications of particular design features for how visitors occupy and understand memorials. In Part III, “Memorials as Responsibilities,” Chapters 8 and 9 respectively draw out implications for managing and planning memorials. In Chapter 10, we consider memorials as a special kind of public space: members of the public engage with them when they visit and also participate actively in the making and remaking of them. These three chapters, however, conclude an entire book that is rich with clarification of the challenges that planners, designers and managers of memorials face. Our intention is not only to add to the extensive body of scholarship on memorials but also to aid all those who are engaged in the shaping and caring for these spaces of engagement. Because Memorials as Spaces of Engagement is organized around thematic topics and around particular cases, the same examples may be referred to in different places. Hence we have adopted the following system for identifying memorials. The first time a memorial is mentioned, the designer and the date of the memorial’s dedication are given in the text; after that, only the name of the memorial is given. All translations from foreign-language sources are our own unless otherwise noted.

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PART I

MEMORIALS AS OBJECTS AND SPACES

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CHAPTER 2

FROM VIEWING TO ENGAGING FREDERICK THE GREAT, cast in bronze, sits high upon his horse on a tall stone pedestal in the middle of boulevard Unter den Linden in Berlin (Christian Daniel Rauch, 1851). The work resembles the many nineteenth-century monuments in urban public space: portrait statues placed on pedestals and located as freestanding objects in parks, plazas and along major avenues. Placed well above eye level with the pedestal sometimes enclosed by an iron fence, they were to be seen but not occupied or touched. In some cities, these “statue monuments” were such a popular form of commemoration as to constitute “statue mania” (Michalski 1998). Later in the nineteenth century, the design of public monuments grew more varied. While statues remained a popular feature, some monuments took on a spatial character by providing interior or exterior spaces people could enter and occupy. And some efforts were made to bring statue monuments closer to the ground so that people could approach them more closely. Over the course of the early twentieth century, the term “memorial” increasingly came to replace the earlier term “monument.” The structures built were no longer exclusively to celebrate triumph, victory and greatness; they also recognized hardship, sacrifice and trauma (Murray 2013). They became more diverse in design as well as subject matter. As was true of monuments, memorials can be single, freestanding objects or spatial precincts of various sizes and configurations. The design qualities of size and grandeur that once characterized monumentality were increasingly viewed with disfavor, both by designers and the public at large, as illustrated by the intense criticism of the first design for the Franklin Delano Roosevelt memorial in Washington (Hyman 1995) that was never built. By drawing visitors close, the design features of many contemporary memorials stimulate the senses and invite exploration; they also encourage visitors to take a more active role in experiencing the memorial in a bodily manner and by leaving their own tributes. From the late nineteenth century into the twenty-first, changes in the design of memorials in Europe, North America and Australia have altered the relationship between visitor and memorial from one of viewing to one of engaging in a variety of ways—by occupying, touching and hearing, and participating in acts of commemoration. In addition, more and more frequently, members of the public pursue independent acts of commemoration by creating their own memorials in public space, demonstrating another mode of engaging with memorials––by making them. 11

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FIGURAL TO SPATIAL Most nineteenth-century statue monuments, like that of Frederick the Great, are single impenetrable objects. When they are on stepped bases unenclosed by fences, people are able to climb the steps and come somewhat closer to the elevated statue as at the grand stairs of the base of the Prince Albert Memorial in London (George Gilbert Scott, 1872). Other monuments allow entry into an interior space but only to give a panoramic view of the city: columns, triumphal arches, obelisks may offer visitors opportunities to climb interior stairs to the top, as the Statue of Liberty (Frederic August Bartholdi, 1886) once did. While many nineteenth-century statues stand alone, isolated in urban space, others were assembled in plazas and parks or along avenues and promenades. In his 1814 plan for London, John Nash envisioned both Waterloo Place and Trafalgar Square as future sites for monuments. In his 1840 design for Trafalgar Square, Charles Barry incorporated two rectangular pedestals on the north side; one soon accommodated a statue of George IV (Cherry 2006). Four more statues were installed in Trafalgar Square during the nineteenth century. Statues and other works are still being added to London’s squares. A statue of Air Chief Marshall Keith Park, victorious commander in the Battle of Britain, was installed at Waterloo Place in 2010, and the still empty plinth from Barry’s design of Trafalgar Square has been the site of many temporary installations (Sumartojo 2013). In these and other ensembles of statues in public space, one walks by and around the monuments but not in them. In the Tiergarten in Berlin, people once promenaded down the tree-lined pedestrian Victory Avenue (1901) that was flanked by 32 statues of Prussian noblemen by a variety of sculptors (Figure 2.1). Between 1890 and 1929, five statues were placed along Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, all of them of Confederate officers and leaders, until one of Arthur Ashe, the renowned black tennis player, was installed in 1996 (Savage 1999). Like the nineteenth-century statue monuments, contemporary memorials may still be single, self-contained objects that are in public space but do not, singly, create space. Either figurative or abstract, they often differ in form and character from nineteenth-century monuments. Abstract forms can sometimes take on a representational character, such as the Monument to the Victims of the Berlin Airlift, whose three prongs reaching into the sky represent the three flight paths of planes bringing food to the western sectors of Berlin during the Soviet blockade in 1948 and 1949 (Eduard Ludwig, 1951, Tempelhof Airport). An abstract form may also be iconic. In Amsterdam, Barcelona and Sydney, memorials that commemorate homosexuals and lesbians who have been persecuted feature triangular forms, adopting the triangular shape of the badge that homosexuals in Nazi concentration camps were forced to wear. Object memorials can also be radical in design and intent as illustrated by the approaches to memorializing that emerged in West Germany in the 1980s (Young 1992, 1994). The tradition in the nineteenth century of creating an ensemble of various monuments within a single public space also continues. In 1965, Anzac Parade was established in Canberra as a formal processional approach to the Australian War Memorial. Eleven national war memorials, both figurative and abstract, have been installed on low terraces along each side of Anzac Parade. Some are spatial and can be entered and occupied. The National Mall in Washington is a large-scale ensemble 12

CHAPTER 2 FROM VIEWING TO ENGAGING

Figure 2.1 Victory Avenue, Tiergarten, Berlin, an ensemble of monuments. The monument in the foreground is of Markgraf Albrecht II, Johannes Böse, 1898 Source: Photograph by Waldemar Titzenthaler, circa 1901. Image courtesy of Landesarchiv Berlin.

of memorials, including the Washington Monument, the World War II Memorial, the District of Columbia War Memorial, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Korean War Veterans Memorial; many of these are spatial in character. Throughout the US, small-scale war memorials have been added sequentially to town parks; more recently these have been joined by September 11 memorials. In Budapest, statues of Communist leaders that were removed from their original locations have been assembled together for display in Memento Park.

Invitations to Occupy: Modest and Grand One possibility for occupying a monument emerged in the 1880s in the US when sculptors began to collaborate with architects to incorporate outdoor space into a single monument by placing a figurative sculpture, mounted on a pedestal, on a raised stone platform reached by a shallow flight of steps. A bench, often curved, was integrated into the back wall of the terrace behind or flanking the statue. The relatively small size of the terrace, raised above the ground place, is more intimate in scale and character than the surrounding park or plaza and the high back of the bench offers a comfortable seat and creates a feeling of enclosure. The bench, set within a wall—an exedra––dates back to ancient Greece when they were placed in burial grounds to accommodate feasts for celebrating the dead and also in recessed resting spots on roadsides or in public squares (McDowell and Meyer 1994). The bench not only served a practical purpose, giving people a place to sit, but indicated that commemoration could involve staying within the space for an extended period of time, possibly engaging in social activities of conversing and feasting. 13

MEMORIALS AS SPACES OF ENGAGEMENT

The 1881 Admiral Farragut Monument in Madison Square Park in New York, the first of several collaborations between sculptor Augustus Saint Gaudens and architect Stanford White, is an early example of an exedra in a nineteenthcentury monument in public space (see Figure 1.2) Other cases followed in the US, all located in parks or plazas, including a second collaboration between Saint Gaudens and White for the 1887 Monument to Abraham Lincoln in Chicago and the 1900 Samuel Hahneman Memorial in Washington, designed by sculptor Charles Niehaus and architect Julius Harder. The works marked a significant design shift by offering visitors space they could occupy within the monument, even while the sculpture retained its significance. Kirk Savage (2009) appropriately calls this type of public commemorative space, which integrates a figurative sculpture with a terrace and seating, a “spatial monument.” He notes that: “Saint Gaudens’s innovations were part of a broader shift in the conception of the public monument, from an object of reverence to a space of subjective experience” (Savage 2010: 12). This type of spatial monument was particularly popular in New York City parks and continued into the twentieth century: the Richard Morris Hunt Memorial in Central Park (Daniel Chester French, sculptor, and Bruce Price, architect, 1898) is just one example. An exedra was a feature of memorials in other countries as well: for example, in the Monument to Edward II in Melbourne (Edgar Bertram Mackennal, 1920) and the Baldwin-LaFontaine Monument in Ottawa (Walter Seymour Allward, 1914). It is not surprising that the twenty-first-century World War II Memorial in Washington (Friedrich St Florian, 2004), so neoclassical in its design, also features an exedra: a long curved, high-backed stone bench facing the central plaza and fountain. Monuments in Germany in the late nineteenth century took on space at a far grander, monumental scale than the modest urban monuments with exedrae. Set on elevated locations both in cities and in the countryside, they were to be seen from afar as much as visited. Many were elaborate, multi-terraced complexes in landscaped surroundings, incorporating temples modeled on the Parthenon or other ancient structures, reached by grand stairways. The Monument to Wilhelm I designed by Bruno Schmitz (1896), atop a mountain, consists of several terraces, one a forecourt large enough for ritual ceremonies such as the induction of Wehrmacht soldiers in 1938. The equestrian statue of the Kaiser is set high above the forecourt and backed by a colonnade. Schmitz took the idea of a complex even further in his proposal for the Monument to the Battle of Nations in Leipzig (1913), for which he envisioned a court of honor, parade grounds and a stadium (Michalski 1998: 65). Even without these components, the pyramidal tower at the head of a tidal basin and a walled enclosure create a truly monumental setting. The monument is the entire setting, including the landscaped grounds, comprising what Michalski (1998) aptly calls a “memorial complex.” The Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne (Philip Hudson and James Wardrop, 1934) is a memorial complex built to commemorate Victorians who volunteered in World War I. It is visible from afar by virtue of its steep roof, high terrace, and its location on a hill that was supplemented with earthworks (Figure 2.2). Originally the temple looked even larger before the foreground reflecting pool was transformed into a paved forecourt with a column and an eternal flame to commemorate those who died in World War II. Its original design was similar to another, earlier memorial complex: the Lincoln Memorial (Henry Bacon, 1922) stands above the Reflecting Pool on the Washington Mall. Based on both the 14

CHAPTER 2 FROM VIEWING TO ENGAGING

Figure 2.2 Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne, Philip Hudson and James Wardrop, 1934 Source: Karen A. Franck, 2011.

Parthenon and the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Shrine’s inner sanctuary is reached by crossing wide terraces and ascending steep stairs (Taylor 2005). Originally built to commemorate those from Victoria who served in World War I, the Shrine has grounds spacious enough to accommodate memorials to subsequent armed conflicts. Sydney’s ANZAC Memorial (C. Bruce Dellit, 1934) and the Australian War Memorial in Canberra (Emil Sodersten and John Crust, 1941) are other cases of memorial complexes as is the Jefferson Memorial in Washington (John Russell Pope, 1943). Directly after World War II, memorial complexes proliferated when the Soviet armies very quickly erected numerous large war memorials of this type in cities they had just conquered, well before building any in the Soviet Union itself (Michalski 1998). Two of these were in the West: one in Vienna on Schwarzenbergplatz (1945) and one in Berlin in the Tiergarten (Lev Kerbel, 1946). Two others in Berlin, in Treptow (Evgeny Vuchetich and Iakov Belopolskii, 1949) and Pankow (1949) are also cemeteries. Such complexes were also built in other conquered Eastern Bloc capitals such as Budapest and Tallinn, both by local governments and by the Soviets, to mark their liberation from fascism and to remind citizens of their ongoing friendship with the USSR (Boros 2004). Elevated above the ground plane, sometimes very high above, memorial complexes are visually imposing. They comprise a variety of interior and exterior spaces. Reaching the interior of the monument frequently involves a lengthy approach, ascending one or more flights of stairs, possibly crossing a terrace or two. The architecture of memorial complexes creates a grand approach and 15

MEMORIALS AS SPACES OF ENGAGEMENT

choreographs visitor movement, often as a processional through a sequence of spaces, ascending in elevation and varying in expanse and so creating a variety of spatial experiences. Large paved open spaces, at the foot of the memorial and as terraces, provide opportunities for ritual ceremonies. Since it is composed of individual spaces reached by stairs, the Memorial to the Deportation in Paris (George-Henri Pingusson, 1962) can also be considered a memorial complex, but in radical contrast to other complexes, its spaces are small and intimate, all located below ground and take on the qualities of a crypt. Citizens themselves created a very different kind of commemorative space in many Australian towns after the start of World War I to recognize the commitment and sacrifice of World War I soldiers. Called Avenues of Honour, these were rows of trees planted by volunteers along major roads leading into towns with one tree dedicated to each resident who had volunteered for service. The first and largest, in Ballarat, was conceived by the female director of a clothing factory and initiated by her female employees in 1917. When completed in 1919, the 14-mile avenue featured 3,912 trees extending from a triumphal arch that bridged the avenue. The state of Victoria, where they were most popular, eventually had 128 Avenues of Honour; in 1987, 52 were known to still exist. After World War II only 12 were created, but two were initiated as recently as 1987 (Haddow 1988). Spatial memorials consisting primarily of trees or other kinds of plantings are still being created. Trees are planted along and around The Avenue of the Righteous among Nations, initiated in 1962 at the Yad Vashem Memorial to the Holocaust in Jerusalem, to honor those gentiles who risked their own lives to rescue Jews. The tradition of a formal commemorative landscape without architectural elements is being rediscovered in Australia with The Road as Shrine, a series of remembrance gardens for people who have died in car accidents, on a country road in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley (Ware 2004). After the September 11 terrorist attacks, the US Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service adopted the term “living memorial” for their program that supports community landscape projects to memorialize the September 11 events and their victims. These include single trees, groves of trees, new parks, forest improvement, community gardens and landscaped town centers (Svendsen and Campbell 2006). Earlier the term “living memorials” was used to refer to memorial structures built in the US to commemorate World War II that, unlike traditional war memorials, would serve a utilitarian purpose and were preferred for that reason. These were often civic amenities such as highways, parks, armories, auditoriums and recreation centers (Shanken 2002).

More Spatial Possibilities “The notion of a modern monument is a contradiction in terms; if it is a monument, it is not modern, and if it is modern, it cannot be a monument,” wrote Lewis Mumford in his 1938 essay provocatively entitled “The Death of the Monument” (ibid.: 438). This passage is often quoted for its pithy reference to the inherent contradiction between monuments and modernism and hence the necessary demise of the former as inappropriate, possibly unnecessary for modern times. However, one can interpret Mumford’s declaration as implying something quite different: the demise of traditional monuments (or memorials). If the traditional monument was dead, what could replace it? Before Mumford’s essay, architects 16

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and artists, particularly in Europe, had begun exploring precisely that as they looked toward abstract forms rather than figurative sculptures. Their work presaged many of the proposals made much later and into the present. The spatial memorials they designed consisted entirely of hard surfaced spaces but were less monumental in scale than memorial complexes. Without figurative sculpture, these spatial memorials were stark in character: the Neue Wache in Berlin (Heinrich Tessenow, 1931), the Monument to Roberto Sarfatti in Asiago, Italy (Giuseppe Terragni, 1934) and Fosse Ardeatine by BBPR in Rome (1944–1949). After the war, several abstract spatial memorials of stone or concrete were proposed in the US, though none was built: Marcel Breuer and Lawrence Anderson’s 1945 design for the Honor Wall War Memorial in Cambridge, Massachusetts (Hyman 1995); the winning design for the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial by William Pedersen and Bradford Tilney (1960); an invited design for the same memorial by Marcel Breuer (1966); and a proposed design for a Memorial to Six Million Jewish Martyrs in New York by Louis Kahn (1966–1972). Hugh Ferris’s detailed drawing of Pedersen and Tilney’s winning design for the Roosevelt Memorial depicts both its spatial expanse and the monumentality of the slabs, reminiscent of more traditional memorials that emphasize height and grandeur. Showing visitors moving up to and across the different levels draws attention to the memorial’s spatial qualities, which invite movement and exploration (Figure 2.3). It was not until 1982 that an abstract spatial memorial was completed in the US: the Vietnam Veterans Memorial designed by Maya Lin (but only with the required addition of a figurative sculpture). Her design demonstrated another spatial

Figure 2.3 Winning design, competition for Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, Washington, William Pedersen and Bradford Tilney, 1960 Source: Drawing by Hugh Ferris, 1960. Courtesy of Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.

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MEMORIALS AS SPACES OF ENGAGEMENT

possibility: placing an abstract form not on a stone surface but in a landscape that serves as part of the memorial. In this case the landscape is a lawn, as is the landscape for the Diana Memorial Fountain in London (Kathryn Gustafson and Neil Porter, 2004). Lin’s design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial also featured a dramatically different relationship to the ground compared to many memorials: being neither elevated nor fully on the ground level but partially below. The granite wall that constitutes the main element of the memorial is sunken into the hill so that the visitor descends below the ground plane of the lawn that is above the wall. Signs along the pathways leading to the memorial are needed to direct one to the memorial, since from the north side, the wall is not even visible. Spatial memorials as hard surfaced landscapes consisting exclusively of abstract forms increased in popularity in the 2000s. Notable examples are the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin (Peter Eisenman, 2005), the National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial (Julie Beckman and Keith Kaseman, 2008) (Figure 2.4) and the field of steel stelae at the 7 July Memorial in Hyde Park (Carmody Groarke Architects, 2009). Previously, completely abstract memorials lacking any traditional memorial elements had been difficult for both experts and the public at large to accept. The National Commission of Fine Arts required Pedersen and Tilney to include a representation of Roosevelt in their design and then included that stipulation for subsequent designs for the memorial (Hyman 1995; Parsons 2012). In the end, the memorial that was built and dedicated in 1997, designed by Lawrence Halprin, features many statues as well as bas-reliefs that tell the story of Roosevelt’s presidency. The Korean Veterans Memorial in Washington (Cooper Lecky Architects, 1995), another spatial memorial, is also dense with figurative imagery, and the main feature of the Memorial to Martin Luther King is a towering sculpture of him (sculptor Lei Yixin, 2011). While abstraction is more acceptable now as a design approach, figuration also remains popular within spatial memorials, thus giving a rich palette of options for designers to propose and sponsors to consider.

DISTANT TO CLOSE With the exploration of new spatial possibilities for monuments and memorials came a desire to bring visitors closer to the design elements that constitute the work, creating a more intimate, even tactile, physical relationship between person and place. To achieve this meant rejecting the elevation created by pedestals and platforms. Creators of memorials are also more likely to integrate them into public space and also find other means of drawing the visitor close.

On the Ground The triumphant equestrian statue of Frederick the Great in Berlin sits atop an elaborately carved, three-tiered bronze plinth that is further elevated by a stone pedestal, creating a monument 44 feet high. A wrought iron fence keeps visitors and passers-by further at bay. Creating such distance and separation from surrounding urban space, achieved by height and barriers, was common enough in nineteenth-century monuments that its absence was extremely discomfiting to sponsors. In 1884, the committee that commissioned August Rodin to memorialize 18

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Figure 2.4 National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial, Arlington, Virginia, Julie Beckman and Keith Kaseman, 2008 Source: Quentin Stevens, 2011.

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the burghers of Calais rejected his requests that the statues he had created be placed directly on the ground, without a pedestal, and in the midst of daily city life, at the exact marketplace location where the six burghers had volunteered to give their lives to save their fellow citizens (Swedberg 2005). It was precisely the distance between memorial sculpture and viewer that Rodin wished to eliminate. Not only did he portray the citizens of Calais as everyday people, using postures and facial expressions to show their fear and despair, he also wished to bring them close to the viewer, drawing the viewer bodily into the work: “By placing the statue very low I had thought that it would become more familiar to the public and make it easier for the public to enter into the misery and the sacrifice and into the drama” (Elsen 1963: 78). Following its own inclinations rather than the artist’s instructions, the commissioning committee decided to place the figures on a pedestal, in a park and, for full measure of distance and separation, enclosed with a wrought iron fence. Eventually, after Rodin’s death, his wishes were met: the monument was moved to the front of Calais’s town hall without the pedestal or the fence, achieving a closer, more intimate relationship between monument and city, monument and viewer. Allowing visitors to come close to statues and other sculptural works is now a common practice in memorial design: they are often placed directly on the ground, possibly with a shallow plinth but without a pedestal. Examples include the Marx-Engels Memorial in Berlin (Ludwig Englehardt, 1986), statues in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington (Lawrence Halprin, 1997), and the Women are Persons! in Ottawa (Barbara Patterson, 2000). Then visitors can come close enough to the work to touch it (Figure 2.5) or to join the ensemble it creates (see Figure 7.6). Other works are at eye level but a fence, a garden bed or both protect the statuary, as they do for the 19 stainless steel statues of soldiers on patrol in the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington (sculptor Frank Gaylord, 1995) and the Three Servicemen at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Frederick Hart, 1984). The terraces of the earliest spatial monuments, exemplified by the Admiral Farragut Monument in New York (see Figure 1.2) are elevated above the surrounding ground plane and reached by a single, shallow flight of stairs. They are, however, far closer to the ground and so more reachable than the subsequent grand memorial complexes with their elaborate stairs and terraces. Designs for some of the early abstract spatial memorials, such as the first two proposals for the Roosevelt memorial in Washington, were also low stone terraces reached by a few wide stairs. Most contemporary spatial memorials are at ground level, flush with the surrounding terrain, and hence easily accessible to all. The ground plane is a useful location for informal memorials as well. The AIDS Memorial Quilt, started in 1985, was first displayed by spreading it out on the lawn of the National Mall in Washington in 1987 and as the full quilt in 1996 for the last time. When members of the public initiate informal memorials immediately after tragic deaths, they often place flowers, candles and other items directly on the surface of sidewalks, steps, plazas and lawns. The easy accessibility, blankness and ubiquitous locations of the ground surface of everyday public spaces make them convenient canvases for all kinds of memorializing. Many memorials, permanent or temporary, formal or informal, are below eye level—literally at one’s feet—so that one looks not up or across but down. 20

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Figure 2.5 Japanese American Historical Plaza, Portland, Oregon, landscape architect Robert Murase, 1990. Children can come close enough to touch the names of the ten internment camps in the US where Japanese Americans were held from 1942 to 1945 Source: Karen A. Franck, 2012.

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Merging with Public Space Placing memorials on sidewalks, or inserting them into the sidewalk surface, not only places them on the ground but also merges them with everyday public space and mundane routines of daily life so that what might be considered sacred, in its function of commemoration of a loss of life or other tragic occurrence, overlaps with the profane. A widespread example is the thousands of Stolpersteine or Stumbling Blocks by artist Gunther Demnig that, since 1995, have been installed in the sidewalks of towns and cities throughout Germany and many other European countries, mostly through the initiative of local residents (Demnig 2014). These 4-inch concrete blocks, covered in brass, are inserted into the surface of sidewalks in front of buildings where people persecuted by the Nazis last lived. While the vast majority of the stones are dedicated to Jewish victims of the Holocaust, there are also plaques for homosexuals, gypsies, physical or mentally disabled persons and those involved in the Resistance. Each plaque lists one person’s name, date of birth and death, and what happened to them. Text often includes the phrase “murdered” and the name of the concentration camp where they were imprisoned and died. Other memorials extend deeper into a sidewalk’s surface (Stevens and Ristic 2015). Sarajevo Roses mark sites where at least three people were killed by artillery shells during the Bosnian civil war of 1992–1995. Formed by filling red resin into the resulting small craters in the sidewalk, these three-dimensional insertions appear flat, with a shape resembling a flower (Ristic 2011). A sidewalk’s surface also offers a canvas for planned temporary memorials such as the three-week-long Anti-Memorial to Heroin Overdose Victims that SueAnne Ware designed for the St Kilda neighborhood in Melbourne (Ware 2008). Narratives of the victims’ lives were stenciled in red paint onto the existing tiles in the middle of the sidewalk adjacent to several streets with planters of red poppies placed alongside. Red resin plaques, attached to the planters, exhibited victims’ pers onal belongings. For more temporary memorials, the sidewalk also serves as an easily accessible canvas. For the tenth anniversary of September 11, the artists’ collective, Illegal Art, used the sidewalk from on 5th Avenue from 14th to 20th Street to mark off the 110 floors of the taller of the Twin Towers. They invited people to walk the height of the tower and to write their own memories and comments with chalk, creating a memorial that lasted until the chalk markings faded. Just as one comes upon come Stumbling Stones in a European city sidewalk unexpectedly, one may also suddenly encounter a cluster of flowers, notes and candles on a city sidewalk marking a site of mourning for someone who recently died, someone who may be known to many or only a few (Figure 2.6). The death of a group of people also stimulates collective informal memorials in public places, as did the terrorist attacks in Washington, Oklahoma City, London and New York. While these examples differ in many ways, all are created in everyday urban locations—on the roadside, on a sidewalk, in a train station––in the midst of mundane public space, by their very location integrated into daily life routines. They serve as destinations for those who know about them and seek them out; they may be a surprise for others; and if small or unobtrusive, can be easily ignored by passers-by. Informal memorials, spread out on the ground or placed upright against a fence or a wall, also lack a formal boundary. They have no barriers, except those police install to control crowds that sometimes gather at well-known sites. Many 22

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Figure 2.6 Informal memorial to Steve Jobs, Apple Store, 5th Avenue, New York Source: Te-sheng Huang, 2011.

formal memorials today have only the subtlest of boundaries or none at all. The jury that selected Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM) noted that its sunken form is “superbly harmonious with its site, and yet frees the visitors from the noise and traffic of the surrounding city. Its open nature will encourage access in all occasions, at all hours, without barriers” (Abramson 1996: 687). In her concept for the Diana Memorial Fountain, Kathryn Gustafson proposed a seamless connection between the memorial and the lawn of Hyde Park. Her original design set the ring-shaped fountain into the ground plane of the lawn with no enclosure, integrating it as fully as possible with the park. Only later, after the memorial was dedicated, was an enclosing fence added. Similarly, Peter Eisenman designed the edges of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin (2005) without a boundary of any kind. The stelae around the memorial’s perimeter are so low that they are completely flush with the adjacent sidewalk and their outlines extend across it; these stelae are effectively ‘underneath’ the sidewalk. Here everyday public space overlaps with sacred space, and many passers-by unknowingly walk over the memorial as they pass by. Other spatial memorials are designed to incorporate pedestrian routes so that people pass through the memorial on their way to another destination, possibly without giving any thought to the commemorative purpose of the space. These memorials may be spacious urban plazas such as the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial (Davis Buckley, 1991) that takes up the entirety of Judiciary Square, located adjacent to a metro station. According to Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s design, the National September 11 Memorial in New York will also function as an urban plaza, offering multiple routes for people to take, regardless of 23

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whether they are visiting the memorial or just passing through. With the opening of the associated museum in May 2014, people are able to pass through the memorial between West Street and Church Street when the memorial is open (between 8:30 am and 8:30 pm). A memorial may also create a linear pathway, as A Walk for Dads does in Westfield, New Jersey. Twelve small obelisks, dedicated to the local residents who perished at the World Trade Center, line a pathway that many commuters use each day to reach the station for commuter trains to New York (Figure 2.7). The Spiegelwand (Mirror Wall) is a freestanding memorial in Berlin that displays the names of the 1723 Jewish residents of the surrounding Steglitz district who were deported to concentration camps by the Nazis. Placed in the midst of a public square, it is not only in a public space frequently crossed by pedestrians but achieves an evocative merger with a weekly market by virtue of its reflective mirrored surface (Plate 2.1). Reflected images of ongoing daily life superimposed over the portrayal of tragedy suggest how daily life continued during the Holocaust, seemingly unchanged. Peter Eisenman held similar design intentions for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The merging of formal and informal memorials with public space and everyday activities does mean they are in more convenient locations and in that sense it makes them more accessible. However, people who have other reasons for being in the space—passing through or shopping in the local market—are unlikely to engage with them as memorials at all. The merging of the sacred and the profane can also be troubling to some. Until 2014, the city council of Munich forbade any Stolpersteine to be installed on public sidewalks because the Jewish Council believed that stepping on the names of those who had died was disrespectful (Apel 2014).

Figure 2.7 A Walk for Dads, September 11 Memorial, Westfield, New Jersey, 2003 Source: Karen A. Franck, 2011.

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Other Invitations to Come Close August Rodin’s reason for eschewing a pedestal and placing the figures of The Burghers of Calais directly on the ground was to engage people more fully in experiencing the memorial by allowing them to come very close and by moving around the figures, not just by viewing them from a distance at a stationary position. And he intended that the work be placed in Calais in front of the train station, a busy public space. Subsequently, the rejection of tall, elevated monumental forms that could be seen from a distance in favor of memorials that are lower in height, on the ground and with design features that require close inspection, meant that people need to come close to get a sense of the memorial. So it is when the names of the dead can only be read when standing on the ground immediately next to a memorial, as at the Spiegelwand or the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The program for the design of the latter required that all the names of US military personnel who died in the conflict be listed. In developing her winning design, Maya Lin sought to draw visitors as close as possible by choosing a very small font size for the names—less than one half-inch. She wanted to “create a very intimate reading in a very public space, the difference in intimacy between reading a billboard and reading a book” (Lin 2000: 4–14). For the Civil Rights Memorial, Lin also chose a very small typeface to generate a similar intimacy. One memorial, Bibliothek, can only be viewed and understood at all by coming right up to it and then peering down into a space located below ground. The underground room, covered by a glass plate flush with the surrounding cobblestone plaza, contains empty bookshelves, to commemorate the 1933 burning of books by the Nazis in Bebelplatz in Berlin (Micha Ullman, 1995). In the daytime, one must come close and bend over to see into the room below ground. Some visitors make an additional effort to glimpse what is below by crouching or kneeling down (Figure 2.8). At night, the room is illuminated, and the light emitted hints at a presence below ground. Experiencing the memorial depends on the visitor’s proximity and willingness to make an effort. To leave a tribute at a formal or informal memorial depends on a similar degree of proximity and close engagement. Especially at informal memorials, the items contributed are likely to be small and often very densely clustered. To see, and to read, one must come close and one may well have to bend over or crouch down to see what has been left below eye level or stretch to see what has been placed above (Franck and Paxson 2007).

SEEING TO EXPERIENCING By virtue of being underground and physically inaccessible, the Bibliothek memorial allows visitors only to see the memorial, and only with some difficulty and effort. They have no way of entering the space and the only feature of it they can touch is its glass cover. In spatial memorials, which, by definition, can be entered and occupied, not only do visitors have opportunities to move around the space, they can also have a variety of tactile and auditory experiences. At the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, as visitors move into the field of taller and taller stelae, their proximity invites touch. Their smooth finish makes it easy to run one’s fingers along the surfaces. At the Diana Memorial Fountain, on warm summer days, the closeness of the channel of water, moving right past one’s feet, 25

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Figure 2.8 Bibliothek, Berlin, Micha Ullman, 1995 Source: Karen A. Franck, 2012.

encourages people to dip their toes or hands in, to sit on the edge and place their feet in the water, and to walk in the channel, despite posted regulations to the contrary. Visitors often touched the names of soldiers engraved on traditional war memorials such as those commemorating World War I (Winter 1995). The designs of contemporary memorials make this kind of physical engagement easier by making the names readily accessible, as at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Many of the memorials designed by Maya Lin have this feature, as Abramson has noted: “Lin’s monuments propose a new, dialogic relationship between subject and object, one that involves intensified levels of physical and perceptual intimacy and self-realization” (1996: 707). At the National September 11 Memorial, to ensure 26

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that adults can reach every name incised on the bronze parapets surrounding the two pools, Michael Arad canted the parapets toward the visitors (Figure 2.9). Additional features ensure the comfort of touching the names: narrow tubes of water on the underside of the parapets warm these panels in cold weather and cool them in hot weather. Locating the names of those who are being remembered within reach so that visitors can easily touch them is now a common feature of memorials, This meets the need to recognize a collective loss but also provides for family and friends who seek out the memorial to grieve and wish to do so in a more personal and physically intimate way. Jonas Dahlberg frustrates this practice to make a powerful point. In his design for the memorial to the 69 people killed on the island of Utoya in Norway in 2011, he has proposed a 3.5 meter “wound”—a cut to be made through the island’s headland. Built into the newly exposed cliff will be a wall displaying the victims’ names. But the channel of water next to the wall will make the names inaccessible. In announcing this winning design, the jury explained: “The void that is created evokes the sense of sudden loss combined with the longterm missing and remembrance of those who perished” (Daly 2014: n.p.). The acoustic experience of spatial memorials includes human speech and other sounds. The sounds of water vary with the design of fountains and pools. Each of the four ‘rooms’ of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial offers a different acoustic mood, while in London changes in the surface and incline of the ring-shaped fountain commemorating Princess Diana create a variety of sounds from the burbling of softly running water and ripples to louder bubbles, plops,

Figure 2.9 Touching names, National September 11 Memorial, New York, Michael Arad and Peter Walker, 2011 Source: Karen A. Franck, 2011.

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splashes and gurgles (Stevens 2009). At the National September 11 Memorial in New York, one hears the steady sound of sheets of water pouring into the two large pools. The enclosure created by the tall concrete stelae deep inside the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe muffles the sounds of the surrounding city, creating a place of unusual stillness. At the memorial dedicated to those killed in the Ravensbruck concentration camp in Amsterdam (Joost Van Santen, 1975), a tall stainless steel cylinder set among 11 stainless steel panels continuously emits harsh, ominous sounds that increase in volume and then fade. In rare cases, visitors are invited to create the sounds themselves. At Washington’s Memorial to Japanese-American Patriotism in World War II (Davis Buckley and Nina Akaumu, 2001), they can push a lever to ring a long aluminum bell “to recall the tradition of Japanese temple bells” (Clark 2008: 64). In this description the choice of the verb “recall” is revealing because it links sound to memory in a way that seeing cannot. These cases illustrate how both people’s dynamic actions and the motion of water and air against the mute solidity of the physical environment create the acoustic settings of memorials. Tape recordings create a very different acoustic environment: one can hear the sound of the recorded voices in the background or one can focus on the spoken words to grasp information that is being imparted verbally. In his proposed design for the memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Marcel Breuer planned for audio recordings of the former president’s speeches (Hyman 1995). In the tunnel that is part of Irish Hunger Memorial in New York (Brain Tolle, Gail Wittwer-Laird and 1100 Architects, 2002), visitors hear tape-recorded personal accounts of the famine, and at Reconciliation Place in Canberra (Kringas Architects, 2001), one hears the voices of indigenous people telling their stories. These play continuously. At other memorials visitors can choose to activate recordings themselves. At the Berlin Wall commemorative site (Sinai, Mola Winkelmuller Architekten and ON arkitektur, 2011), visitors can listen to recordings of speeches and interviews at multimedia stations built into freestanding pillars.

INCREASED AGENCY Like many statue monuments, that of Frederick the Great can only be seen and only from below. It cannot be touched or occupied. And its frontal orientation makes it clear that it is to be seen primarily from the front. The viewer is given little, if any, choice in how to view the work and no opportunity to interact with it physically. Like many monument statues, the visitor is conceived as a passive recipient of visual information. For The Burghers of Calais, Rodin held the opposite intentions. The burgher figures are oriented in different directions: Rodin intended that people could approach them from any angle, offering a choice of paths to and around the work. If the statues had been placed directly on the ground, as he intended, people could also have decided how close to come and to touch the work. Rodin’s intentions anticipated another change in the design of memorials: giving visitors a greater degree of agency in approaching and experiencing them. Contemporary spatial memorials such as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and the Diana Memorial Fountain (as originally designed, without a fence) have no front or back and offer visitors many choices for moving into and 28

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around the memorial space. The layout of these memorials encourages the visitor to be an active, even proactive, participant in experiencing the memorial. Over the course of years, memorial designs have given visitors more and more choices for how to engage with them, framing them as actors, not just viewers. Even with a clear front and back, memorial complexes provide different paths for visitors. Contemporary memorials such as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and the Diana Memorial Fountain (as originally designed, without a fence) have no fixed entry point and no front or back, offering visitors even more options for moving into and around the memorial space. Similarly, in her original design, Maya Lin intended for visitors to approach the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall from different directions. Statue memorials placed on the ground with different orientations of the figures achieve what Rodin had intended while spatial memorials often give visitors choices of how to enter and move through the commemorative space. As designed, many memorials also extend different options for engaging physically with features of the memorial, including adopting different postures, pursuing different actions and touching surfaces and design elements. Recently some formal memorials have increased possibilities for visitor participation, sometimes mimicking what happens at informal memorials that people have created, completely, themselves. Here the degree of agency is, by definition, greater than at formal memorials. The earliest shrines by the roadside marking the death of an individual, up to more recent roadside memorials and others located at many other sites (urban sidewalks, schools, university campuses) are created entirely by individuals, acting on their own initiative, making their own decisions, and contributing items they choose. These memorials demonstrate the capacity of all kinds of people to act independently to pursue acts of commemoration and make their own decisions on what to make or contribute, albeit the choices they make may be quite similar to one another. Nonetheless, in this kind of informal memorializing, one can see the most freedom of choice and so the highest level of agency. Initiatives to create more organized informal memorials respond to people’s desire to create their own memorials by providing a framework for doing so and delimiting what form the contributions will take. An early example that continues to this day is the NAMES Project Memorial Quilt that officially began in 1987 (Hawkins 1993). Displays of the quilt often include large sheets of white cloth, and so invite people to be agents not only in making the panels but in responding more spontaneously and informally (see Figure 1.4). Similarly, sheets of canvas or paper were provided in many memorials in New York after September 11. Using objects of a uniform type is a design feature of several organized informal memorials. Ghost Bikes are bicycles painted white that friends or family place at the site of a bicycle accident that resulted in the death of the cyclist. The person’s name and date of death, a photograph, and flowers may be added, but the consistent, now nearly universal marker is the white bicycle. While individual white crosses appear in many roadside memorials, groups of volunteers in California install entire fields of white wooden crosses on a regular basis (Figure 2.10), both to commemorate the lives of US soldiers who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan and to raise public awareness about those wars and the attendant sacrifices. The tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks inspired several temporary, informal memorials in New York, composed of directed kinds of 29

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Figure 2.10 Arlington West, Santa Monica, California, Veterans for Peace. Since 2004, volunteers have set up this memorial before dawn every Sunday Source: Karen A. Franck, 2013.

contributions from the public The organization Prepare NY, a coalition of interfaith organizations formed to help create a city-wide climate to promote healing and reconciliation, invited people from all over the world to prepare colored ribbons, with writing, to attach to an emergent tapestry. More than 20,000 ribbons were contributed and attached to 12 9-foot frames in Battery Park. The organizers described the installation, “Ribbons of Hope,” as an “interactive communitycreated art project.” Between September 6 and September 11, 2011, Trinity Church on Wall Street invited people to write on a white ribbon and to tie white ribbons with the words “Remember to Love” on the fence around St. Paul’s Church, which is immediately opposite the World Trade Center. People could also write names and prayers on the ribbons. Some said a prayer as they tied a ribbon to the fence. Inside St Paul’s, the Trinity New Music Orchestra played. Just as in leaving tributes at a completely open informal memorial, the making of the memorial is an act of memorializing as well as helping to make the memorial itself. While informal memorials result from agency to varying degrees, recently designers of some formal memorials have incorporated specific features for inviting agency. In addition to offering a choice of paths and postures and possibilities for touching and listening, contemporary formal memorials have incorporated other ways that visitors can be active participants. Long lists of names of those who have died, in the military or in acts of violence may pose a challenge for visitors who wish to locate a particular name. To enable this search, several memorials provide hard copy directories of names at the memorial for visitors to consult. Checking the directory and locating a name then becomes a common practice at the Vietnam 30

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Veterans Memorial and at the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington, which also provides paper and pencil for recording the information. At the National September 11 Memorial in New York, the information is retrievable from computer consoles. Bringing flowers to gravesites, a common Christian tradition, carried over to World War I memorials in the UK and Australia that typically list the names of individual soldiers. The memorials serve as surrogate gravesites because the remains of soldiers from these countries were not brought home from Europe. After the 1915 publication of John McCrae’s poem, “In Flanders Fields,” the poppy became the preferred flower for commemorating the lives of World War I soldiers and subsequently soldiers in later wars, particularly in Commonwealth countries. Synthetic poppies are now commonly placed at memorials on ceremonial occasions in the UK and Australia, and worn by attendees. On ritual occasions such as Remembrance Day, Anzac Day and Veterans Day, elaborate wreaths are traditionally brought to war memorials. Photographs of World I memorials on Anzac Days in Australia in 1925 and 1931 show an obelisk and a column completely covered in flowers and wreaths from top to bottom (Inglis 2008: 229). Written messages to the departed often accompanied the flowers. Sometimes memorial designs consciously accommodated wreath-placing: the face of London’s National Submarine War Memorial (A. H. Ryan-Tenison and Frederick Brook Hitch, 1922) features 40 small anchor-shaped hooks to hold them. The practice of bringing wreaths to memorials on anniversaries or other official occasions, such as visits by foreign officials and dignitaries, remains common in many countries. In addition to flowers, those mourning loved ones killed in the war left notes and letters at World War I memorials. But the number and range of offerings that mourners left at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington were entirely unprecedented. These began when the memorial was still under construction. One veteran placed his Purple Heart medal in the cement that was being poured. Maintenance staff, uncertain of what to do, retrieved and kept it. As construction proceeded and more offerings were left, the National Park Service made the decision to keep and archive all items that were not food, plants or unadorned US flags. This archive now numbers 400,000 items. Once veterans and others knew the non-perishable items were being kept, the memorial became even more popular as a site for leaving all kinds of tributes. Possibly inspired by the outpouring of tributes at the Wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, designers of memorials that commemorate victims have become increasingly aware of the value of accommodating this practice. At the Bainbridge Island Japanese Exclusion Memorial near Seattle, Washington (Jones & Jones, 2011), stone shelves and bronze hooks are placed along the curving basalt and cedar wall that honors the internees. In some memorials a freestanding object or a niche dedicated to each victim offers a place for items to be left, as at the Pentagon Memorial and the Staten Island September 11 Memorial (Figure 2.11). At the National September 11 Memorial in New York, the letters making up the names of victims cut into the parapets around the two pools, are wide enough that visitors can insert flowers, small flags or insignia into the letters (see Plate 4.2). At night the letters of each name are illuminated from below. Sufficient space around each name allows it to stand on its own and gives enough space for visitors to tape a note or a photograph. As at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, these offerings add texture, detail and individuality to what is, despite the many names, a more general 31

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Figure 2.11 Postcards, September 11 Memorial, Staten Island, Masayuki Sono, 2004 Source: Karen A. Franck, 2006.

representation. This layering of the personal and immediate over the more abstract and permanent is facilitated when memorial design accommodates the leaving of offerings. At the Memorial to Victims of Violence in Chapultepec Park in Mexico City, the architects Gaetna-Springall have taken the idea of inviting tributes one step further (Figure 2.12). Relevant quotations from famous people are stenciled onto some of the 70 towering rusted Cor-Ten steel slabs. But on the many remaining blank surfaces visitors can write or draw. Instructions say: “Paint what you feel … Express what you think.” And so people do—in chalk, or scratching with keys (Cave 2013). Now that active participation is such a prominent aspect of visiting contemporary memorials, terms such as “viewer” and “spectator” that imply passivity no longer capture people’s experiences. By leaving tributes at a memorial, individuals can express their own feelings and establish and mark a personal connection to the site and to the individuals they are remembering. Tributes left also enrich the experience of other visitors, because they can see the active role the site continues to play in commemoration. In leaving tributes, messages or drawings and studying those left by others, people engage with a memorial in a personal, intimate way.

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Figure 2.12 Memorial to Victims of Violence, Mexico City, Gaetna-Springall Arquitectos, 2013 Source: Photograph by Sandra Pereznieto, Gaetna-Springall Arquitectos.

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FROM STRAIGHTFORWARD TO CHALLENGING THE DESIGNER OF A PUBLIC MONUMENT in the nineteenth century chose from a limited range of design possibilities. Monuments then were likely to be figurative sculptures, obelisks, columns, triumphal arches, or some combination of these elements. Sponsors very likely expected such designs, just as they expected commemorative works to affirm or even glorify the persons or events being commemorated. Developing a memorial design that pleased both the sponsor and the public was challenging and could involve lengthy negotiations, but the design possibilities and the subject matter were relatively straightforward. From the late nineteenth century onwards, designers of memorials have explored an increasingly wide range of design possibilities, proposing works that not only differed from earlier forms but that deliberately opposed and challenged them. Just as importantly, an increasing diversity of publics has called for commemoration of a widening range of subjects. Commemoration has accordingly continued to expand to a more inclusive range of subject matter, embracing themes that are both more troubling and more contested. Different social groups hold contrasting views about the persons and events that are being commemorated (Foote 1997; Levinson 1998). The moral challenges presented by a range of darker historical events, including the Holocaust and the Vietnam War, have led to widespread questioning of many of the social conventions and values of traditional commemorations. History has become more complicated. The traditional memorial forms that honored and glorified the past were increasingly inadequate to meet such challenges, generating a need for alternative, anti-monumental solutions. Memorial design has become more challenging for designers because of these significant changes in subject matter and because of the increasing array of approaches that can be adopted to address them. Unfamiliar memorial forms and disturbing subjects also present puzzles to the public. The meaning of a memorial can no longer be easily grasped by simply looking at it. Visitors have to make more of an effort to interpret meanings that are more indirectly or less precisely expressed. Increasingly, remembering is not achieved by simply viewing a sculpture but is instead an active, engaged process, requiring people to “look within themselves for memory” (Young 2000: 119). Because the design, meaning and 34

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embodied experience of many contemporary memorials are not straightforward, people face cognitive challenges as they attempt to determine their meaning, increasing the possibility of disagreements. Not surprisingly then, the public may respond with confusion or aversion, sometimes enough to prevent a memorial from being built or by requiring significant changes to its design. While the challenges that new designs present continue to be problematic, they also affirm and exemplify the affective and communicative powers of the memorial medium (Springer 1999).

BEYOND HEROISM AND HONOR Debord’s (1994) critique of spectacular society as “an enormous accumulation of positivity” is an appropriate description of the many traditional memorials that celebrate military victory and the deeds of great men. But now the scope of events and people being remembered is far broader and the reasons for commemorating more diverse. While heroism and honor continue to be themes, honoring is extended to those whose achievements and contributions once went unnoticed. Honor and celebration are joined by themes of victimization and suffering which in Germany is seen as counterbalancing the earlier accumulation of positivity (Bornhöft 2007). The shift away from heroic commemoration had already started in the late nineteenth century. The municipal leaders of Calais expected Auguste Rodin to represent as heroes those citizens who volunteered to sacrifice themselves to spare the lives of others. Instead, in The Burghers of Calais (1889), he showed their human frailty, their faces showing fear and despair. War memorials increasingly depicted ordinary soldiers, and not only decorated officers (Mosse 1990; Gillis 1994). The bronze relief at the Robert Gould Shaw and Massachusetts Regiment Memorial in Boston (1897) shows soldiers marching in step, with their commander on horseback. It was the first monument to show black soldiers in uniform and its sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, depicted each one as a distinct figure with its own facial features (Savage 2001), thus capturing their individuality. Sculptors also showed soldiers in the throes of battle, tired and frightened. In one of the sculptures at the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial in Washington (architect Henry Merwin Shrady and sculptor Edward Pearce Carey, 1922), a member of the cavalry is shown falling from his horse, about to be trampled to death as his comrades appear cold and fearful, riding a cart into battle. Showing soldiers in nonheroic stances continued into recent times: at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, they look vigilant but weary, and at the Korean War Veterans Memorial, wary. The costs of war in sacrifice and loss of life also became a common theme. At the Soviet War Memorial complex in Treptow, Berlin (architect Yakov Belopolsky and sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich, 1949), the focal figure is a soldier holding a sword in one hand and a child in the other as he stands on a broken swastika. Its counterpoint, at the site’s entry, is the statue of a weeping mother, reminding visitors of the many sons lost in the war and the grief of those who mourn them (Figure 3.1). Relief panels lining the sides of the memorial court depict the citizenry’s suffering and sacrifice for the Motherland and victory. Historically, the loss of civilian lives through natural disasters and accidents has also been commemorated with memorials, as with those to the sinking of the Titanic in New York (1913) and in Southampton, England (1914), and the small 35

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Figure 3.1 Grieving Mother Homeland statue at Soviet War Memorial complex in Treptower Park, Berlin, Yevgeni Vuchetich, 1949 Source: Quentin Stevens, 2012.

memorial fountain in New York to the sinking of the General Slocum (1904). But the number of such memorials has increased in recent decades. There are now memorials to the victims of the Irish Famine in locations throughout Ireland, the US and Canada as well as in Melbourne and Sydney. It was once common for the occurrence of a fire that took a great many lives to be marked only with a plaque, such as the one at the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York, which was installed in 2011. It is now much more common for such an event to receive a large memorial. Efforts are underway to mark the site of the Shirtwaist fire more prominently. There are also memorials to the victims of epidemics, such as the AIDS Memorial Quilt and memorials to SARS in London and Hong Kong. Starting in the late twentieth century, a range of events other than wars and well-publicized tragedies were recognized as important enough in achieving social change to be acknowledged and publicized through the erection of memorials. Many of these recognized efforts to advance the rights of particular social groups, such as indigenous peoples, racial minorities, women and workers. The Civil Rights movement and the struggles and confrontations it involved were commemorated in memorials such as the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama (Maya Lin, 1989) and Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, Alabama (1992), the sites of confrontations between police and civil rights demonstrators in 1963. The suffrage movement to win women’s rights and the achievements of women are commemorated with works in Ottawa (Women are Persons! by Barbara Paterson, 2000), Canberra (Centenary of Women’s Suffrage Commemorative Fountain by Cate Riley, Andrew Smith and Mary Stuart, 2004) and Boston (Boston Women’s Memorial, Meredith Gang Bergman, 2003), while women’s contributions to fighting 36

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World War II are commemorated in Richmond, California (Rosie the Riveter Memorial by Cheryl Barton and Susan Schwartzenberg, 2000). The achievement of workers’ rights and the establishment of an eight-hour working day is recognized in several memorials in Australia and New Zealand, as are the contributions and sacrifices workers make at the National Workers Memorial in Canberra (Johns Pilton Walker architects, 2013). Many of the recent memorials to indigenous peoples recognize their participation in war efforts, despite the severe discrimination they were often subjected to at home. Two examples are the National Aboriginal Veterans Monument in Ottawa (Noel Lloyd Pinay, 2001) and the Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism During World War II in Washington (Davis Buckley, 2000). The master plan for Reconciliation Place in Canberra (Simon Kringas, 2002) presents a broader picture of Indigenous history. Many histories that have been marginalized or hidden in mainstream historical narratives and in traditional monuments are now receiving their own memorials. In some cases, a memorial articulating a repressed history is added to an earlier memorial that represented only the “official” narrative. Such later installations that recognize extremely dark histories of slavery and lynching offer a dramatic counterpoint to those that celebrate the achievement of civil rights. Memorials to intentional acts of aggression have increased significantly in number and in the subjects they cover, but initiatives to recognize such events emerged much earlier. The 1913 National Women’s Monument in Bloemfontein, South Africa, by Frans Soff and Anton van Wouw remembers 27,000 Boer women and children who died in British concentration camps during the South African (Boer) War. A memorial in Würzburg, Germany, to civilians bombed during World War II, by Fried Heuler, was completed in 1954. It was largely in the 1980s that what could be called “victim” memorials began to proliferate. In the 1950s, Holocaust memorials were erected in countries where Jews and others had fled Nazism but such memorials only really started to become numerous in Germany in the 1980s (Young 2000). In Pretoria, South Africa, a Monument for Victims of Terrorism was dedicated in 1988, and a national Victims of Acts of Terror Memorial was unveiled in Israel in 1998. Public memorials to individual terrorist attacks began as early as those to the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and have become ever more frequent and larger after the widely publicized terrorist bombings of civilians in Oklahoma City, New York, Bali, Madrid and London. In the US, memorials are regularly created after mass shootings at schools and on college campuses. Aggressors often single out their victims based on their distinct ethnicities, sexual preferences, or religious or political beliefs. Consequently many memorials today recognize the particular identities of those groups. The first memorial to homosexual victims of oppression was dedicated in Amsterdam in 1987 (Homomonument by Karin Daan). Now there is one to gay and lesbian victims of the Holocaust in Sydney (2001) and one in Barcelona (2011), among others. After the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe opened in Berlin in 2005, additional memorials were created nearby to recognize the Nazi killing of other groups: the Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime (Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, 2008); the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe Murdered under the National Socialist Regime (Dani Karavan, 2012) and a memorial to the victims of the Nazi’s targeted killing of the mentally and physically disabled (Ursula Wilms, Heinz Hallman and Nikolaus Koliusis, 2014). 37

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Unlike the loss of life in war, the deaths of innocent victims are entirely unexpected, serve no purpose and are morally unjustifiable. The memorials blame the perpetrators as much as they mourn the victims. The unjustifiable link between the victims and the events leave both mourners and memorial designers searching for answers. The variety of losers is greater than the variety of winners and, to paraphrase Tolstoy (1917), every unhappy memorial is unhappy in its own way. The darker, negative sides of memory connect to many different, individual issues and feelings: confusion, suffering, loss, lack, guilt, remorse, anger, vengefulness, disbelief, and to a quest for explanations of what happened, why these people suffered, and what can be learned or gained from that suffering. It is difficult for a commemorative object to adequately represent the full scope of such negative and contested feelings: Commemorative rites and symbols … preserve and celebrate traditional beliefs … [These] were applicable to positive events on whose significance all could agree. In contrast … Negative events are moral traumas: they not only result in loss or failure but also evoke disagreement. (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 1991: 377, 384, citing Durkheim 1965) Accordingly, the symbolic programs and overall briefs for memorials have become increasingly complicated. Conventional design approaches, including figurative sculpture, are sometimes adopted or adapted for these new commemorative challenges. But for many subjects, particularly those that refer to highly troubling events and the intentional victimization of innocent people, traditional forms and design approaches are often seen as inadequate by memorial sponsors, the architects and artists who design them and the wider public; hence the turn to new means of expression, which themselves also pose challenges for the designers of memorials and for their audiences.

ABSTRACTION Abstraction eschews visual depictions and conventional symbols and forms, relying instead on the non-figurative and non-representational features of shape, structure and color. During the latter part of the twentieth century, these features made abstraction a popular means for designing memorials that could address changing, more controversial and uncertain attitudes toward history and its expression. Additionally, public space was becoming so saturated with an accumulation of memorials, that new approaches were needed to counter high levels of semantic crowding and stimulation which left the public increasingly blasé and made many traditional memorials effectively “invisible” (Musil 1932). The new abstract aesthetic could draw attention and make people question: saying nothing could make more of a statement. When abstraction was new in the early twentieth century, it was employed to commemorate subjects long addressed by traditional memorials, such as heroic sacrifice, suggested by the simple, stark form of the Cenotaph in London (Edwin Lutyens, 1920). Other architects and artists in the Soviet Union in particular and Europe in general employed non-representational forms to express and celebrate progressive political and cultural developments. The unbuilt Monument to the Third International 38

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by Vladimir Tatlin (1919), a spiral steel tower supporting three revolving platonic solids, is perhaps the best-known Constructivist proposal. Other key European works include Walter Gropius’ (1922) Märzgefallenen memorial in Weimar (Figure 3.2), an abstract lightning bolt commemorating trade unionists killed by right-wing extremists (Forty 2005), the floating brick panels of Mies van der Rohe’s 1926 Memorial to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Berlin, and Guiseppe Terragni’s 1933 War Memorial in Como, Italy (Amsellem 2007). Mies’s and Gropius’s memorials were destroyed by the Nazis in the 1930s, and the modernization of memorial design was largely halted by the return to traditional iconography and messages in fascism, the social realism of Stalin, and their parallels in the AngloAmerican welfare states. The many difficult, troubling and controversial events of World War II generated new reasons for adopting abstract designs for memorials. The fascist regimes that had instigated the war had put the entire concept of unified national identity in question, and had also tainted the use of figuration, and, in particular, realism, through its use in their memorial designs. The liberal societies of post-war West Germany and Italy largely sought to distance themselves from those regimes, and also from the monumental and figurative commemorative language that they had used to justify their politics (Wijsenbeek 2010). While communist regimes often employed social realism, as in the Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park in Berlin (1949), different formal and spatial vocabularies did not always align neatly with specific political dogmas (Benton 2004). The first abstract memorial that responded to the difficulties of commemorating World War II was erected immediately after the war in Italy: the Monument for the Victims of Concentration Camps at the Cimitero Monumentale in Milan (BBPR, 1945–55). This white cubic steel frame has at its center a glass box holding a metal pot containing blood-soaked earth from the Mauthausen camp, bound with barbed wire. Several white and black inscribed marble tablets are set within the white grid frame (Michalski 1998; Amsellem 2007). The 1951 Berlin Airlift Memorial (Figure 3.3) was also abstract, representing through three concrete

Figure 3.2 Denkmal der Märzgefallenen (memorial to “The March fallen,” revolutionaries killed in the Berlin uprising of 18 March 1848), Weimar Cemetery, Walter Gropius, 1922 Source: Karen A. Franck, 2014.

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Figure 3.3 Berlin Airlift Memorial, Tempelhof Airport, Eduard Ludwig, 1951 Source: Quentin Stevens, 2012.

prongs the three flight corridors by which the Allies kept that blockaded city connected to West Germany. In the international competition for a Memorial to the Unknown Political Prisoner sponsored by the US and the UK in 1953, many abstract designs were shortlisted. These proposals stand out as perhaps the earliest examples, albeit unbuilt, for a large-scale public memorial that challenged the conventions of both commemorative subjects and idioms (Marter 1994). The winning scheme by Reg Butler was a skeletal steel tower supporting intersecting rectangular frames and a central spire (Burstow 1989). The chosen scheme from the 1953 competition for the Memorial to the Victims of Deportation in Paris by Georges-Henri Pingusson followed the competition guidelines by not including any sculpture, providing instead a stark, contemplative space below ground, which was completed in 1962 (Amsellem 2007). The victorious countries in North America and Australasia were largely unscathed by World War II. These countries, with booming economies and holding generally positive, unified views of the past, faced less of a moral challenge to figurative memorial approaches. Nevertheless, experimentation with nonfigurative memorial forms began, prompted by developments in the other arts and in materials and structural engineering. For example, Eero Saarinen’s Jefferson Memorial Arch in St. Louis (1947–65) celebrates the westward expansion of the United States. This engineered abstract form is not often thought of as a memorial and its typology as a modern triumphal gateway is not completely abstract. Many of the designs submitted 40

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to the 1960 competition for a memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Washington were definitely abstract in character, including the winning design by William Pedersen and Bradford Tilney with sculptor Norman Hoberman (Creighton 1962); as originally proposed, it included no figurative representation of the president, but was never built. A second competition was held in 1966, and the winning design by Marcel Breuer (see Figure 2.3) was abstract as well, as was his 1944 proposal for a war memorial in Cambridge, Massachusetts; neither was built (Hyman 1995). It was the Vietnam War and then the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington (1982) (Plate 3.1) that significantly challenged historical national consciousness and affirmative approaches to public commemoration in the US. Australia’s first, tentative official engagement with the difficulties of history through abstract form only occurred with the 2001 design of Reconciliation Place, a commemorative site addressing the relation between settler and indigenous cultures. The increasing public commemoration of the Holocaust in Germany in the 1980s made it starkly evident that the forms and symbolism of traditional memorials were inadequate for addressing such deeply disturbing subjects. Such modern tragedies were felt to be unthinkable and unrepresentable; figuration and other precise images risked trivializing their subject (Young 1992, 2000). In addition, the broadcast media provided the general public with explicit images of such events, so that the subjects being commemorated were no longer vague or distant. Public commemorative sculpture had to provide an experience that was not a pale, archaic imitation of what the public had already seen (Foss 1986). Realistic and allegorical sculptural imagery seemed inadequate, and abstraction offered the prospect of new aesthetic, experiential and even representational potentials. Because abstract sculpture rejected much of sculpture’s formal conventions and history, and provided new aesthetic criteria, it could metonymically convey the need for new kinds of moral judgments about the past. Abstract memorials had been proposed and built well before the 1980s but the Vietnam Veterans Memorial brought a new dimension to abstraction in memorials; an interactive dimension. Maya Lin’s design intention was to invite visitors’ close physical and multisensory engagement with the memorial. In this respect the memorial drew upon minimalist sculpture of the 1960s. Minimalist sculptors sought to overcome painting’s staleness and its very restricted emphasis on vision and the flat picture plane, which enforced frontality and spatial separation of the work from the viewer. Minimalism drew inspiration from the translation into English of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological writings on people’s bodily, sensory immersion in the world (1962, 1964). Minimalist artists challenged their audiences by focusing their awareness on the complex here-and-now of the context surrounding the artwork, including their own embodied relation to it. Minimalist sculptures are intentionally simple platonic solids that prevent the viewer from becoming psychologically absorbed in trying to read and reflect upon representations and their meanings. The minimalist object is what it is; it does not denote, express or refer to any other objects. Minimalist sculptors explored an “expanded field” of practice in which sculpture is not an object that represented another object. It no longer remained separated on a pedestal, but established new spatial and representational relationships to both landscape and architecture (Krauss 1979). Because minimalist artworks offer nothing to look at, the visitor’s attention is drawn instead to their own non-visual sensory experiences, their own actions and those of other visitors and their direct, embodied experience of the physical 41

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context surrounding the artwork: in sum, what Fried (1967) calls “theatricality.” Such sculpture was an exploration of spatial relationships between people and objects that was between, opposed to, and inclusive of both architecture and landscape. The anthropomorphic size, scale and shape of many minimalist works, and their being placed directly on the floor or ground in the middle of a space where people could move close to them and around and inside them, contributed to this highly engaged, interactive dimension. The earliest minimalist artworks were placed mostly in art galleries or on private land; their “public” generally consisted of paying, voluntary, well-informed and respectful visitors (Benjamin 1936; Berger 1972). Indeed, minimalist art in galleries created a phenomenological tension because they suggested the possibility of touching but did not allow it. When minimalist artworks started to be placed into truly public settings, the relationships between sculpture, site and visitors changed, and new problems arose. Richard Serra’s infamous minimalist public artwork Tilted Arc (1981) was a 4m high x 30m long curved steel sheet which cut across the middle of Federal Plaza in New York. This sculpture presented such serious aesthetic, practical and political difficulties for public space and its users and managers that it was removed by court order in 1989, despite the artist’s and the art world’s protestations (Friedman 1995; Kelly 1996; Holman 1997). The abstraction and site-specificity of minimalism had even greater consequence when applied to memorials, which are commissioned by public bodies with the intention of commemorating particular events. The essential difficulty is that this “expanded field” of public settings and public reception deprives minimalist artworks of their auratic status as artworks, a function that had historically been communicated and enforced in public spaces by the use of pedestals (Krauss 1979; Benjamin 1936; Springer 1988). Many memorials, such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, are “not-sculpture” and “not-landscape” (Krauss 1979, 1981). The sculptural object has been incorporated into a complex landscape that visitors move over, into and through. Minimalist memorials’ lack of explanatory markings and their locations in the midst in busy public spaces mean that people who encounter them may remain unaware of their commemorative purpose. Abstraction in memorial design gave architects and artists new ways to think about the past and to memorialize it, and so helped re-enliven discussions of spaces and objects for commemoration, both in design circles and in the public at large. But for mourners and others who visit memorials, abstraction presents challenges. First, abstract memorials are difficult to interpret: they refuse to offer easy and comforting answers to the gazing visitor (Rendell 2007). The increased physical and sensory engagement that minimalist memorials in particular offer does not necessarily help visitors gain a clearer or richer understanding of history. Second, because many people who encounter abstract memorial settings do not recognize their meaning and purpose, they may use these sites in ways that conflict with the intentions of their designers and the interests of mourners, as the various activities that occur at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin illustrate. Abstract and minimalist artworks do not aid remembrance of specific details about the past, though this would seem to be one of the key purposes of constructing memorials. Many popular and academic critiques of public memorials since World War II have focused on this incomprehensibility of abstract design approaches, and their consequent insensitivity to mourners and victims (Foss 1986; Garlake 1998; Abramson 1999; Young 1999; Pickford 2005). But the broad public 42

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acceptance of projects such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which are among the most visited and most discussed memorial projects of recent decades, show that abstract memorials do offer visitors and critics valuable new ways of engaging with the past.

INVERSIONS AND ABSENCE In their positive affirmation of past events and people, traditional memorials often take the form of upright, solid objects or statues. Statues may be placed on high pedestals. Height gives them visual prominence. Whatever the form, the material is usually light-colored, such as white marble. These design qualities are employed to honor, uplift and glorify. In pursuing anti-monumental approaches that are more appropriate for commemorating loss or devastation and to express sorrow and remorse, architects and artists have explored the inverse of these qualities: objects and statues on the ground or below ground, materials of dark colors, and reflective and polished surfaces to create reflectivity and transparency. The wall at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington illustrates several of these features. Through them, its abstract form negates the common, affirmative metaphors of traditional memorials. The wall is low instead of high, it sinks below ground, its surface is dark and reflective, and the approach path is off axis instead of direct. These inversions work well to express negative feelings about the war, and loss (Sturken 1991; Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 1991; Abramson 1996; Young 1999). Loss is sometimes expressed in memorials through a visible absence of something—of buildings, objects or people (Danto 1985). This may be done explicitly by presenting the shape of what is absent, as the hollow silhouette of a soldier does in the Korean War Veterans Memorial in New York (Mac Adams, 1991) (Figure 3.4). The outline of the silhouette frames a view to the Statue of Liberty, lending an additional meaning to this absence. And every year at 10 a.m. on July 26—the time the armistice was signed—the sun shines through the silhouette, casting its light on an image of a flame in the memorial’s granite pavement. Expressing loss is a common theme in Holocaust memorials. On Grosse Hamburger Strasse in Berlin, artist Christian Boltanski made a pre-existing void, which resulted from the World War II bombing of an apartment building, into a memorial called The Missing House (1990). On the side walls of the two buildings that abut the site, he mounted panels that give the names, occupations and dates of birth and death of the residents who occupied the destroyed apartments before the Nazis took power. Many were Jewish and were deported prior to the bombing. The library shelves of the memorial Bibliothek in Berlin’s Bebelplatz (see Figure 2.8) are empty, and extensive enough to accommodate the 20,000 books burned by the Nazis at that location in 1933. Books are present but indecipherable and unreachable in the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial in Vienna (Rachael Whiteread, 2000). They are depicted with their spines turned inward, their titles invisible and the doors of this “library” lack handles, conveying the city’s cultural loss. With his winning design, “Reflecting Absence,” Michael Arad captured the loss of the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center with pools that mark their footprints. Similarly, ghostly outlines of the towers are reproduced every anniversary of the attack by two beams of blue light that reach high into the sky over Manhattan. The many empty chairs at the Oklahoma City National Memorial 43

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Figure 3.4 Korean War Veterans Memorial, New York City, Mac Adams, 1991 Source: Quentin Stevens, 2006.

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(Hans and Torrey Butzer with Sven Berg, 2000) and empty benches at the National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial (Julie Beckman and Keith Kaseman, 2008) signify the loss of a large number of individual lives. Memorial designers also use emptiness in a scenographic manner to suggest a tragic event that has just taken place. Part of Ottawa’s Peacekeeping Monument (Jack Harman, 1992) (Figure 3.5) is in the form of a destroyed town depicting the context of wartime devastation in which peacekeepers operate. For the Memorial to the Deserted, Room in Berlin (1996) artist Karl Biedermann created a kitchen table with two chairs, one tipped onto its back. This scene of a hurriedly abandoned ordinary room also evokes a violent event that is no longer visible—the forced removal of Jewish residents by the Nazis. Ottawa’s memorial Women are Persons! (Barbara Paterson, 2000) is unusual for employing absence affirmatively. Statues of five famous suffragettes stand around an empty chair, suggesting an invitation for more women to join their struggle in the future. The memorial engages the visitor, saying, what is missing here is you. In Berlin, a continuous double row of cobblestones cutting across roads, sidewalks and open spaces throughout the city marks the outer edge of the wall that once divided the city, now gone. At Bernauer Strasse, the Berlin Wall Memorial (Kolhoff and Kolhoff, 1999 and sinai and ON architektur, 2012) commemorates the Berlin Wall with a complex architectonic treatment of emptiness, incorporating different kinds of erasures and un-coverings of the past, presenting both new and old voids. It preserves the last remaining section of the inner and outer border walls in their original condition and the now-gone “death strip” in between, as well as segments of wall that have been chipped away and removed. Extending more than a kilometer on each side of the reconstructed wall, open rows of Cor-Ten steel rods

Figure 3.5 Reconciliation (Peacekeeping Monument), Ottawa, Jack Harman, 1992 Source: Quentin Stevens, 2011. Reprinted with permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, from M. Mariani and P. Barron (eds) Terrain Vague: Interstices at the Edge of the Pale, 2014, permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.

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reproduce the original wall’s alignment and height, evoking its extended division of the cityscape but allowing views and movement through. Steel strips flush with the ground reproduce the footprints of buildings that were demolished in order to build the Wall (Figure 3.6). Four tall shafts of steel evoke a watchtower. The memorial enables visitors not only to see and imagine the evacuated inter-wall zone as it once was, but also to look under, over and through it through framed “windows” of incremental sub-surface excavations of buildings, from a raised observation deck, and though the gaps between the steel rods. The grounds contain remnant foundations of tombstones removed when the adjacent cemetery was exhumed. This combined memorial and historic site conveys the evacuated terrain vague that existed there during the partition, the gradual erasure of the urban fabric that preceded it, the subsequent transgressions of the wall, and its eventual demolition. By virtue of their emptiness, voids cannot come close to conveying the totality of what is missing. The pools marking the footprints of the National September 11 Memorial do not convey the height or the appearance of the absent towers. The remnants of the Berlin Wall and the open spaces between them make what was once impenetrable totally permeable. The simplification inherent in artistic representations employed to convey loss is taken to an extreme in memorials that use absence to show nothing. Memorials with reflective surfaces evoke absence in a different manner. The large mirror wall in Hermann Ehlers Platz in Berlin is etched with the names and addresses of thousands of Jews deported from the neighborhood. This memorial can be hard to see as its mirrored surface reflects the sky, the plaza’s trees and its social uses including a regular market (see Plate 2.1). Seeing the ongoing daily life mirrored in the wall’s surface more clearly than the names of the deported victims suggests that the absence of these former residents is easily overlooked and, indeed, that daily life went on as they were being deported and murdered. Never Again Auschwitz (Jan Wolkers, 1977) is a memorial consisting of large panels of broken, mirrored glass lying flat on the grass of an Amsterdam park, reflecting only shattered images of the sky above. After the extermination of Jews at Auschwitz, Wolkers argues, the heavens can never again be seen unbroken: “the horror that took place on earth below has forever damaged it” (Wolkers 1977). When visitors come close to the wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, its black polished surface and the engraved names of the dead and missing disappear into reflections of the visitor and those nearby, directing their attention to the context, instead of the physical memorial itself. Memorials that incorporate formal inversions afford visitors more challenging sensory experiences and bodily encounters with the setting than their monumental forbears. Where traditional memorials are often designed for looking at, void memorials allow visitors to look through them and beyond, or to gaze into the memorial’s emptiness or its reflective surface, or to move inside the void space. Reflective surfaces resist being looked at, encouraging visitors instead to look at what is reflected in them—the sky, other people, themselves. Berlin’s Wall Memorial is a series of void spaces that are accessible to visitors in ways the setting it recalls never was; it is more permeable than many traditional memorials. Voids that can be occupied create a range of different spatial relationships between the visitor, the physical memorial and the things or events being represented, all of which diverge from the traditional relationship of standing to look up at something. Anti-monumental designs may also prompt different bodily movements than 46

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Figure 3.6 Outline of former Reconciliation Church at Berlin Wall Memorial, Bernauer Strasse, Berlin, sinai and ON architektur, 2012 Source: Quentin Stevens, 2012.

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traditional memorials. Whereas walking uphill toward a prominent memorial requires effort, going downhill into sunken memorials as at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is easy, and encourages visitors to accelerate. It is emerging from the memorial that takes more effort. Often anti-monumental features that present physical and perceptual challenges to visitors are intended to metonymically convey the conceptual and ideological challenges of remembering the past. Dark, sunken or empty forms can both represent and stimulate painful emotions such as sadness, defeat, grief, and guilt, in contrast to uplifting architectonic forms commonly associated with heroism and victory. Whether representational or abstract, these formal inversions are a vocabulary that serves to commemorate destruction rather than creation, victims rather than heroes, and society’s faults and weaknesses rather than its strengths (Tomberger 2007; Doss 2010). Peter Eisenman, the designer of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, intended such associations to operate below the level of consciousness. The difficulty and discomfort of moving through and occupying this site is supposed to make people reflect on why they are feeling so uncomfortable. A more radical way of achieving anti-monumentality is to make the physical form of the memorial nearly or wholly invisible. This is typically achieved by hiding the memorial underground. Such memorials that are difficult or even impossible to see require physical effort on the part of visitors to gain a glimpse, and intellectual effort to understand their meanings. Many examples are found in works in Germany that address the Holocaust. The Bibliothek is not only empty of any books but it is completely below ground, visible only through an opening in the cobblestones of Bebelplatz. In Kassel, Germany, the original 1908 pyramidal Aschrott Fountain is now an inverted shape completely below ground (Horst Hoheisel, 1988), representing the Nazis’ destruction of the original fountain because its prominent patron was Jewish, and indirectly his abduction and murder. Hoheisel proposed a different kind of invisibility for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe: to blow up the Brandenburg Gate and grind its remnants into dust that would be spread on the nearby site allocated for the memorial, thereby creating two voids (Lupu 2003). Artist Jochen Gerz has employed other methods to restrict or eliminate the visibility of a memorial. For the Memorial against Fascism, War, Violence – and for Peace and Human Rights in Harburg, Germany (1986), Gerz and his wife Esther Sahlev designed what was originally a 12-meter-high column; visitors were invited to inscribe their names into its lead surface as pledges to vigilance against fascism. Over an eight-year period, the lower part of the column was covered with a great variety of writing and graffiti, including swastikas, and it was progressively lowered into the ‘ground’ of the brick cylindrical platform where it stood. The column is now completely submerged; only a small section of it is visible from a lower plaza through a narrow window. The multi-lingual text that originally invited people to add their names to the memorial also remains (Hansen 2008). Starting in April 1990 and extending over a period of three years, Gerz and his students began to clandestinely dig up single cobblestones from the square in front of the state parliament building in Saarbrücken in order to inscribe on each the name of one of the 2,146 Jewish cemeteries destroyed by the Nazis. After carving the name, each cobblestone was replaced with the inscription facing down and thus not visible. Eventually the Parliament recognized the memorial officially and 48

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renamed this square the “Place of the Invisible Memorial,” which is the only public indication that this site is a memorial. Gerz comments: In my opinion, the traditional monument was kitsch; it was a horror show after the war. It was invented to make a glorification of an event – a victory which is good for you but bad for others. So the invisibility of our monument was like a cure. If you are representing absence, you should create absence. That same absence also permits each person to become the author of his/her own memorial work. (Callaghan 2010, n.p.) In commenting on counter-monuments, including Gerz’s work, Young makes a similar point: that such “disappearance … would return the burden of memory to those who came looking for it” (2000: 7). The use here of the expression “looking for” is significant. These memorials frustrate the gaze. Remembering is not achieved only by looking at a sculpture, but is instead an active, engaged social process, where people “look within themselves for memory” (ibid.: 119). This task of interpreting formal absence is difficult. Compared to palpable forms and texts, absences and invisibilities are harder to understand and open to more varied, and more conflicting, interpretations that connect them to a wide range of meanings and memories. Absences require what German commentators often refer to as the “work” of remembering, Erinnerungsarbeit. Often explanatory plaques are added to “empty” or invisible memorials to explain them, in contrast to straightforward object memorials that usually display enough details to tell their own story. These examples show that the challenges that contemporary memorials present to visitors do not necessarily lie in unfamiliar symbolism or formal complexity. Indeed, abstract memorials and those that employ themes of absence present challenges to understanding because of their relative lack of content. Voids encourage visitors to inquire further into the details of what is missing, because voids do not bluntly present the facts. But voids will only be perceived as absences if they provide sufficiently detailed traces to indicate what is missing and cannot be seen; they rely on the Gestalt psychology of visitors’ perceptions as well as on visitors’ knowledge of the events being commemorated. The presence of such hints often transforms the activity of commemoration into a proactive process of exploring and interpreting, but answers are not necessarily easy to find, definitive, or even available. In Berlin, officials became concerned that with the installation of the Bibliothek, visitors were offered no information at the site regarding the memorial or its purpose. So three sets of bronze plaques describing the event that occurred were set into the plaza’s cobblestone surface several meters away from the memorial (Jordan 2006). In Saarbrücken, such explanation is not provided, so searching for traces or explanations of the invisible memorial at its location is futile: commemoration lay in the actions of producing and hiding it. There may not in fact even be any writing on the underside of the cobblestones. The challenges that inversion and absence present for visitors to memorials should not be dismissed as problems or deficiencies in their design. Rather than gainsaying the very idea of commemoration, the expanding range of antimonumental memorials has broadened the potential for commemoration by offering new opportunities for visitor engagement with the physical setting as well as with the people and events being remembered. 49

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IN DIALOGUE Another design approach that makes a memorial challenging for visitors is one that contrasts with and contests the purpose and meaning of an existing memorial. The term we have chosen for such memorials—“dialogic”—captures this condition well since the new memorial enters into a conversation with an earlier memorial located nearby. Dialogic memorials reference existing commemorative works through co-location, related naming, and formal and conceptual imitations or oppositions (Springer 1999). A dialogic memorial draws critically from an existing memorial’s formal vocabulary and values, and in doing so, enriches that language by redeploying or inverting the meanings of existing forms and adding new inflections. In Germany researchers have included dialogic memorials within a larger category of works called Gegendenkmäler, though not all cases so labeled have the physically proximate pairing that is essential to dialogic memorials as we define them (Wijsenbeek 2010). The neologism Gegendenkmal emerged in the 1980s in West Germany when liberal social and artistic values began to confront a weighty, difficult legacy of Imperial and National Socialist monuments. The term first appeared in 1982 in the competition brief to create a new memorial that would directly challenge an existing work—Hamburg’s 1936 Monument to the Fallen of First Hanseatic Infantry Regiment No. 76, designed by Richard Kuöhl (Schubert 1989; Springer 1989). This massive cubic stone displayed a relief of life-size soldiers marching four abreast and an inscription in traditional Gothic script. Dubbed “the Block,” this memorial had been the subject of longstanding debate about the place of Germany’s fascist past in post-war Hamburg. The monument was generally seen to glorify war, not just to honor the fallen. Instead of simply removing the monument and thereby curbing public debate, the competition’s planners sought to reveal its original purpose and to reframe its status as a historic document. The winning proposal by Ulrich Böhme and Wulf Schneider (Figure 3.7), never built, replicates the Block’s soldiers in three-dimensional form. Reminiscent of gravestones, rows of marching soldiers step out from the monument and progressively sink into the ground to become pavers in the adjacent sidewalk (Springer 1988). A later, partly-implemented memorial counters the original monument in a different way: four expressively rendered figurative sculptures, arranged in a shattered swastika, graphically illustrate the suffering of victims of war and political repression—both citizens and soldiers. This juxtaposition of old and new works produced a new, inter-dependent ensemble that warned of the consequences of glorifying war (Schubert 1989; Garbe and Klinger 2008). James Young’s 1992 essay, “The counter-monument: memory against itself in Germany today,” introduced the German concept of Gegendenkmal, with examples, to Anglophone readers. Young translated Gegendenkmal as “countermonument,” which he used to refer to various works that incorporate features that were oppositional to traditional monuments. His two paradigmatic examples were the Gerzs’ Monument Against Fascism, War and Violence – and for Peace and Human Rights and Hoheisel’s Aschrott Fountain. Since the publication of the essay and Young’s later book The Texture of Memory (1994), researchers writing in English frequently employ the terms “counter-monument” and “counter-memorial” to refer both to what we call dialogic memorials as well as a range of other 50

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Figure 3.7 Unbuilt winning proposal for a countermemorial to Richard Kuöhl’s 1936 Monument to the Fallen of First Hanseatic Infantry Regiment No. 76 in Hamburg, Ulrich Böhme and Wulf Schneider, 1982 Source: Image courtesy of Wulf Schneider.

anti-monumental design approaches (Stevens et al. 2012). Young’s inclusive concept of counter-monument as “the monument against itself” shares a commonality with the more restrictive concept of Gegendenkmal as being dialogic. Both display “a rebellion against the conventions and traditional implications of the medium, along with the expectations derived from them” (Springer 1999: 331). A dialogic memorial may or may not incorporate design features that are antimonumental or anti-representational. Eduardo Chillida’s A House for Goethe (Figure 3.8) is anti-representational. As Wijsenbeek (2010) points out, this abstract temple in an elliptical, baroque form is an antithesis to the earlier figurative statue of Goethe that stands nearby. The statue requires less explanation because it depicts its subject literally. The limitation of such figurative works is that they are generally dirigiste, reaffirming the views of the State, and leaving visitors relatively little room for their own interpretations. Abstract memorials offer more opportunities for interpretation, though such intellectual engagement may be difficult. A House for Goethe also offers opportunities for physical engagement since visitors can enter the space it creates. With some dialogic abstract memorials, the intended link to the initial memorial may be difficult to make. The plaque next to A House for Goethe makes no mention of the earlier statue, which is not within view. Visitors are unlikely even to know that the abstract memorial has any connection to Goethe unless they read the plaque. 51

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Figure 3.8 A House for Goethe, Frankfurt, Eduardo Chillida, 1986 Source: Dontworry/Flickr, 2011.

Designers have created dialogic memorials in the US and the UK, as well as in Germany. Two US cases established dialogue with earlier war monuments in order to offer contemporaneous critiques of the Vietnam War (Wijsenbeek 2010). Ed Kienholz’s (1968) Portable War Memorial mimics the 1947 Marine Corps (Iwo Jima) War Memorial. Its blackboard “tombstone” lists the names of 475 states extinguished by World War II and provides pencils and additional space for adding names or comments, making it the first example of a memorial that explicitly encourages visitor participation and contributions (Michalski 1998). Yale University students commissioned Claes Oldenburg’s (1969) Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks to counteract an adjacent memorial to students fallen in World War I. It can be read as an anti-Vietnam War appeal to “Make love, not war!” (Springer 1988; Smith 2011). Three different statues temporarily installed on the 52

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Fourth Plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square have been dialogic with the heroic military statues on the Square’s three other plinths: Alison Lapper Pregnant (a naked disabled woman), Ecce Homo (a humble, life-sized Jesus), and Powerless Structures Fig 101 (a carefree boy on a rocking horse). Fredrick Hart’s (1984) Three Servicemen is also dialogic: the three figurative bronze soldiers stand vigil as they face the wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Figure 3.9). This sculpture was added to the original memorial in order to confront and overcome the perceived interpretive and semantic deficiencies of the wall of names. The wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is itself dialogic in another sense. Although it does not respond to an existing memorial to the same subject, it does create a dialogue with neighboring works. Its ‘V’-shape frames sightlines to two earlier, affirmative memorials to other American wars: the Washington Monument to the Revolutionary War and the Lincoln Memorial to the Civil War (Vale 2008). This axial condition clearly defines its triangulated dialogue with those other monuments. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial also contrasts thematically and experientially with these works. Its black polished surface reflects them. Its dark form sinks into the landscape rather than rising up. It encourages intimate, introspective experience rather than distant viewing (Blair et al. 1991; Sturken 1991; Abramson 1996). It is in part through these spatial, experiential means, and not just its abstraction, that it offers a dramatic contrast to the triumphal commemorations of America’s earlier wars. Dialogic memorials are also spatial; they establish spatial and semantic relationships with their counterpart memorial, and also with the bodies of visitors

Figure 3.9 Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, Maya Lin, 1982, including Three Servicemen statue, Frederick Hart, 1984 Source: Quentin Stevens, 2011.

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who experience both works. They challenge each visitor’s capacity and willingness to compare and judge statement and counter-statement and thereby realize the intended purpose of the dialogic memorial (Springer 1989). People are most likely to recognize a dialogue exists when the new memorial is in proximity to the original one, when they encounter them in one space. In addition, the emotional and intellectual effect of the dialogic relationship between the “counter” and the original monument depends upon visitors’ knowledge of the events being commemorated and their literacy regarding the symbolism used to present those events. Young’s (1999) analysis of counter-monuments—that is, anti-monumental forms—suggests that an encounter with two memorials that are obviously paired, but whose meanings are not readily intelligible, can encourage the active questioning that keeps memory alive. This is a challenge. But to meet it—to understand a dialogic pairing—requires that the visitor recognize that the two memorials are, in fact, in dialogue. Anti-monumental designs may present new views of an historical event, but they generally present only one side of the story: the lows rather than the highs, black instead of white. The question is whether a single memorial, or a single memorial complex with many elements, can tell a difficult story and express different views about it. How can memorials not just include more material, but also be more multi-vocal, more democratic? When writers want to express more than one point of view, they can use different characters. Tom Stoppard (1977) said, “I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.” Novelists now experiment with storylines that shift between different protagonists. But it is difficult for a single architect, sculptor or landscape designer to contradict himself or herself. Architectural composition is ideologically suspect, because it inevitably imposes a particular order, which demands obedience (Bataille 1930; Hollier 1992). In this context, dialogic memorials, where a new commemorative object by a different designer is installed in spatial and expressive relation to an existing object, best illustrate how a commemorative site that includes multiple objects can also admit diverse expressions, and thus make it more difficult to neatly resolve society’s views on history. The incremental history of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is perhaps the clearest illustration of a difficult, ongoing debate expressed through memorial forms. The dialogic pair of the Goethe statue and A House for Goethe is another. Both examples show a dialogue that is not just representational and conceptual; the dialogue occurs in and through space. Visitors’ attention is drawn to the setting within which both works have their dialogue, a setting in which visitors also play a role.

MULTIPLICITY Many traditional memorials are single objects that tell a relatively straightforward story, like the monolithic Washington Monument, or a group of tightly clustered objects, such as the 13 figures outside the cemetery on Berlin’s Grosse Hamburger Strasse that mark the site of a 1942 deportation of Jewish residents (Will and Mark Lammert, 1985). At many other memorials multiple physical elements are distributed within a single memorial space or dispersed across widely separated sites. Another kind of multiplicity emerges when a single memorial is mobile and is moved from one location to another. 54

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Multiple elements within a single site that bear a strong or complete resemblance to each other can express the extent of loss in physical form, as the benches do at the National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial in Washington. Or the forms may fulfill a more obscure symbolic function. The six stelae of Louis Kahn’s proposed Holocaust memorial in New York were intended to suggest the six million Jews killed, as do the six glass towers in the New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston (Stanley Saitowitz, 1995). In contrast, while the 2711 stelae of varying sizes comprising Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Figure 3.10) represent the enormity of the events it commemorates, the particular number carries no symbolic meaning. Instead their seemingly endless repetition represents the systematic and relentless carrying out of the Holocaust. The spatial extent of memorials like this one, with a repetition of elements, takes them out of the traditional realm of sculpture to what Krauss (1979) called “the complex” or “site-construction,” emphasizing that they are not sculpture forms viewed from the exterior but rather a combination of architecture and landscape, a complex spatial field through which the visitor moves. Such a multiplicity of elements in a single site can add to the richness of visitor engagement, especially their spatial experience.

Figure 3.10 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Peter Eisenman, 2005 Source: Plan by Te-Sheng Huang.

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Multiple elements spread out within spatial memorials may also be figurative sculptures. The Animals in War Memorial in London (David Backhouse, 2004) is a veritable menagerie of full-size likenesses of at least thirteen different animals, from glowworms to elephants. In other cases a variety of elements may be employed to address the needs of different groups of mourners, as illustrated by the successive adding of elements to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington from the original wall of names to, eventually, a flagpole, a statue group of soldiers, a statue group of nurses, a plaque dedicated to all those who have died as a result of their service and a planned visitors’ center. In some cases, memorial sponsors may from the very beginning seek to include a diversity of elements in an attempt to convey as much information as possible about the event being remembered. This was true of the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington which includes a field of 19 statues of soldiers of varied ethnicities and uniforms, a wall etched with over 2500 photographs of people in various roles, a flagpole, a reflecting pool, and a curbstone listing all the nations who participated. The Berlin Wall Memorial includes a range of diverse sculptural elements as well as small kiosks exhibiting text, photographs, and video and audio recordings. Absorbing and making sense of the range of information presented in these different ways can be a challenge to visitors. Incorporating numerous diverse elements within a single memorial can be a means of conveying more information. It may also be a response to the scale and complexity of the terrible events being recalled, a recognition of the diversity of victims and mourners, and a consequence of disagreements over the memorial’s subject and meanings and the appropriate means of commemorating them. Multiple elements can also represent a plurality of memories and attitudes, thereby meeting the needs of a diversity of mourners. But such goals are difficult to achieve within one overall design. Whatever the reasons for multiplicity, incorporating a diversity of elements presents a challenge for memorial designers. It can be difficult to integrate diverse elements well, both spatially and representationally. Memorials and parts of memorials may be dispersed widely across the landscape. They might be incorporated into everyday public spaces. One may come upon them unexpectedly as one is going about the practical routines of daily life. Such an encounter with a memorial that commemorates a very troubling event can be quite disturbing. If one frequents a location, one always encounters the memorial, without choice. In this way official memorials dispersed in the public realm are similar to informal memorials. One example of a widely dispersed memorial completely integrated into the fabric of public space is the Stolpersteine (Stumbling Blocks) developed by the German artist Gunther Demnig. These are small brass plaques set flush among the paving stones in the sidewalks outside building entrances. On each plaque is written the name, birthdate, and fate of an individual who had previously lived at that address and was deported and murdered by the Nazi regime. There are now more than 43,000 such plaques in over 1000 cities and towns across Germany and in 16 other countries (Demnig 2014). Some houses and streets have large numbers of these plaques, giving some sense of the scale of the atrocity. In addition to commemorating individual events, collectively these plaques inform us about a coordinated act of evil. The Places of Remembrance Memorial in Berlin Schöneberg fulfills this purpose as well: it consists of 80 different unobtrusive signs attached to lampposts throughout that suburb’s Bavarian Quarter. Each features on one side the original 56

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text and date of a Nazi law forbidding Jews to engage in normal everyday practices. The other side shows an everyday artefact or scene that refers to that particular law. The memorial’s complexity responds to the challenge of representing a large number of separate acts that contributed to the Nazi persecution of Jews. Its dispersal throughout a neighborhood and the choice of a form that resembles mundane street signs suggest in a compelling manner how this persecution constrained so many aspects of everyday life. Many of these signs are hung next to specific institutions to illuminate the roles they played in the exclusion of Jews: outside the library, a law banning Jews from borrowing books; outside a playground, a sign banning Aryan and non-Aryan children from playing together; outside the town hall, a decree invalidating Jewish-Aryan marriages; outside a church, a declaration that Christian baptism did not alter a person’s designation as a Jew (Wiedmer 1995; Till 2005). Events that warrant commemoration may have involved several, widely dispersed locations, but reaching an overall scheme for installing memorials at those various sites is difficult, requiring coordinated planning and agreement by multiple actors. The Berlin airlift of 1948–49 could have been an ideal candidate for such a distributed commemoration, because it had several well-defined takeoff sites and three landing sites in the Allied Occupation zones of West Berlin. The first memorial to this subject was installed at Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport, the Americans’ former air base, in 1951 (see Figure 3.3). The memorial’s design, colloquially known as the “hunger fork,” features three prongs that represent the three air corridors to West Berlin. At its base are listed the names of the 70 men—American, British and German––who lost their lives in the effort. It was only in 1985 that a second identical memorial was constructed, in Frankfurt, at the main American air base that had serviced Berlin. A third memorial was dedicated in 1988 in Celle, near Hanover. No plan was ever developed for a series of memorials to mark the other corridors; and no memorials were developed at Berlin’s French base, Tegel, which became Berlin’s main commercial airport, or at the British site. While the six other loading sites for the airlifts have no memorials, various replicas of the original memorial have been created in disparate locations: a miniature one topped with an eagle at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire, England, and a 10-foot high one at the National Museum of the US Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. Dispersed memorials located at the sites where the commemorated events occurred suggest there was an organizational logic behind those events and so define their locations: the Stolpersteine and the Places of Remembrance, the suffusion of evil; the Berlin airlift memorials, the logistics of provision. Commemoration of those aboard the four US airplanes that were hijacked and crashed on September 11, 2001 could also have been coordinated across the crash sites. But that would have focused on the centralized planning of the act, rather than on the individual sets of victims. Across the various memorials to the dead of September 11, many victims are remembered several times over in overlapping categories according to their township, borough or state of residence, their place of work, their profession, or the site where they died. The geographical focus is on the victims and those who miss them. Dispersed, coordinated memorials to one event maximize the number and variety of people who will engage with them and the range of messages that can be conveyed. A recent proposal for a widely distributed, coordinated set of memorials would commemorate the 2008 earthquakes in Sichuan, China, that 57

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killed approximately 70,000 people. The architecture firm, HOK Asia, proposed a series of sky-lighting projections, similar to New York’s Tribute in Light which marks the anniversary of September 11, at sites across the province, “emanating from different locales [and] interconnecting toward the epicenter, therefore symbolizing a unified China … based on the recognition that the event touched upon many communities at once” (HOK 2009: 24). Such schemes thus have the potential to recognize the distributed nature of an event and of its impact. The potential scope of dispersed memorials points to a fundamental limitation of the common practice of concentrating official remembrance at one central site, such as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, which may often be disconnected from the sites of the relevant events, and which remains distant from those who wish to mourn. This is in stark contrast to the sitespecificity and nearness of informal memorials, such as those created by mourners following the multiple London bombings on 7 July 2005. These terrorist attacks occurred on three underground trains and a bus. Three of the sites of death were within inaccessible, invisible tunnels, and the fourth was on a busy arterial street. The almost-simultaneous attacks were carefully planned to maximize disruption, by positioning them at major Underground stations at the four cardinal gateways of London’s transportation network. Temporary tributes of flowers and cards began to accumulate near the four sites, in adjacent parks and in the doorways of nearby buildings including churches and the mainline station at King’s Cross. Several years later small permanent wooden plaques were installed near each site and a centralized memorial was built in Hyde Park. The formal memorial is used for official anniversary ceremonies, but mourners continue to leave flowers at the individual attack sites. It seems fundamental to the purpose of a memorial that it provide a lasting public marker of events and people now gone; such permanence should presumably include remaining fixed at one location. Making memorial objects mobile is thus a rather surprising new approach to commemoration. This mobility opens up different relations between historical events, the passage of time, a commemorative object, meaningful relation to sites, and the localized engagement of various publics. Two examples illustrate how mobility can bring a larger audience to a memorial. Rather than people traveling to a city where a stationary memorial is located, the memorial comes to their city. The AIDS Memorial Quilt is not fixed to any particular location. The last time it was displayed in full, in 1996, it filled most of the National Mall in Washington. By 2012, it consisted of 8,000 panels, far too many to be displayed in a single location. Instead sections are exhibited in as many as 1000 indoor locations in a year (NAMES Project Foundation 2014). The Moving Wall, sometimes called “The Wall that Heals” (John Devitt, Norris Shears, Gerry Haver and others, 1984), is a half-size replica of the wall of names at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The aluminum panels that now make up the mobile wall are transported by trailer throughout the country and placed at various locations for four or five days. Ceremonies are held at the sites and visitors to this portable wall place flowers and mementos on and next to it, just as they do at the original in Washington. Other portable replicas have been created as well: the Dignity Memorial Vietnam Wall, at 3/4 size, made of faux granite panels, was set up on Pier 86 in New York next to the Intrepid Sea Air and Space Museum for 12 days in 2011 (Figure 3.11) These two American memorials focus on remembering victims; their portability brings them closer to their loved ones. 58

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Figure 3.11 Dignity Memorial Vietnam Wall, displayed on Pier 86 in New York City next to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum Source: Karen A. Franck, 2011.

Another mobile example, in Germany, focuses instead on reproaching perpetrators, warning potential perpetrators, and cautioning other people to be watchful. The Mahnender Mühlstein or Admonishing Millstone (Figure 3.12) is a portable memorial warning against violence and sexual abuse toward children. Developed by social worker Johannes Heibel in 2008, this 1.4 tonne stone wheel engraved with a biblical quotation has toured 20 different German cities, where it was placed for between one and six months in major public spaces, often directly in front of Catholic cathedrals. As with dispersed memorials, people may come upon it without warning or expectation as they move through the public space of a city. For those who cannot visit or have not visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, the Moving Wall allows them to have an approximate experience of what such a visit would bring. That was John Devitt’s intention. It also serves an educational purpose for others not familiar with the war or its cost in lives. The mobility and divisibility of the AIDS Quilt give a wide variety of people all over the country a chance to see it. The Admonishing Millstone can spread its message over a larger geographic area and thereby to a wider audience than it could at a single fixed location. In each case, the sudden appearance of a memorial at a new site gives it a degree of immediacy and novelty that a stationary memorial can only achieve when it is first erected, and so the novel memorials are more likely to capture attention. When the memorial appears in a quotidian location—the Millstone in a town square, the AIDS Quilt in the Winter Garden of New York’s 59

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Figure 3.12 Mahnender Mühlstein (Admonishing Millstone), Johannes Heibel, 2008. Displayed in the central marketplace in Trier, Germany Source: Quentin Stevens, 2012.

World Financial Center—people come across it unexpectedly and have an experience they might never have planned to have. Their sudden appearance in public space can challenge an audience that does not expect to encounter these objects’ associated meanings. The particular qualities of each site create a different context for the mobile memorial, and so visitors’ experiences of the memorial are likely to vary accordingly. Seeing the Moving Wall in the pastoral setting of a park is quite different from seeing the Dignity Memorial Wall next to the Intrepid aircraft carrier. Mobile memorials illustrate the value of commemorative installations that are permanent in their materiality but temporary in their location. One also realizes how much the surrounding setting of a memorial can shape its meaning and the visitor’s experience.

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FROM GENERAL TO PARTICULAR UNLIKE BUILDINGS, memorials only represent and communicate. With imagery and text they depict events or persons being remembered without having to provide shelter or accommodate the tasks of daily life. Recently these depictions have become more detailed and more directly informative. Rather than representing persons or events in a general way, in an allegorical manner or to convey an overall message, many contemporary memorials present an elaborate array of information. This is particularly true of large spatial memorials: by virtue of size and configuration, they can accommodate figurative sculptures and abstract forms; their ground and wall surfaces can display images and text. Although the use of such design opportunities has increased, contemporary memorials still vary in how much they “speak.” While some are relatively abstract, if not mute, others rely heavily on visual imagery and text to convey detailed information about their subject. The choices of imagery and text are significant design challenges and often generate controversy over meaning and accuracy. Achieving the particular is not easy. The history of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington illustrates the shift from the general and suggestive to the more particular and didactic. Pedersen and Tilney’s winning entry to the 1960 design competition featured eight very tall, sculpted stelae that would display excerpts from the former president’s speeches (see Figure 2.3). The architects included no visual representation of Roosevelt. Despite the architects’ subsequent agreement to add a statue of Roosevelt and to reduce the height of the tallest slab, the scale and abstraction of the design made it highly controversial and it was never built. In response to the original design, programs for subsequent design proposals required one or more images of the president (Parsons 2012). The memorial that was finally built after many revisions to its design by Lawrence Halprin, consists of four outdoor “rooms” that create a narrative sequence corresponding to Roosevelt’s four terms in office. Numerous bronze sculptures and friezes depict Roosevelt, his wife Eleanor, his dog, and scenes that capture circumstances during his presidency. Twenty-one excerpts from Roosevelt’s speeches are carved into the rough-hewn granite walls of the memorial and in a few places text appears on the paved ground surface. The memorial teaches as much as it commemorates and does so in ways that physically engage the visitor. This was precisely the designer’s intention: he intended the memorial to be an “experiential history lesson that people could grasp on their own as they walked through the site” (Halprin 1997: 7). 61

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IMAGERY Sponsors and designers draw from a rich palette of possibilities to convey information through visual imagery. Abstract forms that serve as markers, figurative sculpture, two-dimensional works and artifacts are all visual means of meeting the need for detail and didacticism in contemporary commemoration.

Markers The outstanding feature of Tilney and Pedersen’s design for the Roosevelt Memorial is eight tall, sculpted cement slabs of varying heights. The architects called these elements “shafts” and “stelae” (Creighton 1962: 51). The term stelae, which once referred to the upright stones used in ancient times as grave markers, now refers to standing stone slabs used for other kinds of dedication and commemoration as well. In his analysis of the 1960 competition for the Roosevelt Memorial, Thomas Creighton (1962) comments that “shafts” were a common and successful characteristic of many of the competition entries. Since then many memorials have included stelae or other abstract stone markers. Sometimes the total number of stelae has no intended symbolic meaning; for example, the eight stone slabs in the memorial that Pedersen and Tilney proposed and the 2,711 concrete stelae in the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. In contrast, Louis Kahn intended that the six stelae in his proposed design for a Holocaust memorial in New York represent the six million Jews killed in Europe. The 52 stainless steel pillars at the memorial to the July 7, 2005 bombings in London honor the 52 people who were killed that day (Carmody Groarke, 2009). At the National Workers Memorial in Canberra (2013), one stele represents each of the seven Australian states and territories, placed on a national map at the site of its capital. Many spatial memorials to victims, both small and large, dedicate a stele or other freestanding object to each person killed. When the markers are associated with particular individuals through the names placed upon them, they create individual memorials within the larger, collective one. Then they are reminiscent of gravestones to tend, and serve as such, giving mourners a private place to visit, to leave small tokens, photographs, potted plants, flowers or, in the Jewish tradition, small stones, The memorial to the London bombings is unusual in this regard: the stelae do not bear the victims’ names. Instead these are listed collectively on an adjacent plaque. Deciding whether to dedicate a stele to each individual, and if so, determining their size, shape and arrangement are all important design choices that contribute to the overall image of the memorial and shape the experiences of visitors and mourners. Those markers within a given memorial are usually of uniform size and shape with their arrangement creating the spatial composition of the memorial and the pattern of movement of visitors. At the September 11 Memorial in Westfield, New Jersey, the markers are low obelisks that line the edge of a pathway. At night each one is illuminated while a central glass obelisk, lit from within, displays the name of all the victims who died on September 11 (see Figure 2.7). In Old Bridge, New Jersey, each marker is a polished granite cube; each is lit from below; together they form a semicircle around a central stone stele (Figure 4.1). Their flat tops are particularly accommodating for placing small objects, flowers and photographs. 62

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Figure 4.1 Marker at Oldbridge 9/11 Memorial, Oldbridge, New Jersey, Blaise Batko, 2003 Source: Karen A. Franck, 2011.

At the Oklahoma City National Memorial (Butzer Design Partnership, 2000), one chair is dedicated to each person who died in the bombing of the Murrah Federal Office Building in 1995. Made of bronze, the 168 chairs stand on glass bases that are lit at night. They are of two sizes: full size for the adults and noticeably smaller ones for the children. The chairs face the Reflecting Pool and the other areas of the memorial. They are arranged in rows representing the nine floors of the building to indicate the location of each of the victims who was inside the building that day. At the National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial (Julie Beckman and Keith Kaseman, 2008), one granite bench, with a small pool of water beneath it that is lit at night, honors each person who died when the American Airlines Flight 77 airplane was crashed into the building (see Figure 2.4). The details of their placement and orientation convey information about each victim. The 184 sloped benches are arranged in rows according to the ages of the victims, the bench for Dana Flakenberg, 3 years old, being the first one a visitor encounters upon entering the memorial and the bench dedicated to John Yamuch, aged 71, being the last. The years of birth are also inscribed on the wall along the edge of the memorial, which rises from three inches at its lowest point to 71 inches at its highest, again marking the ages of the victims. The rows are angled to parallel the flight path of the approaching plane (Figure 4.2). In addition, the two orientations of the benches denote where the victims were killed in the attack. The benches facing the Pentagon are for those who were on board the plane while those benches facing away from the building are dedicated 63

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Figure 4.2 National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial, Washington, Julie Beckman and Keith Kaseman, 2008 Source: Plan by Te-Sheng Huang.

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to those who were killed inside the Pentagon. Each bench is engraved with a victim’s name at one end. To read the names of those who were inside the building, one faces the Pentagon; to read the names of those in the plane, one faces away from the building. The pattern for arranging of markers is a useful design tool for designers, even when the underlying rationale may not be obvious to visitors. In these formal memorials the markers only represent the victims, never the perpetrators who may also have died. At informal memorials, people sometimes attempt to include markers that recognize the perpetrators. These efforts arouse strong passions and such markers are often contested and removed. At the informal memorial to the deaths at Columbine High School in 1999, two crosses dedicated to the teenage shooters were installed alongside similar crosses for their victims (Spencer 2009). In a commemorative circle of stones created immediately after the shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007 a stone representing the shooter was repeatedly added and removed, generating extended discussion in the college paper and other public media (Grider 2011). Memorials are never intended to tell the entire story, even if that were possible. They are still places of remembrance and honoring and certain information will disrupt or undermine that mission.

Figurative Sculpture [F]igurative sculpture of a high order can particularize and humanize a vision. It speaks not in a language of generalized gestures but of life’s realities. (Halprin 1997: 20) Traditionally memorials, particularly monuments that affirm heroic acts and famous persons, have featured works of figurative sculpture, often large and imposing, to express the intended message. The works are frequently portrait sculptures of well-known figures or other persons where the specific details of the representation carry meaning. Formerly a famous figure was often clothed in attire to make some larger allegorical point and to idealize figures by clothing them in ancient garb. Horatio Greenough, commissioned to create a statue of George Washington (1841), portrayed him in a toga and sandals, his chest bare, in the pose of Jupiter, the Roman god of war. Derided by many, it remained in the rotunda of the US capitol only two years (Savage 2009). Military heroes were commonly depicted in uniform. Today, both attire and posture are also likely to convey realism and narrative detail. In the memorial Trains to Life, Trains to Death in Berlin (Frank Meisler, 2008), the two children heading toward England on a Kindertransport train are well dressed; the boy holds a suitcase and is striding forward. More children—five—are being deported east to concentration camps; their faces downcast, an open suitcase and other belongings lie behind them, discarded (Figure 4.3). After World War I, once citizens in Australian and British towns decided to have a war memorial, discussion focused on what form it should take, and, if it was to be a soldier, whether he should be shown in combat or at rest (Inglis 2008). In those days, a single male, white soldier could represent all those who fought. In contrast, contemporary memorials are often expected to represent the ethnic diversity of soldiers (as in Frederick Hart’s statue, The Three Soldiers at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial). The Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington includes 65

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Figure 4.3 Trains to Life, Trains to Death, Berlin, Frank Meisler, 2008 Source: Karen A. Franck, 2012.

19 sculptures of servicemen of different ethnicities (Frank Gaylord, 1995). In their winning competition entry the original designers of the memorial had proposed abstract and ambiguous figures, with no recognizable uniforms or facial features. It was the presence of these statues that persuaded the Korean War Veterans Memorial Board to select the design for the memorial. Subsequently the board required more realism and more narrative detail (Hagopian 2012; London 2012). As completed, the soldiers not only have different facial features but are also shown to be from different military units. Sculptors also create narrative scenes that help visitors understand the circumstances of the events being remembered: Gaylord’s soldiers are shown trudging, backs bent, wearing ponchos and different military equipment. Placing everyday objects in locations or with features that suggest particular actions, some figurative memorials omit human figures altogether and make their absence a key aspect of the narrative, possibly inviting the visitor to take the place of the missing figures. In the Oregon Holocaust Memorial in Portland, personal belongings, sculpted in bronze to scale, are strewn on a cobblestone space intended to resemble a town square (artists Tad Savinar and Paul Sutinen, 2004). Broken eyeglasses, a battered suitcase, a violin, a menorah and a teddy bear appear to have been left behind in haste; the owners are nowhere to be seen. Those who know something about the Holocaust see, quickly, the beginning of a journey to a Nazi concentration camp. At the Irish Famine Memorial in Sydney (Hossein and Angela Valamanesh, 1999), a rotated wall bisects a worn wooden table, set on one side with a spoon and an empty bowl that is void at its base (Figure 4.4). A glass insert displays names of some of the 4,000 destitute young women who immigrated 66

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Figure 4.4 Monument to the Great Irish Famine, Sydney, Hossein and Angela Valamanesh, 1999 Source: Quentin Stevens, 2013.

to Australia. In each of these examples, the presence, character and placement of everyday objects are props for a scene that has just taken place or, if the visitor joins the scene, is ongoing. In the Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, Alabama, that commemorates the Civil Rights movement, a path through the sculpture Police Dog Attack (James Drake, 1993) forces the visitor to maneuver around the snarling, leaping dogs. Although the decision to include realistic representations of people is straightforward, it often leads to more challenging and publicly contested decisions: what exactly to depict and how; which person(s), in what pose, in what clothing, with what expression and, where relevant, of what age and ethnicity. In his design, Lawrence Halprin excluded any depiction of Roosevelt in a wheelchair, based on the argument that he never appeared publicly that way. Under intense pressure from the disabled community, Congress passed a resolution requiring such a sculpture be added. The sculpture by Lei Yixin (2011) of Martin Luther King in the memorial to him in Washington shows the Civil Rights leader with his arms folded across his chest. While the stance was taken from a well-known photograph of King standing at his desk, this pose and his stern expression have been critiqued for being out of keeping with his usually open stance when speaking. Frank Gehry’s (2012) proposal for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington features a statue showing the president when he was a barefoot farm boy in Kansas, gazing upon images of his later accomplishments, which taken together suggest his origins and the trajectory of his life. His descendants and the National Civic Art Society, however, have found this depiction demeaning to the president, diminishing the value of his achievements, and have continuously contested the design. While highly abstract forms whose message is ambiguous can generate controversy, so can highly realistic representations that convey what many believe are the wrong 67

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details—wrong because they are factually inaccurate or because they convey the wrong meaning.

Two-Dimensional Images Two-dimensional images in memorials are engraved or taken from photographs and then etched or sandblasted onto wall surfaces. Required to include a representation of Roosevelt, Marcel Breuer proposed one image of him sandblasted on a granite surface (Hyman 1995). September 11 memorials in several New Jersey towns display photographic, sandblasted images on granite surfaces of local residents who died in the attack. Etched into the reflective surface of the granite wall of the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington are 2,400 images taken from archival photographs (Figure 4.5). They depict the diversity of those who fought in the war and of those who aided the war effort in Korea. Rather than depicting just US soldiers, the array includes anonymous images of Korean soldiers and many support personnel: chaplains of various denominations, doctors, nurses, orderlies, construction workers, cooks, radio operators and press reporters. At Australia’s national Vietnam War Memorial in Canberra (architects Tonkin Zulaikha Harford and sculptor Ken Unsworth, 1992), a single massive screen print from a newspaper photograph of a helicopter landing to collect troops, mounted at eye level, depicts the experience of soldiers in the field. The New Zealand Memorial in London (Paul Dibble and John Hardwicke-Smith, 2006) displays

Figure 4.5 Korean War Veterans Memorial, Washington, sculptor Frank Gaylord and Cooper-Lecky Architects, 1992. The wall’s polished surface reflects the sculptures of soldiers and visitors Source: Karen A. Franck, 2014.

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an abundance of two- and three-dimensional motifs of war, New Zealand, and its relation with Britain: birds, a fern leaf, a cabbage tree, Anzac poppies, the blade of a saw, a rugby ball, a flag, a canoe, airplanes, Maori symbols and a farmer. Memorial walls and the surfaces of stelae or other objects provide an easily available hard surface for two-dimensional images; in this way, they do not take up additional space as sculptures might. However, for the Eisenhower Memorial, Frank Gehry proposed 80-foot high woven metal screens, or “tapestries,” showing images of Eisenhower’s childhood home and the landscape of the Midwest. These have been the object of intense criticism as well as praise (Pedersen 2014). Images figure prominently among the tributes people leave at informal memorials: typically, they are photographs of the victims or newspaper photographs, and, more rarely, handmade drawings and other artworks (Plate 4.1), Photographs of those who have been killed in acts of violence are frequently left at informal memorials that mark the event. After September 11, 2001, vertical surfaces throughout New York were covered with posters of the missing, showing recent color photographs. Also common were drawings featuring the Twin Towers, often with a religious theme such as an angel carrying them or Christ bearing them on his shoulders.

Artifacts Urban memorials located at sites of destruction rarely show any material traces of the past event. In Oklahoma City, at the Pentagon and at the National September 11 Memorial, there is no evidence of ruin or physical damage. While the sites of destruction are marked, they appear whole and pristine. In both Oklahoma City and New York, a “survivor tree” may show some wear but it lives. A different way to give visitors a visceral sense of the consequences of the past event is to incorporate discrete artifacts that give visual as well as tactile evidence of the damage done. At Lands End in San Francisco, the USS San Francisco Memorial commemorates the bravery and the lives lost on that ship during the devastating World War II battle at Guadalcanal. The heavily damaged right and left wings of the ship’s bridge, oriented in the direction of the battle, frame a stone terrace. One can see and touch the jagged holes where shells tore through or the places where the heavy steel is bent or warped. At many September 11 memorials throughout the US and in other countries a similar objective is evident: to show in touchable, material form the damage wrought. Steel fragments of varying sizes and shapes––burnt, twisted, chipped, rusted—from the structure of the Twin Towers form all or parts of these memorials. The Port Authority makes these remnants available, from its storage in an JFK airplane hangar, to any group able to pay for their transport with the organization’s commitment to make them part of a memorial that is open to the public and free of charge. More than one thousand pieces have been distributed, ranging from 6 inches to 53 feet. On the Jersey City waterfront, facing the World Trade Center, one section of a rusted truss with protruding bolts, placed horizontally, constitutes the memorial form, set on a stone terrace. One can touch its rough surface; visitors hang rosaries and other items from the bolts (Figure 4.6). In the September 11 Memorial in Closter, New Jersey, a fragment from the World Trade Center plays a special role in recognizing the anniversary of the attack. Every year on September 11 at 8:46 a.m., the time the first plane struck the North Tower, a 69

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Figure 4.6 Jersey City 9/11 Memorial, Jersey City, 2002 Source: Karen A. Franck, 2011.

beam of sunlight passes through a small opening in a tall granite slab to illuminate the polished, warped piece of steel embedded in the blue-stone surface of the memorial. Family members of September 11 victims were very keen that The Sphere, a 25-foot high bronze sculpture designed by Fritz Koening to symbolize world peace, be given a prominent place in the World Trade Center Memorial. This artwork stood on the plaza between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center before the attack. It now has a large gash marking its exposure to the event. As a poignant symbol of resiliency and survival, it was rescued from the debris and served, with an eternal flame, as a well-visited interim memorial in Battery Park. Stored temporarily to accommodate park renovations in 2012, it has been re-installed near the earlier park location. Despite all efforts by supporters and an online petition, it will not be returned to the World Trade Center. Other large-scale and symbolically significant remnants of the World Trade Center complex, including the Survivors’ Stair and a section of the slurry wall that holds the Hudson River from flowing below the buildings, are on display below ground in the September 11 Memorial Museum, but none appears on the outdoor plaza. The intention, above ground, is to present a fully intact, serene space where the disastrous physical effects of the event may be remembered but not viewed (or touched). The particulars have been carefully segregated: the physical evidence, which may be more troubling, is either at another location or below ground to be seen with more effort and an entrance fee. 70

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One artifact preserved in the Oklahoma City Memorial is the chain link construction fence that served as a much-visited interim memorial until the permanent memorial was completed. The designers proposed that sections of that fence, coated in green plastic, be placed inside the memorial grounds, but family members had become very attached to the original fence, in its entirety, so it was moved section by section to a location next to the western gate, outside the memorial grounds proper, and continues to serve as a memorial where people leave tributes (Linenthal 2001). As in other examples, the history of the fence illustrates how attached people become to everyday, sometimes unsightly, objects that have acquired symbolic meaning through their relationship with the remembered event. Some artifacts are much smaller in scale and have a different origin: these are the ones victims leave behind or, more often, ones that mourners and visitors bring to a commemorative site. Before reaching the World Trade Center after the September 11 attack, firefighters changed into their boots next to St Paul’s Chapel and left their shoes on the spikes of the graveyard fence. The shoes that were never reclaimed remained for many weeks on the fence, a powerful reminder of who had not returned. Like the empty chairs at the Oklahoma City Memorial, shoes evoke in a highly visceral way the absence of individuals—one for each pair. Following the bombing at the Boston Marathon, many pairs of running shoes were brought to informal memorials (Figure 4.7). Those shoes demonstrate another characteristic of some informal memorials: that the artifacts contributed may be specialized—having a particular connection to the person or event being remembered, possibly being items mourners imagine the victims still need or would appreciate. In Oklahoma City, teddy bears and angels figured significantly; sometimes angel wings were attached to the stuffed animals. The bears, dolls, clothes and toys may have been gifts to the children themselves. Many people fashioned crosses, using sticks, bits of plastic or crocheting them. These became a

Figure 4.7 Informal memorial at site of April 2013 Boston Marathon bombing Source: Te-Sheng Huang, 2013.

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tradition at the site (Jorgensen-Earp and Lanzilotti 1998). At Columbine High School in Colorado, people left objects characteristic of high school students, including athletic equipment, school jerseys and letter sweaters (Doss 2002). Mourners also bring artifacts to memorials for their relevance to a particular victim. At Angels’ Circle on Staten Island, a memorial dedicated to residents of the island who lost their lives on September 11, small stone angels are placed at many of the individual memorials, showing a commonality among the victims, many of whom were Irish Catholics (Plate 4.2). Just as frequently small tokens suggest the responsibilities or passions of a single individual: a firefighter’s helmet, a miniature football, a golf ball, running shoes. As tokens of grief and remembrance and possibly as gifts to the deceased, artifacts bring a rich layer of specificity and immediacy to both formal and informal memorials. They are direct, unmediated expressions of emotion and so, in a kind of transference, bring the reality of the event closer to the people who bring them as well as to other visitors. The informal memorial is rich in this detail and specificity. And the formal memorial is no longer either general or abstract; with intimate additions, the event and its influence on the lives of others come alive, an effect a formal memorial without tributes cannot achieve.

TEXT My incorporation of text … requires the viewer to read the work. (Lin 2000: 205) Even though memorials are first and foremost designed objects and spaces and thus rely primarily on visual imagery, they also display increasing amounts of written text. Consequently, text becomes as much of a design issue and a possible source of controversy as other more formalist concerns. On Whitehall in London, two war memorials illustrate the shift from the general to the more particular and more informative as achieved through text as well as imagery. The Cenotaph (Edward Lutyens, 1920), originally built to honor British soldiers who died in World War I, is extremely simple: a stepped pylon supporting an empty coffin, all carved in stone and embellished only with a stone wreath at each end and a smaller one on top. This formal simplicity is matched by the memorial’s textual constraint. When it was built, only three words—“THE GLORIOUS DEAD”—and the dates of World War I in roman numerals were engraved at each end. When the memorial became the chosen location for honoring those who died in World War II as well, the dates of that war were added but no other changes were made to the original memorial. Further down Whitehall, mimicking the overall shape of the Cenotaph but without its stepped character and sloping sides, a bronze sculpture features the clothing of women who, in many different ways, contributed to the war effort (John W. Mills, 2005). On each long side appears: “THE WOMEN OF WORLD WAR II.” On the south end, a plaque reads: “THIS MEMORIAL WAS RAISED TO COMMEMORATE THE VITAL WORK DONE BY OVER SEVEN MILLION WOMEN DURING WORLD WAR II. FUNDED BY THE CHARITY MEMORIAL TO THE WOMEN OF WORLD WAR II AND SUPPORTED BY NATIONAL HERITAGE MEMORIAL FUND.” And on the north end: “UNVEILED BY HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN, 9TH JULY 2005.” 72

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Inscriptions, Explanations, Reflections The three words on the Cenotaph both dedicate it and suggest its purpose without additional explanations of who the “dead” are, how many there were or where they died. Except for the dates of the two wars, and six United Kingdom flags, the memorial imparts no additional information. In this respect the memorial’s silence achieves a high degree of inclusivity as well as eloquence. In other memorials as well, a few words or a short statement are composed or chosen for an inspiring inscription to express a strong feeling or belief in universal terms. Art critic, Royal Cortissoz, a friend of the memorial’s architect Henry Bacon, wrote the dedication for the Lincoln Memorial: “IN THIS TEMPLE AS IN THE HEARTS OF THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM HE SAVED THE UNION THE MEMORY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN IS ENSHRINED FOREVER.” Christopher Thomas points out that the reference to the People “is an abstraction and Union is the governing idea of the memorial” (2002: 130). The inscription chosen for a memorial may also be a quotation. On the Stone of Remembrance in the sanctuary at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, only five words are engraved: “GREATER LOVE HATH NO MAN.” Many visitors, however, may not know the rest of the passage from Jesus’s words in the Bible: “… than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (Inglis 2008). Sometimes physical design features concretize the metaphorical language of an inscription. At the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama (Maya Lin, 1989), water rushes down a wall over a quotation from Martin Luther King, Jr.: “… UNTIL JUSTICE ROLLS DOWN LIKE WATER AND RIGHTEOUSNESS LIKE A MIGHTY STREAM.” Commemorative inscriptions may also take the tone of admonition as in the phrase taken from Rudyard Kipling that appears on many war memorials in Australia and Great Britain: “LEST WE FORGET.” When a memorial’s design is considered too ambiguous or too confusing, explanatory text may be added. Other than the names of the Americans in the military who died and the beginning and ending dates of US engagement in Vietnam, Maya Lin proposed no text for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. After her design was selected, the sponsor (the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund) decided to inscribe two separate texts at the apex of the wall. One dedicates the memorial and explains who is named and in what order: IN HONOR OF THE MEN AND WOMEN OF THE ARMED FORCES OF THE UNITED STATES WHO SERVED IN THE VIETNAM WAR. THE NAMES OF THOSE WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES AND THOSE WHO REMAIN MISSING ARE INSCRIBED IN THE ORDER THEY WERE TAKEN FROM US.

The second description describes a more general intent and specifies the source of funding: “OUR NATION REMEMBERS THE COURAGE, SACRIFICE AND DEVOTION TO DUTY AND COUNTRY OF ITS VIETNAM VETERANS. THIS MEMORIAL WAS BUILT WITH PRIVATE CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.” While Maya Lin imagined the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall as an open book, earlier and subsequent memorials capture the qualities of a book more literally by displaying passages of text for visitors to stand and read. In memorials to famous figures known for their oratory, excerpts are often taken from their speeches. At the Lincoln Memorial, two speeches appear in their entirety: the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. The choice of these 73

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texts, and not the Emancipation Proclamation, fulfills the intended purpose of the memorial—to celebrate Lincoln as the savior of the Union, not as the emancipator of slaves. Excerpts from President Roosevelt’s speeches in two memorials also illustrate how the choice of passages emphasizes particular aspects of history and not others, helping to set the tone of the memorial. Kirk Savage notes that excerpts from Roosevelt’s Pearl Harbor Speech at the World War II Memorial in Washington refer to “RIGHTEOUS MIGHT” and “ABSOLUTE VICTORY.” In sharp contrast, at the memorial to Roosevelt, an inscription in very large letters from a 1936 speech— “I HATE WAR”–– appears on one wall and is repeated in the same large font on the adjacent fallen stones, becoming a refrain (Savage 2009: 306). Given their significance in shaping a memorial’s meaning, the choice of passages poses a challenge for sponsors and designers. Lawrence Halprin turned to William Leuchtenburg, an FDR scholar, to help select the texts for the Roosevelt Memorial (Parsons 2012) but the final choices seem to have been largely his as designer of the memorial. This was not the case with the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial where the sponsoring organization, the National Memorial Project Foundation, made all final selections after soliciting suggestions from Clayborne Carson, the editor of King’s published papers, and then from a council of 12 African American historians and scholars. All were required to follow specific requirements regarding content and length—no more than 30 words (Carson 2011). The one recommendation that the designers of the memorial, Roma Design Group, made for an inscription—an excerpt from the “I Have a Dream Speech”—was rejected. Far more publicly controversial, however, was the editing of a passage that misrepresented the point King had made but was nonetheless engraved on one side of the sculpture of him. The mangling of his original statement, which the sponsors believed was too lengthy to be engraved in full, aroused sufficient outrage that the passage was removed completely in 2013 and not replaced. Yet the National Park Service Rangers who give tours of the site still tell the story of the original edited quotation, the outrage, its removal and point to the now blank space. In these examples words are engraved on vertical surfaces. Excerpts from speeches are also placed in less noticeable and honorific locations, nearly melting into the everyday urban landscape. One example is the memorial at RosaLuxemburg-Platz in Berlin (Hans Haacke, 2006): 60 brief excerpts from Rosa Luxemburg’s speeches appear on diagonal brass strips that are embedded into the ground surface and stretch across sidewalks and sometimes extend over the curb onto the street. Here the quotations constitute the entirety of the memorial. In the Lincoln Memorial, Lincoln’s speeches appear single space and without margins, requiring the visitor’s sustained attention and concentration, looking upward. At the Roosevelt Memorial and the King Memorial, the passages are quite short, at eye level, carved with ample space around them, making them easier and quicker to read. In their length and design, they appear more like headlines than passages from books or text printed on paper. Many dedicatory and aspirational inscriptions on memorials are taken from the speeches of well-known sources and individuals, representing a single voice and a single point of view. The passages may be already well known and in this way they have a public, collective quality. They often touch on universal, commonly held beliefs or aspirations that are relevant to the subject of the memorial but also relevant to other subjects as well. Other quotations on memorials are from anonymous individuals and are of a more personal nature. When there are several, 74

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they represent a diversity of voices. What is referred to may also be more closely connected to the memorial’s subject. Sometimes they capture the thoughts and reflections of those to whom the memorial is dedicated that were recorded during the time of the event that is being commemorated. At the Memorial to JapaneseAmerican Patriotism in World War II in Washington, excerpts from letters written by Japanese-American soldiers who volunteered for the US military are engraved on prominent walls. These bring an immediacy and intimacy to what may otherwise feel more like an impersonal history lesson. Or the quoted text may be quite mundane as at the Australian Vietnam Forces National Memorial in Canberra (Tonkin Zulaikha Harford and sculptor Ken Unsworth, 1992). One wall displays excerpts from typical radio conversations during battle and eyewitness descriptions of events as well as official statements of fact about the war. The pattern of this text—angled scattering across the wall—and the frequent use of acronyms (“RPGs” or “CO”) and idiomatic expressions (“throw smoke”) can leave the visitor slightly bewildered, requiring an effort of interpretation. For the memorial to the students killed at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999, “each of the victim’s families were asked to provide a unique and personal reflection … that would honor their loved ones” (Columbine Memorial Foundation 2014). Some families described characteristics of the ones they had lost, and expressed feelings of love and sorrow and strong religious beliefs, often directed to the victim. Others made overt political statements. One father wrote: “My son, in a Nation that legalized the killing of innocent children in the womb, in a country that would lie and cover up what they knew and what they did, in a Godless school your life was taken … Dan, I’m sorry.” On granite plaques set into the Healing Wall of the Columbine Memorial are memories and comments taken from anonymous interviews with students, teachers, the injured and other community members. One inscription reads “I would be misleading you if I said I understand this. I don’t.” Another student remembers: “My friend was laughing and then it turned into crying and I thought, my god, why is this happening to us?” For the September 11 Memorial in Westwood, New Jersey, family members of each victim composed their own texts; these vary in tone and content. The beginning of one resembles a resume, listing the person’s professional positions. It praises his accomplishments as an engineer in detail and his love of family more briefly. Another lists the victim’s familial relationships and refers to his enjoyment of the “simple pleasures of life.” Indeed, all the texts refer to relationships with family members, their mutual love, and feelings of grief—sentiments that are not usually expressed in texts about individual victims at memorials that commonly follow a uniform format with content composed of facts rather than feelings or beliefs. These personal reminiscences call to mind the personal notes and letters many people leave at memorials, addressed to the dead and to the living. At informal memorials, members of the public express condolences, feelings of grief, prayers, patriotism, belief in God, as well as interpretations of the event and exhortations about the future. What they say varies by both the type of event and how it is being interpreted in that location, with religious meanings and implications predominating in some locations and more political ones in others. Whether few or plentiful, the texts left at informal memorials, including store-bought condolence cards, are constitutive elements of the memorials themselves. At formal memorials, such texts add a more personal, more immediately emotional and more hand-made layer to the memorial as designed. In his book, Letters on the Wall, Michael Sofarelli comments 75

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that the most frequent contributions left at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial are “written mementoes.” He recalls kneeling down to read the small piece of paper a young boy had left at the base of the wall: “In a child’s handwriting, the red crayon read simply ‘Happy Birthday Grandpa’” (Sofarelli 2006: xvi).

About Events and Places Text can also be more factual, providing information about the memorial’s subject. Such text may give visitors a kind of history lesson. Three paragraphs at the National Japanese-American Memorial to Patriotism during World War II describe the deportation of Japanese Americans to interment camps, the willingness of young men in these camps to volunteer for military service, the subsequent recognition that the internment was a serious injustice and the apology extended by President Reagan. In contrast, text elsewhere in the memorial is more impassioned: “JAPANESE BY BLOOD, HEARTS AND MINDS, AMERICAN WITH HONOR UNBOWED BORE THE STING OF INJUSTICE FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS.” Designers also use events and dates to compose a narrative that is a central feature of the memorial, integrated with the design of an object or a space, rather than playing a supplementary role. For the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama (1989), Maya Lin designed an elliptical granite table. On its surface, following its outer rim is a circular timeline giving a history of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. It identifies 53 key events, including the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 and the Brown vs. Board of Education court decision in 1956 that mandated school desegregation. In between, in irregular intervals are the names and details of 40 people murdered, beginning with: “28 AUG 1955. EMMET LOUIS TILL. YOUTH MURDERED FOR SPEAKING TO A WHITE WOMAN. MONEY, MS.” The interspersing of larger-scale historic events with individual deaths (and their shocking circumstances) tells a powerful story of what was achieved but at what cost; the personal is closely tied to the political, all presented simply with relatively few words and dates. Lin relied on historians and the Southern Poverty Law Center to recommend what text to include and then she worked with them to “edit the text. I wanted it to tell the history without becoming too emotional or sensational” (Lin 2000: 4–28). Text of events and dates may also present a wider context for what is being memorialized, as at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Portland (Walker Macy Landscape Architects, 1987). Here groups of soldiers’ names, organized by time period, are accompanied by short descriptions, first about US involvement in Vietnam and then descriptions of local events that occurred in those years in Oregon. The memorial states: “While the war raged in Vietnam day to day life in Oregon continued. Recorded on these panels is a random selection of happenings which took place in the towns and countryside from which the men named here come and would not see again.” The memorial attempts to tell a narrative of death accompanied by commonplace events that were occurring at home during that time. Unlike the memorial in Portland, text etched into the translucent glass wall at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in New York (architects Peter Wormser and William Fellows and writer Joseph Ferrandino, 1985) touches on the turmoil that was occurring at home, presenting a more troublesome context for the war. Excerpts taken from letters to and from soldiers and diary entries are interspersed with selections from New York Times articles that refer to the assassination of 76

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Robert Kennedy and the killing of students at Kent State. And one soldier writes on November 16, 1968: “Dear Mom, I worry about the war back home more than I do about my own life over here. What good is the peace we accomplish here if we don’t have peace in our own back yards?” Names of places present another kind of commemorative and informative text. Sometimes a list of places is a relatively small feature as at the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington, where a low stone curb, facing the wall of quotations, lists alphabetically the names of the 22 countries in the UN coalition, in addition to the US, that gave military or medical support, and the number of casualties each country suffered. At the Australian War Memorial in London (Tonkin Zulaikha Greer Architects and artist Janet Laurence, 2003), the names of places are an integral part of the design and tell a complex story that requires a visitor’s careful attention to decipher. The face of the memorial displays two lists of places (Figure 4.8). Approaching the memorial from a distance, one can read in a large font, projecting from the face of the stone, the names of all 47 foreign battlefields where soldiers fought. Some names are familiar (Ypres, Tobruk). Others stimulate thoughts about where Australian soldiers were fighting and why. As one moves closer, this text blurs, and one starts to recognize a smaller-scale text incised into the stone that includes the names of all the 23,844 hometowns of soldiers. The superimposition of the two sets of place names allows visitors to imagine various individual geographies of the journey of war service, from home to the unfamiliar place of death. Visitors can start to recognize the names of places they themselves have lived or visited, to recognize that people just like them went to these other foreign places to fight. Eventually one starts to notice that among the names of hometowns are many towns outside Australia, particularly in Europe, and even in some cases towns in the enemy countries. One realizes that Australian soldiers were often

Figure 4.8 Australian War Memorial, London, Tonkin Zulaikha Greer Architects and artist Janet Laurence, 2003 Source: Quentin Stevens, 2012.

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immigrants who went to Europe to fight in the interests of their adopted home. The text is more than information; it is a story about what kinds of people went to fight, where, and why. Place names can also reveal a different kind of tragic geography—one of deportation. The names of the internment camps to which Japanese Americans were deported are engraved on a wall in the Memorial to Japanese-American Patriotism in World War II in Washington, along with the battles in which Japanese Americans fought. At Track 17 in Grunewald, on the edge of the metal platform next to the train tracks, the dates of departure, the destination and the number of Jews on each train are given in chronological sequence. The Stolpersteine, embedded in sidewalks of streets throughout Europe, give the names of the concentration camps to which residents of the adjacent buildings were taken and subsequently murdered, along with the resident’s name and date of birth and deportation.

About People It is now so common for memorials to identify all commemorated individuals by name that any listing may well be expected to be a complete record rather than a symbolic representation. This is suggested by a short message in red print on the website for the Irish Famine Memorial in Sydney: “400 of over 4000 names appear on the memorial and because it is an artwork it is not possible to add or remove the names” (Irish Famine Memorial 2011). Sometimes the contemporary importance given to recognizing the individual identities of those who are being honored, and to make the historical record more complete and more respectful, leads to the adding of names to an existing memorial. The original design of the Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Regiment Memorial in Boston (Saint-Gaudens, 1897), which commemorates the lives of Col. Shaw and the black soldiers he led who died with him in the assault on Fort Wagner during the Civil War, bore no names of those soldiers. In 1981, their names were added to the back of the monument, facing the Boston Common along with additional text describing the difficulties black soldiers faced (Shackel 2003). The tradition of listing soldiers’ names on war memorials began in the US after the Civil War, in Australia after the Boer War in 1903, and in England after World War I. Names on memorials from those periods appear in small, raised type listed very closely to each other on metal plaques. These plaques often appear below a figurative sculpture or other sculpted work or are simply embedded in a stone boulder. In their design and placement, the names are a relatively modest feature of the memorial. In Australia, more often than in other countries, the memorials list all those who served, whether they died or survived (Inglis 2008). After World War I, the Allied forces decided to commemorate each of their fallen soldiers in Europe by engraving his name on a gravestone or, when the body could not be found or the remains identified, engraving his name on a collective monument. One example is the towering memorial arches at Thiepval, designed by Edwin Lutyens (1924), that honors the 73,367 soldiers who died in the Battle of the Somme (Hawkins 1993). The names are listed alphabetically, without rank, on the inside surface of the arches. In the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne (1930), the names of all those from Victoria who volunteered to fight in World War I are handwritten in elegant calligraphy in 42 notebooks. Each of these Books of 78

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Remembrance is encased in a locked, illuminated glass vitrine in the very quiet and dimly lit ambulatory around the focal point of the memorial—the Sanctuary. If a visitor wishes to find a particular name, a Shrine staff member who is always present, unlocks the appropriate vitrine and, wearing gloves, looks for the name. So the individual names are present and of great symbolic significance in a collective sense but they are only visible on an individual basis and never all at once. At the Australian Vietnam Forces National Memorial in Canberra, the names of those who died are visible to no one: they are written on a scroll that is sealed inside an elevated steel ring. Given a list of names that are to be visible to all, sponsors and designers of a memorial to soldiers or victims must decide where to place the names, in what sequence and with what additional information about each person The expanse of names at Thiepval, seeming never-ending, like the expanse of gravestones at World War I battlefields, powerfully captures the extent of loss of life. But the names are displayed high above visitors, far out of reach. At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, the extent of names also gives a clear sense of the extent of death. At the same time many of the names are within reach and so can serve as individual memorials within the larger collective. The placing of names on the flat surface of a wall has become nearly ubiquitous in contemporary memorials, with the exception of memorials where each name appears on a freestanding marker. According to Maya Lin, Lutyens’s design inspired her design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, yet her design is dramatically different from his. As she designed it, the memorial is, nearly equally, the wall and the names on it. The competition brief for the memorial required a listing of all US military personnel who died or were missing in action and specified that no ranks would be given. Many criticized these features of Lin’s design without realizing that they were requirements given by the sponsor. The genius of her arrangement was to list the names not alphabetically (which was the common practice in war memorials) but chronologically by day and year of death. However, these individual dates are not listed on the memorial. Since within any given day the names are alphabetical, one can tell when the next day starts, thereby seeing, for instance, the high death toll during the Tet Offensive. The chronological listing creates a narrative of the war and a pattern of relationships: those who died on the same day may well have been in the same unit and known each other (McLeod 1989). Veterans can locate a name and recognize others who died in the same battle. Lin fought hard to keep the timeline arrangement, seeing it as the “real time experience of the place.” She imagined that “a returning veteran would be able to find his or her time of service when finding a friend’s name” (Lin 2000). The grouping of names tells a different story at the Spiegelwand (Mirror Wall) in the Steglitz neighborhood of Berlin (Wolfgang Gorschel, Joachim v. Rosenberg and Hans-Norbert Burkart, 1995). Here the names of Jewish residents deported from the neighborhood are listed according to the car and train on which they were deported, all information taken from the meticulous records the Nazis kept (Figure 4.9). Again, a narrative is told and a pattern of relationships suggested. One of the most difficult decisions Michael Arad faced in designing the National September 11 Memorial in New York was the placement and sequencing of names and what additional information to include about the victims. In his initial design statement, written with landscape architect Peter Walker, architect Michael Arad proposed that the names should be ordered in a “haphazard” sequence to 79

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Figure 4.9 Detail of text, Spiegelwand, Berlin, Wolfgang Gorschel, Joachim v. Rosenberg and Hans-Norbert Burkart, 1995 Source: Quentin Stevens, 2012.

reflect the “haphazard brutality of the attacks” with insignia attached to names of first responders (Blais and Rasic 2011: 162). Families of those lost protested this proposal but among them conflicts arose. Families of first responders wanted their relatives’ names listed together with their fallen colleagues, not interspersed throughout; many wanted ranks inscribed with the names. Families of other victims felt that any insignia implied a hierarchy, counter to the Lower Manhattan Development Council’s resolution in 2003 that the memorial “will honor the loss of life equally and the contributions of all without establishing any hierarchies” (ibid.: 162). Some wanted the names of the corporations that suffered losses to be included along with the names of their employees; others said this would look like a corporate directory. Others wanted family members listed together (60 families suffered multiple losses). In late 2006, after many meetings with families, Arad returned to an early notion of his of “meaningful adjacencies” and eventually with Mayor Bloomberg’s intervention, the final decision was reached. Victims’ names would be arranged in accordance with geographic and family ties, links with co-workers and the specific wishes of victims’ families. The latter required a tremendous, unprecedented outreach effort and an elaborate computerprogramming project. In the completed memorial, names are arranged in nine groups according to victims’ locations and circumstances, engraved on the bronze parapets around the two pools. Around the south pool are the names of first responders, those on Flight 175 that crashed into the south tower, those who were working or visiting that tower, the Pentagon victims, Flight 77 victims, and Flight 93 victims. Around the north pool are the names of those who were working or visiting the north tower, those aboard Flight 11 that crashed into that tower, and the victims of the 80

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1993 bombing. Within each group, names of colleagues appear together in a group arranged according to the adjacencies their families requested. The first responders are listed according to agencies and units in which they served and these are named. Names of corporate entities, including Windows on the World, do not appear anywhere on the memorial and while the flights are numbered, the names of the airlines do not appear. On the September 11 Memorial, an additional item of information next to the names of 11 women can stop one short. That is the phrase “and her unborn child,” included with the agreement of family members. Of a different kind altogether but similarly shocking in its short, poignant simplicity is the age at death appearing after the name of each soldier at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in New York; they were all so young. The Salem Witch Trials Memorial in Salem, Massachusetts (Maggie Smith and James Cutler, 1992) further demonstrates the power of a single word or two. On each of the rough granite benches dedicated to one of the 17 men and women executed in 1692 is engraved the person’s name, the date of death and either “hanged” or “pressed to death.” Particularity does not depend on extensive information. A very different kind of listing of names appears in many memorials to acknowledge those who contributed funds to their construction. At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington this is achieved with a brief and unobtrusive text at the wall’s apex. What is more noticeable are the brick pavers in the ground surface of many local September 11 memorials in New Jersey that give the names of every sponsor—person, family, company or other organization—sometimes with additional, personal text from the sponsor. The practice is distracting; one feels they too are being memorialized but the names do connect the memorial to local businesses and organizations and to local residents, some of whom may be relatives of the victims. The method of displaying sponsors’ names at the AIDS Memorial in San Francisco is unusual and problematic. The names of corporate donors appear prominently in a section of the memorial’s ground surface that one approaches first, giving them what seems like too much prominence. Then, in the spiraling list of names that emanates from the center of the memorial, also in the ground surface, the names of individual donors and “friends” are interspersed among the names of those who died without any distinction between them. Unless one is familiar with particular names or the name is of a well-known person (e.g. Elizabeth Taylor), there is no way of knowing who falls into which group. Perhaps that is intentional but for the first-time visitor it can be disturbing. Is it essential that donors’ names be listed on the memorial itself? Donors to the National September 11 Memorial in New York can contribute fixed amounts for cobblestones and pavers in the ground surface. They can indicate the name of a person or organization they may be honoring with the donation and write a dedication: Contributions can be made in memory or honor of a friend or loved one. With your gift, you will be given a number that corresponds to a specific cobblestone or paver. Generations of visitors will be able to locate your stone using a kiosk at the Memorial site. (National September 11 Memorial and Museum 2014) The National Capital Authority in Canberra has decided not to allow sponsor names to appear on any new memorials. 81

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PARTICULARS: WHY SO MANY? The amount of information displayed at contemporary memorials in text and images might well surprise earlier sponsors and designers. Col. Thomas Casey was the engineer and chief of the Office of Public Buildings and Grounds, responsible for finalizing the design and overseeing the construction of the Washington Monument (1885). In order to emphasize the simplicity and power of the structure alone, he successfully ensured that it would have no ornamentation or inscriptions on the exterior (Savage 2009). This was a dramatic change from a dominant nineteenthcentury expectation that monuments have sculptural elements and ornamentation. In the mid-nineteenth century, some commentators in the US had rejected the need for any monuments whatsoever since the populace could read history as it was written in books (Curran et al. 2009). Pedersen and Tilney’s explanation for the omission of any image of the president in their original design for the Roosevelt Memorial followed a similar logic: “We felt it unnecessary to make a physical likeness the central element of the memorial when so much photographic material is generally available” (Creighton 1962: 51). Nonetheless, in the late twenty and early twenty-first centuries, when written and visual information has become more widely available than ever before, not only are more memorials being built to a greater range of subjects but also with more detailed information. One reason seems to be the desire to use memorials not to honor and to commemorate but to teach—precisely what earlier commentators felt could be achieved by reading books. Memorials, however, can teach history in a very different way. In explaining his design for the Roosevelt Memorial, Lawrence Halprin touched on this pedagogical function that could be met with a rich array of text and images that visitors would “experience” to gain a “deep and emotional understanding”—offering opportunities for an embodied, sensual experience not available from reading books or watching films or videos. No single image could capture the multiplicity of events, challenges, difficulties and successes. No simple statement could adequately express the achievements. Somehow I needed to invoke in each visitor, through his or her own experience of the Memorial, a deep and emotional understanding of how these years changed lives. (Halprin 1997: 7) Another explanation for the degree of detail is the desire to reduce ambiguity, to make clear the intended meanings. Dell Upton (2013) notes that monuments traditionally used metaphor and allegory to convey meaning and could be, as a consequence, ambiguous, whereas now they employ “expository text” to more closely direct visitors’ interpretations. Figurative imagery that is not allegorical can serve the same purpose of ensuring that visitors will interpret the meaning of a memorial in a particular, intended manner. Both text and figurative sculpture were added to the wall in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to satisfy those who were troubled by the connotations of the wall and its ambiguity. Presenting people or circumstances with a high degree of realistic detail and incorporating actual artifacts or reproductions of them are ways to achieve clarity. In such cases the move is from the metaphorical, allegorical and general to the literal, actual and specific. 82

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Nonetheless, contemporary memorials still vary widely in how much they “speak.” While many sponsors and members of the public continue to be keen that meanings be made clear, designers have also been able to create prominent public memorials that are far more ambiguous but well received, such as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe where there are no figurative representations, no text (except for rules of conduct inserted on the ground plane) and where even the name of the memorial is absent. The desire to be clear, for visitors to understand correctly, emerges nonetheless. Management at the Memorial to Murdered Jews of Europe provides pamphlets at the site to explain the memorial and its lack of symbolism. Even at far less ambiguous memorials, sponsors or management staff feel a similar responsibility to explain a memorial’s symbolism. At the Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial in Ballarat, Australia, a stone marker at the entrance defines the meaning of each of the memorial’s design features, giving visitors a lesson before they even enter the memorial space. At the World War II Memorial in Washington, a movable, laminated sign explains that each of the gold stars mounted on the wall separating the memorial from the Mall’s Reflection Pool represents 100 American military deaths. Other reasons for incorporating detail are to teach parts of history that are not sufficiently known and to honor those whose contributions have been overlooked in previous memorials and in other domains. Such is the rationale for The Women of World War II Memorial in London. While it offers more specificity by honoring a particular group of people than the Cenotaph near by, it does not explain any particular contributions women made. The Rosie the Riveter Memorial at the site of the former Kaiser Shipyard Number 2 in Richmond, California, where 747 World War II warships were built, meets that objective. The memorial is dedicated to the efforts of women who made up one quarter of the shipyard workers and the total group of 18 million women who contributed to the World War II war effort (landscape architect Cheryl Barton and artist Susan Schartzenberg, 2000). Open gray steel forms suggesting parts of a ship’s hull under construction form a path of the ship’s length leading to the harbor’s edge (Figure 4.10). Rungs of the structure serve as a scaffold for displaying engineering drawings, historic photographs of the workers, letters and other historic items. On the surface of the path is a timeline and workers’ recollections, gathered during the design process. Intended to reach a wide audience, in its design and the information it offers, the memorial both educates and honors. The imperative to make visible, in built form in public space, a history that has been ignored, intentionally marginalized or misrepresented, has now become the impetus behind many memorials, helping to account for their increase in number and diversity, and for the need for didacticism that leads to detailed text and imagery. When people recognize that a subject of importance to them has not yet been sufficiently recognized in previous memorials, the new memorials they propose become ways of redressing what are seen as missing, incomplete or inaccurate historical accounts. In Westminster, California and Houston, Texas, Vietnamese residents have succeeded in creating memorials that do what the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington does not: recognize the contributions of South Vietnamese soldiers (Allen-Kim 2014). In Vancouver, grassroots organizations worked for many years to create several memorials that commemorate by name the women whose lives were lost to male violence (Burk 2010). The twin objectives to make visible and to commemorate may be paired with other objectives—to 83

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Figure 4.10 Rosie the Riveter Memorial, Richmond, California, landscape architect Cheryl Barton and artist Susan Schartzenberg, 2000 Source: Karen A. Franck, 2012.

redress a wrong, and for those responsible for the wrong, to acknowledge the injustice they caused. Such is the case with the National Japanese-American Memorial to Patriotism in Washington. These memorials suggest yet another reason to account for the accumulation of detail in contemporary memorials: the need to recognize, by name, the sacrifices made by individual citizens—as soldiers whose lives are lost in war or as civilians whose lives are taken in terrorist acts and other random acts of violence or who die in fires or other accidents. The design choice is no longer to recognize those who died as a group without individual names, as for instance in memorials to the Titanic (e.g. the 1912 Titanic Memorial Lighthouse in New York or the 1931 Titanic Memorial in Washington), but to name each and every individual lost. Where once memorials represented the general, shared impact of an event as in the Titanic memorials or the Cenotaph, currently they are likely to incorporate the particular details of loss: locations of events, numbers of those who died and, most importantly, the identities of those who died. This contrasts dramatically with traditional monuments where “The particularity of people or events are often hidden behind a façade of abstraction meant to evoke higher purposes of individual soldiers folded into grand categories such as duty or freedom” (Upton 2013: 22). The proliferation of memorials to so many different subjects reflects the decline of widely shared collective memories and the rise of memories and recollected experiences of particular groups of people whose experiences, indeed whose very existence, may not be well known to the wider public. Hence the need for the memorial to document and explain—to present the particulars of the events 84

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or people in question precisely and accurately since neither the relevant knowledge nor the memory is widely shared. In the end, the kinds of particularity reviewed in this chapter are a response to this change in both the subject matter and its framing in contemporary memorials. Once the message the memorial conveys is to be neither general in its abstraction nor widely inclusive and universally shared (as the Cenotaph so beautifully illustrates) and instead particularity is to be conveyed, significant design challenges arise. Which particulars to include? Why those? How can they be integrated into the design to make a whole? The choice of imagery and text are key decisions in determining what story is to be told and what aspects of it and, relatedly, what will not be told. Not only are these choices difficult but they are frequently sources of intense controversy before and after the memorial is completed, as parties with differing interests and priorities express conflicting opinions about past events and their significance.

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PART II

MEMORIALS AS USED AND UNDERSTOOD

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CHAPTER 5

COMMEMORATING IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in New York, the police cordoned off Manhattan below 14th Street. The nearest location for people to gather was Union Square at 14th and Broadway and that is where they went, clustering in small groups, speaking softly, playing music, praying and holding vigil. Many brought flowers and other items they had made or bought. They lit candles and many wrote comments on large sheets of paper spread out on the pavement expressing their sorrow and calling for love, peace, and forgiveness. Later in the Fall, people visited the sidewalk on Church Street adjacent to St Paul’s Chapel when it became the location closest to the World Trade Center site accessible to the public. Again they left tributes, wrote on sheets of canvas attached to the Chapel’s fence, signed a guest book the chapel staff had provided, and studied the tributes and comments others had left. In 2002, the Port Authority installed a “viewing fence” along the sidewalk on Church Street at the edge of the World Trade Center site. This became the closest and also the most managed place to visit, to leave tributes (despite notices prohibiting this) and to hold anniversary events. Some of those events were purely commemorative, such as reading the names of all those who died; some were political, such as demonstrators claiming that the attack was a US government conspiracy. Then on September 11, 2011, a permanent, formal memorial was dedicated at an internationally televised ceremony commemorating the 10th anniversary of the attack. Since then a great many people from around the world, including 4.5 million in the first year, have visited the memorial and the museum that opened in 2014, again leaving tributes. Now that visitor rules and regulations posted at the memorial prohibit “Expressive activity that has the effect, intent or propensity to draw a crowd, except by permission,” it is unlikely that politically oriented events will occur. This brief history reveals several key commemorative activities common to memorials, be they temporary or permanent: visiting, bringing tributes, expressing responses to the event and to related issues, interacting with others and holding ceremonies. The history also suggests varying degrees of agency and choice people have at different kinds of memorials. The greatest amount of freedom is at immediate, informal memorials that visitors create themselves where expression can readily extend to the political; the least degree of freedom is at formal memorials. In most cases, the tributes people leave there and the collective ceremonies that take place there are consistent with the memorial’s intended meaning, but sometimes that meaning is extended to other related topics, appropriated for other kinds of events, or resisted.

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VISITING, BRINGING TRIBUTES Visiting a site designated and designed for remembering is probably the most frequent commemorative activity a memorial supports, particularly for those who intentionally seek it out as a place to honor, to grieve or to pay their respects. And so the visit takes on the character of a pilgrimage—a journey to a sacred place— even when only an obscure marker identifies the site or when there is no memorial at all. Other kinds of visits may occur by chance as people come upon a memorial unexpectedly or when the memorial is a favored tourist destination. But in those situations the memorial still offers a commemorative place to visit and, once there, to experience and to engage in other commemorative activities. A formal, permanent memorial can take many years to build. In the interim, people fulfill the need to visit a location that bears a meaningful connection to what is being remembered in other ways. Immediately after a sudden loss of life that occurs in a public location, be it one or two people who died or a much larger number, those who have a personal relationship to those who died and others are drawn to the site of the tragedy. Possibly people need to see where it happened, to leave a tribute or to join others who have similar feelings of sorrow. In addition, the physical location where loved ones were last alive holds great resonance. So friends and relatives may go to the site of a fatal traffic accident and many will go to school and university campuses where shootings have occurred. When a wall collapsed on a public sidewalk in Melbourne, people immediately began bringing tributes to the site. Many people go to the precise location where a well-known person was killed—to the front of the Dakota Apartments, where John Lennon was murdered, or to Malchei Israel Square in Tel Aviv, where Itzhak Rabin was assassinated. If the site of the death is not accessible, people go instead to a nearby public space, as they went to Union Square on September 11. So many mourners gathered in front of the Dakota Apartment building after John Lennon’s death that his wife asked them to come the following Sunday for ten minutes of commemorative silence in a location across the street in Central Park. The site eventually became the Strawberry Fields Memorial honoring John Lennon. After the bombing of three Underground trains and a bus on July 7, 2005 in London, mourners went to King’s Cross Station, the originating station for all three trains, to Russell Square, close to one of the bombed trains, and to St Pancras Church near the bombed bus. Over and over again, urban public spaces become sites of pilgrimage and mourning. Sometimes so many people come and so many tributes are left that police need to erect barricades to control the crowds or to protect the growing accumulations of flowers. The tribute people most often bring is flowers, following an ancient tradition of bringing flowers to cemeteries. Bouquets of flowers, still wrapped in plastic, often with a card attached accumulated in great waves outside Kensington Palace, the home of Princess Diana, after her death. Similar mounds of bouquets were brought to King’s Cross Station after the July 7 bombings. Candles, cards, notes and letters are also common. Other offerings may have particular meaning for those being remembered, like the running shoes and caps at the site of the Boston Marathon bombing demonstrate. A tradition may develop at a particular site: after the 1995 terrorist bombing in Oklahoma City, visitors left hundreds of 90

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bracelets inscribed with the words “What would Jesus do?” (Doss 2002). They also left hundreds of crosses, many made by hand from twigs and other scrap materials (Jorgensen-Earp and Lanzilotti 1998). While religious themes dominated in Oklahoma City and in Littleton, Colorado, where high school students were killed, in New York after September 11, 2011, strong patriotic sentiments were expressed and in Union Square calls for peace and love seemed to be the dominant themes. Strings of hand-folded origami paper cranes, a Japanese tradition that has come to symbolize peace, graced several memorials in London and New York. To leave their tributes, people often make ingenious use of what is already there. Fences serve as good vertical scaffolding for attaching items. Large flat surfaces are useful as well, because contributions can accumulate in various arrangements on the ground, writing can be done on the flat surface and groups of people can gather. People often make ingenious use of physical elements they find. At Union Square, openings of drainpipes became perfect places for single candles, as were the long narrow surfaces of concrete traffic barriers (Franck and Paxson 2007). All kinds of vertical elements in the landscape can serve as focal points and scaffolds for display. In Union Square, lamp posts and the statue of George Washington became focal points for radiating collections of candles and artifacts and for wrapping with the US flag. What may start with one or two items can quickly become a dense collection of offerings that can be quite homogeneous in kind, as with the hundreds of bouquets left in memory of Princess Diana. Or items may vary greatly in shape, size and color and collections can have an eclectic, jumbled appearance. But they are rarely chaotic since contributors tend to follow an overall pattern, making them “folk assemblages” (Santino 2004) or “unmediated folk art assemblages” (Grider 2001). After the July 7 bombings in London, visitors successively laid their bouquets to form a circular arrangement on the lawn of Russell Square (Plate 5.1). Sometimes the pattern has symbolic meaning, such as the candles at Israel Square that formed the Star of David or the peace symbol. Many visitors conscientiously avoid covering someone else’s writing with their own unless another custom is established: after the assassination of Itzhak Rabin, messages were pasted or written on top of each other, creating what appeared to be an intentional layering and collaging of texts (Engler 1999). Some citizens take on the role of “curator”—removing dead flowers and burned-out candles or rearranging items, maintaining mementoes, or providing new sheets of paper or canvas for visitors to write on. Curators may be relatives and friends of those who died, as in Oklahoma City (Doss 2002). They may censure or edit. One contributor to a September 11 memorial in New York, with the assent of others present, removed an obscene statement about Osama bin Laden. At the Columbine High School commemorative site, the father of one of the victims removed two of the 15 crosses that a carpenter from Illinois had installed, because they were in memory of the two students responsible for the killings (ibid.). If people continue to visit a site over weeks and months, a structure already there may come to serve as scaffolding for people to continue to leave tributes, or those with responsibility for maintaining the space may install an interim structure. In both circumstances the structure is very often a fence to which people can easily attach their tributes. In Oklahoma City, families, friends, survivors, rescuers and others often visited what became known as the Memory Fence, a chain link construction fence preventing people from entering the site of destruction. The team of a baseball coach who was killed in the bombing would visit after a 91

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game and leave a ball in his memory. Rescue workers, having a different connection to the event, wrote messages describing what the event meant to them and sometimes left gloves and hard hats. The wrought iron fence around St Paul’s Chapel, a block from the World Trade Center on Wall Street, served a similar function over several months with the support of the chapel’s staff. In 2002, when people could access Church Street, the eastern boundary of the World Trade Center site, the viewing fence that the Port Authority had installed along the full length of the site on Church Street held panels displaying a history of the World Trade Center in text and images and the names of all those who died. The vertical surface of the fence and its open weave accommodated the attachment of flowers, photographs and other items. On the first anniversary, luxurious wreaths from many organizations and embassies were placed along the fence, wreaths that might well be seen at permanent memorials recently visited by dignitaries. Those managing a space may anticipate the emergence of an informal memorial and provide an installation to accommodate and protect informal tributes from the very beginning. In Melbourne, in 2013, a brick wall surrounding a construction site suddenly collapsed onto the sidewalk and killed three passers-by. The company managing the construction site quickly erected a shelter for commemorative offerings adjacent to the sidewalk, with wooden racks to hold bouquets of flowers and a roof (Plate 5.2). Thus, mourners’ offerings did not spread across the sidewalk or onto the replacement fencing. The site of a death in public space can retain significance over time and may be continuously marked as relatives, friends and others visit the site and maintain a long-term informal memorial. In 2009, a small boy called Zachary was killed while crossing the street in Berkeley, California. The stop sign and the small traffic circle where the accident occurred immediately became an informal memorial with notes, toys and photographs and chalk for people to write with. Over the months the memorial was updated with seasonally related tributes and then a letter from Zachary’s father describing his own recent graduation from college. In 2010, an artist wrapped the pole in a knitted sheath and someone mounted an official-looking sign naming the place “Zachary’s Corner.” Flowers and other items continue to be left, often to recognize the passage of seasons and holidays (Plate 5.3). Often sites retain collective and personal significance over many years, regardless of how they are marked. In 1911, 146 workers, mostly young immigrant women, died in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York. The fire made headlines across the country and spurred the adoption of significant fire safety measures in building codes and fire and safety regulations in workplaces. The building remains, now a historic landmark, owned by New York University. A plaque on an exterior wall marks the site of the fire. On each anniversary since the 50th one, the university has participated in ceremonies led by labor unions and the New York Fire and Police Departments. In recent years, the ceremony has started with a march down Broadway. Volunteers carry 146 poles, each bearing a symbolic shirtwaist and the name of a victim (Figure 5.1). Some participants are relatives of those who died. A collective pilgrimage may also be a one-time event and can include a ritual marking of a site. In New York in 2014, two organizations, Families for Safe Streets and Right of Way, led a pilgrimage by bicycle, traveling 60 miles, to visit 12 places where bicyclists or pedestrians had been killed by vehicles. At each location, they painted a stencil dedicated to that victim. In each of these two cases, the 92

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Figure 5.1 Volunteers carry shirtwaists and photographs in annual ceremony commemorating victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911, New York Source: Karen A. Franck, 2012.

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pilgrimage is both a commemoration of lives lost and a means of raising awareness of the problems that lead to the deaths: poor working conditions and insufficient safety measures, which continue today worldwide; and the need to increase the safety of pedestrians and bicyclists in New York. Formal memorials offer mourners and others a permanent place to visit, to remember and to grieve, early on and as the years pass. One Saturday morning in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the National AIDS Memorial Grove of trees and a stone plaza is silent and empty. Then a young girl comes skipping down the path toward the circular plaza. Behind her a couple and a young man proceed more slowly. Before the girl reaches the plaza, she climbs up on a boulder, stands there, and jumps from one rock to another. The couple and the young man come into the plaza, still walking slowly and silently. They move to the far side where, bending over, the woman studies the names arranged on the surface of the plaza. Once she has located the name she is seeking, she lays a bouquet of carnations above it (Figure 5.2). She takes a picture of the name and the bouquet. She calls the young girl over and the young man takes a picture of the group—the couple and the young girl standing next to the name. As the others move to different parts of the memorial and to a bench, the woman stands by the name, silent, looking down at the names and the bouquet. When they leave together, the bouquet of carnations remains, animating the stone setting and the grove, indicating that someone had been here. It is not surprising to see bouquets and wreaths at memorials to fairly recent events, or after an anniversary of the event. What is more surprising is to see tributes at memorials to events that occurred in the distant past: a single rose at the Monument to the Boston Massacre of 1770 or on a stone seat of the Salem Witch Trials Memorial dedicated to one of the young women hanged in 1692. One cannot help but wonder who left the rose and whether it was a descendant of that long-ago victim.

Figure 5.2 Visiting the Circle of Friends, National Aids Memorial Grove, San Francisco Source: Karen A. Franck, 2012.

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The small group in the Memorial Grove—possibly the family of someone who died of AIDS—is able to visit a memorial where that person’s name is inscribed, to mourn and to pay tribute in that space and to capture their visit there in a photograph. And so people make similar pilgrimages to formal memorials in many cities that often include visiting the name of the person they are remembering, much as they might visit a grave in a cemetery and following similar rituals. This opportunity is particularly important when access to a grave is not possible because the person’s remains are in a distant location or because they could never be found. In Frankfurt, the Memorial Wall at the Neuer Börneplatz Memorial (Hirsch, Lorch and Wandel, 1996) shows the names of the nearly 12,000 Jewish residents of Frankfurt who were deported and murdered in concentration camps between 1933 and 1945. The name, dates of birth and death and deportation destination of each person appear in raised letters on individual steel blocks attached to the wall that encloses the Old Jewish Cemetery. Following the Jewish tradition of placing a stone on a grave to leave a sign that someone has visited, people put small pieces of crushed basalt from the adjacent path on top of the blocks (Figure 5.3). Sometimes visiting a name is a more elaborate process. After the two World Wars, the remains of Australian soldiers who died abroad were not brought home and so memorials in Australia took on a great significance to families and friends, even several generations later. At the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, those who wish to do so can find the name of anyone from Victoria who served in World War I by visiting the ambulatory next to the Sanctuary and seeking help from staff. All 114,000 names are hand-written in delicate calligraphy on parchment paper in notebooks encased in glass vitrines. The staff member unlocks the relevant vitrine and locates the name in question, with great care, and wearing gloves. In the

Figure 5.3 Memorial Wall, Neuer Börneplatz Memorial Site, Frankfurt, Hirsch, Lorch and Wandel, 1996 Source: Karen A. Franck, 2014.

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quiet, dimly lit space visitors study the name carefully. They can photograph it, but, given the delicacy of the paper, they are not allowed to touch it. At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, visitors locate a name by consulting one of the directories located at each end of the path next to the wall. Once found, visitors touch the name if it is within reach, which most are. They may well photograph the name or have someone take a photograph of them framing the name. Sometimes they make a rubbing of the name (Figure 5.4); often they leave a tribute at the foot of the wall. For some relatives and friends, visiting the name of a loved one at the National September 11 Memorial in New York must substitute for visiting a grave because no remains were found. The rituals are similar to those at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial: touching the name, making a rubbing, photographing it and leaving a tribute. Visitors use the ample blank surface surrounding each name to place a flower or to tape a photograph or a note. They take advantage of the depth of the letters cut into the parapet to insert flowers, insignia, or tightly rolled pieces of paper (see Figure 2.9). At many recent memorials to victims of terrorist acts in the US, friends and relatives can visit what serves as an individual memorial, dedicated to a single victim, within the larger collective space of similar markers as at the 9/11 Pentagon Memorial. When there is sufficient space around each marker, family members can gather around it with some separation from other visitors and mourners, as they do at the individual chairs in the Oklahoma City Memorial where Marita Sturken (2007) observed that children sometimes sit on these chairs while adults sit on the grass lawn. One distinct group of visitors to memorials is foreign dignitaries during official publicized visits. A formal route into the memorial or a ceremonial flight of stairs allows the visit to become a procession that ends with laying a wreath in a designated location. After doing so, the dignitaries bow their heads and then stand silently as they are photographed. A suitable setting for such wreath-laying ceremonies was once important in the design of memorials. The long processional path and stairs up to the sanctuary at the Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park in Berlin and the large expanse of open space below were well suited to visits by Soviet dignitaries. In contrast, memorials such the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin were not designed to accommodate this kind of formalized commemorative activity. There is no obvious place at that memorial for an official to lay a wreath and no area large enough for even a small group to stand together. This may be one reason that during ceremonial visits to Berlin on occasions related to observance of the Holocaust, a more spatially accommodating memorial is chosen: the Track 17 Memorial at the Grunewald railway station, the station from which thousands of Jewish residents of Berlin were transported to concentration camps in the east. For example, on Holocaust Memorial Day in 2010, the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, Israeli President Shimon Peres joined German President Horst Koehler and a delegation of Holocaust survivors to lay wreaths at Track 17 (Moore 2010). Certainly the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe does serve as a pilgrimage site, as apparent in the laying of roses on individual stelae, particularly on anniversaries such as Holocaust Memorial Day. In 2013, it did serve as a place of pilgrimage for a 75th anniversary observance of Kristallnacht, the night in 1938 96

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Figure 5.4 Making a rubbing at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington Source: Karen A. Franck, 2012.

when the Nazis coordinated the destruction of synagogues and Jewish businesses in Germany and Austria. Two hundred rabbis from the Conference of European Rabbis, meeting in Berlin for the first time, held a candle-lighting ceremony at the Brandenburg Gate with traditional songs and then marched, with the candles, to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. A video shows the Brandenburg Gate brightly lit and the memorial shrouded in darkness. A group of rabbis is seen singing and listening to the Torah being read as they gathered around one low stele where they placed their candles (Jewish Link 2013). A great many people who visit memorials do not have a personal connection to its subject matter and are not there in any official capacity. Many are quiet and reflective, reading texts inscribed on the memorial with great care, bending over to study what is below eye level, including notes and photographs left by others and touching the names inscribed. These visitors may pose for photographs and take many photographs themselves, and they may also bring flowers or other tributes. They walk through the memorial slowly and with care; they may ask questions of memorial staff and volunteers. They may talk with others in their group about the memorial. They too seem to be on a pilgrimage. The quiet voices, solemnity and attentiveness of those visitors contrast with the behavior of others who treat the memorial as one stop on a varied itinerary of tourist destinations. Their louder, more animated behavior and their tendency to talk on cell phones and engage in livelier and more nonchalant activities can be disturbing to those who consider and treat the memorial as sacred space. 97

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EXPRESSING, INTERACTING Bringing tributes to a memorial is an expressive act, as are ritual visits and ceremonial events. Once at the memorial, visitors have opportunities to pursue other kinds of expression: to convey their response to tragic events through writing and drawing, to interact with other visitors, to share common experiences or concerns and to encounter others who may hold decidedly different opinions from their own. At informal memorials people express their feelings and beliefs about the event through drawings, which may convey strong symbolism (Figure 5.5) and, more frequently, through writing. The outpouring of hand-written texts at informal memorials suggests that writing is the most immediate and most common overtly expressive, lasting response to tragic events. The content of the messages likely varies with the nature of the event and the attitudes of those who write in response to it. In Oklahoma City, many expressed their belief that the bombing was a warning to those who do not believe in Christ or whose beliefs have lapsed (Linenthal 1998). Malchei Israel Square, where Itzhak Rabin was assassinated, had already been the site of many peace rallies, and after the assassination many wrote about their political opinions and their desire for peace on walls of the adjacent city hall (Engler 1999). At informal and interim memorials throughout New York, volunteers hung canvases on fences and spread rolls of paper out on paved surfaces, encouraging visitors to write. Contributors expressed strong sentiments about freedom, democracy and the resilience of New York and the nation and they often invoked God and religion. Strong and opposing opinions appeared about what the next step should be. A large white sheet spread out on steps at Union Square read: “Racism is not the answer. War is not Progress. But PEACE is POSSIBLE” (Franck and Paxson 2007). People’s comments often suggested that they were responding to previous comments. On a canvas at Washington Square Park, one person wrote in black, “NEVER FORGET.” Below it, in blue, someone else added, “NEVER FORGIVE,” The “NEVER” in this phrase received considerable attention: it was crossed out in black and then a commentator added, in brown, an arrow pointing to a new inscription of the word “NEVER”. Another canvas was densely filled with comments calling for peace and love, clustered around peace symbols and, in large letters, “LOVE LIFE LIVE LOVE.” Inside the letter O of the first LOVE, someone wrote what might have been “KILL THE BASTARDS” but the last word had been crossed out (Plate 5.4). Elsewhere on the canvas the following statement appeared: “Well, I can hear you. Everyone can hear you. And the people who destroyed these buildings will hear from us real soon …” Some of the comments were signed but most were not. In reflecting on the proliferation of writing at informal memorials in New York after September 11, Beatrice Fraenkel comments: The fact that millions of people wrote “God bless America” or “We will always remember,” or just signed posters invites one to reflect that what counts is not so much the messages as the mere fact of writing. A striking feature of shrines constructed after catastrophes is often the sheer quantity of written messages displayed rather than the literary quality of those writings. (2011: 231) 98

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Figure 5.5 Drawing posted at an informal memorial in New York after September 11 Source: Karen A. Franck, 2001.

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Temporary and interim memorials offer a public forum for people to air their views about the commemorated event and also to reflect on its wider personal and social significance. A sudden taking of life generates strong emotional and often political responses; people need not only to grieve but also to draw meaning, even lessons, from the event. What happened may rouse long-brewing ideas and concerns. Gathering at a memorial site, talking with others and writing down one’s thoughts to be read by others all provide outlets for expressing those concerns. The precise location of Rabin’s assassination, on a square which had already been the site of peace rallies, became not just a kind of altar, but also a platform for expressing political opinions and desires for peace and for holding meetings and political debates (Engler 1999). In Oklahoma City, many visitors wrote exhortations about non-violence and conspiracies and about what may seem like issues unrelated to the attack—abortion, and the belief that the bombing was a warning to atheists and agnostics (Linenthal 1998). As the New York example illustrates, commemorative messages within a temporary memorial may stimulate other written responses, so that the memorial both supports and displays a dialogue, including outright disagreements. Such disagreements may also occur in person. At the interim memorial on Church Street, on anniversaries of September 11, groups pronouncing that the attack had been a US government conspiracy received questions and objections from other visitors, with groups engaging in lively conversation. Informal memorials provide opportunities for a wide range of people to express opinions and raw emotions without the need for sophisticated language or technology for formal presentations. The presence of these opinions at sites of mourning gives them a degree of seriousness they might not have in other locations (Haney et al. 1997). Individuals and groups who may otherwise be silent have a chance to “speak” publicly and to draw upon various ways of doing so. The availability of a range of figurative styles of expression—symbols, artifacts and drawing as well as written language—allows a wider variety of people to participate, particularly those who are more comfortable with these modes of communication than with calm, controlled writing or speaking. Children and adults can write in their native language. They do not need to worry about how correct their language is. It is this wider range of speech styles that Iris Marion Young (1997) recommends for a “communicative democracy,” and that Nancy Fraser (1997) endorses for free expression in the public sphere. The freedom of speech that informal memorials potentially offer is somewhat contingent on the wider political context in which they arise. In repressive, authoritarian regimes, informal memorials of any duration will generally be forbidden, especially when they carry political messages or any information critical of the government. The first step at informal memorials seems to be the placing of tributes, but once they are thus physically marked, the sites become places of vigils and other ritual activities. At Union Square, people played musical instruments, sang, chanted, and joined candlelight vigils and prayer groups. During a peace rally on the night immediately following the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, thousands gathered in the open space of Malchei Israel Square and many people, particularly the young, remained, lighting candles and keeping vigil. One week later, on the day marking the conclusion of the customary Jewish mourning period, a memorial rally was held (Azaryahu 1996). On the day after the shootings at Littleton High School in Colorado, a prayer meeting was held for local students in Clement Park, and over the following weeks prayer and worship services, candlelight vigils and readings from the Bible were held near the informal memorial (Doss 2002). 100

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The widened sidewalk along Church Street, part of the interim memorial at the World Trade Center site, offered a kind of stage for unofficial September 11 anniversary events, such as a continuous reading of the names of all those who had died in the attack. Volunteers offered visitors a chance to make their own tributes such as making prints in paint of their hands or folding paper into origami cranes, a symbol of peace (Figure 5.6). As people engaged in making their tributes, they also engaged in conversation, so that expressing became the creation of a physical artifact and a verbal conversation. More politically oriented events were held as well, including a silent performance protesting the Iraq War (Figure 5.7). Possibilities for expression are far more limited at formal memorials. Except for individual notes and letters that visitors leave, the writing present at such memorials is nearly always an official, designed feature of them. An exception is near the Yitzhak Rabin Memorial. A section of the wall surface of the city hall, adjacent to the memorial, has been set aside for ongoing graffiti writing; people also add their comments on other locations nearby (Engler 1999). Visitors read the texts of others and add their own. At the Harburg Monument Against Fascism, a sign invited visitors to write their names on the memorial with a stylus provided at the memorial. For their proposal for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the same designers (Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz) imagined an entire memorial composed of what visitors would write. Visitors to the Memorial to Victims of Violence in Mexico City are also invited to write and draw on the memorial’s surfaces (see Figure 2.12). Opportunities for gathering and interacting with other visitors vary dramatically with the design of formal memorials. The site plan of the wall of names at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial makes visiting it a relatively solitary journey: one proceeds down the path alongside the wall and then back up. Visitors stop along the way to find a name, to make a rubbing of it or take a photograph, to leave an offering and to read the texts that others have left. There are conversations between people who have come together and people who are strangers to each other, though there is no room along this pathway for groups to gather or for ceremonies. Visitors consult with volunteers and Park Rangers on finding a name. At the base of the memorial, where the path flattens out, people linger longer, but there is no place to sit, to gather or to spend a longer period of time. On Veterans Day many offerings are left; many people study the names and the photographs and notes. One needs to negotiate one’s way between them—a different kind of contact. Visits to a memorial can also present opportunities to connect with other survivors of the commemorated events, and with other mourners. On a warm Saturday in June, the large World War II Memorial in Washington was filled with veterans and their families. Many wore uniforms, medals or ribbons. Some were in wheelchairs. They waited in lines and small groups on the two ramps that run alongside the 56 pillars, waiting their turn to be photographed in front of the pillar engraved with the name of their state or territory (Figure 5.8). As they waited, they introduced themselves to other veterans; there was a buzz of chatter. Below on the spacious plaza more veterans and relatives gathered, nearly filling the space; many sat on benches at the plaza’s edge. There were more introductions, more hand shaking, more conversations and many more pictures. On that summer day, the veterans and their friends and families transformed the memorial from a solemn space into a scene of lively interaction, friendship and warmth. Seeing the memorial empty a visitor might think that the 101

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Figure 5.6 Making origami cranes at interim memorial at World Trade Center on an anniversary of the attack Source: Karen A. Franck, 2007.

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Figure 5.7 Silent demonstration against Iraq War at interim memorial at World Trade Center on September 11 anniversary Source: Karen A. Franck, 2007.

Figure 5.8 Veterans from Wisconsin pose at the Wisconsin stanchion, National World War II Memorial, Friedrich St Florian, 2004 Source: Karen A. Franck, 2012.

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memorial is too grand and too imperial and might wonder why a US memorial to World War II looks so fascist. However, seeing it so fully occupied on a day of pilgrimage one notices how the garlanded pillars offer places for more local, precise identity within the collective, and for posing for photographs that affirm it, as well as how the plaza’s plentiful seating allows people to spend time here comfortably, to meet others and to converse. Such large gatherings are rare, as they will be at any memorial, and are very likely to grow more infrequent as time passes. The degree of interaction that takes place among visitors seems to vary both with the design of the memorial which may bring people together in certain locations rather than spreading them out, and with the density of people who are standing or sitting in one place for some period of time. In the US on National Police Officers Memorial Day, many friends and relatives of slain officers come to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington. They visit the names of the officers they have come to remember, which are inscribed on a low curved wall. The facing wall, low enough to sit on, offers them a place to remain for a while and conversations begin with other visitors who are grieving a similar loss (Figure 5.9). The narrowness of the passage between the two walls and the number of people who visit on this particular day offer many opportunities for conversation. So does a similar dense clustering of people along the parapets of the pools at the World Trade Center Memorial on anniversaries of September 11 as people come close to look into the pools and to touch the names. Here too visitors and mourners may engage in conversation, sometimes asking, “Where were you on September 11?”

Figure 5.9 Relatives and friends of police officers killed in the line of duty on National Police Officers Memorial Day, National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial, Washington, Davis Buckley, 1991 Source: Karen A. Franck, 2012.

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HOLDING CEREMONIES Official, well-planned and carefully choreographed ceremonies may be the most symbolic, collective means of commemorating at formal memorials. The ceremonies are often held on special days set aside to honor soldiers (such as Memorial Day and Veterans Day in the US and Remembrance Day and Anzac Day in the UK, Australia and New Zealand), police officers who died in service or those who were killed in terrorist acts. These ceremonies offer opportunities for veterans, for those now in military or police service, and for friends and relatives of those who died to gather and to pay homage and, equally importantly, to see and talk with each other. Memorials accommodate ceremonial events in different ways, with greater and lesser ease. Some spatial memorials of a more traditional design seem tailor-made to host ceremonies. The large, paved spaces accommodate ceremonies very well with very little modification beyond adding chairs or a rostrum, particularly when elevated terraces can serve as platforms for speaking, such as the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne (see Figure 2.2). Here a wide, paved axial approach enables ceremonial parading or assembly of veterans, dignitaries, service personnel and even horses. The Shrine’s steep staircase can be used to rank distinguish guests for official photographs or for displaying wreaths, and is also used for slow formal processions up to the inner sanctuary. Its broad landing makes an excellent stage. Wide, flat grass verges to either side of the axis accommodate formal audience seating as well as providing ample overflow space for the general public. In 1954, the reflecting pool, in front of the main building since the memorial’s dedication in 1934, was removed to create a smaller cross-axial plaza, terminated by a World War II cenotaph and eternal flame, thereby accommodating a wider set of ceremonies to different events. The sanctuary in the Shrine hosts many smaller, more intimate events on most days of the year, sometimes more than one event per day. Indeed, by intention the memorial is preeminently a place both of ceremony and pilgrimage. Individual fighting units hold their ceremonies under the particular trees dedicated to them on the lawns of the Shrine where the Shrine staff set up a rostrum, a small sound system and folding chairs. The Soviet War Memorial in Treptow also offers large expanses of paved space around its axial lawn, allowing a processional approach to the key commemorative element: a towering statue of a Soviet soldier, which stands above a tomb at the top of a long flight of steps. The design accommodates large crowds; the stairs choreograph a procession up to the tomb to lay wreaths. What is particularly notable about the ceremonies held at this memorial is how they reflected and demonstrated important political changes, some of them with historic significance (Stangl 2003). After the Soviets completed the memorial in 1949, every May 8, ceremonies were held to celebrate the Soviet Union’s victory over Germany that occurred on that day in 1945. Early in the history of the memorial, this annual event was organized and managed by the Soviets with participation from German officials. Starting in 1950, however, the event became a means of recognizing and celebrating the new German Democratic Republic, which then took responsibility for the event, and the East German Volkspolizei took the place of the Soviet Honor Guard. In the 1950s, thousands of East Germans participated, carrying banners with slogans, walking in procession up the steps to the enclosed mausoleum beneath the statue to lay wreaths: “an act of obeisance to the Soviet Army” (ibid.: 105

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228). In the 1960s, the event became purely commemorative and more modest. Then, in 1994, the memorial was the site of the formal withdrawal of all Russian soldiers from Germany. Russian President Boris Yeltsin and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl spoke from beneath the towering statue of the soldier while German and Russian soldiers stood at attention on the paths flanking the lawn below along with a few thousand spectators (Fesperman 1994). Wreath-laying ceremonies attended by Russian veterans, Russian and German dignitaries and many others are still held every May 8, and tens of thousands still visit the site on such occasions, some traveling from as far away as the former Soviet Union (Gabowitsch 2014). Contemporary memorials are rarely, if ever, designed for the kind of formal, choreographed ceremonies held at Treptow, and they vary in how easily they can accommodate such events. The large paved area of the World War II Memorial in Washington offers a spacious hard surface for people to speak and for seating an audience. For the 2012 Veterans Day ceremony, rows of chairs were placed on the plaza immediately below the stairs at the memorial’s main entrance on 17th Street. The audience faced the fountain in the middle of the plaza, the Remembrance Wall beyond and the Lincoln Memorial in the distance. That day, speakers stood at a rostrum facing the audience, their backs to the Remembrance Wall. The size and grandeur of the memorial seemed to dwarf the small group that gathered there (Figure 5.10). When a memorial does not contain large expanses of hard-surface open space, efforts must be made to create a space that can be occupied adjacent to it. The Cenotaph in London, the preeminent memorial for commemorating military

Figure 5.10 Ceremony on Veterans Day, National World War II Memorial, Washington Source: Karen A. Franck, 2012.

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service and veterans in the UK, is a freestanding object in the center of Whitehall, the main street of the government precinct. One can safely view it from the sidewalk, but to reach it one must cross multiple traffic lanes and there is not much room to stand near it. This is not an easy place of pilgrimage, but several times a year it does become a place of ceremony. On those days, Whitehall is closed to traffic (Plate 5.5). To hold the National Service of Remembrance on Remembrance Sunday, the long, linear space of the street, flanking both sides of the monument and extending down to Westminster Abbey, provides ample room for dignitaries and the public to stand for the entire ceremony. No chairs are set up. First, the Queen and then other members of the royal family place wreaths on the narrow steps at the base of the monument, followed in careful, choreographed sequence by the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, other political leaders, and commissioners from each country in the Commonwealth. Aside from the two minutes of silence at 11 a.m., music is the predominant sound as the anthem and hymns are sung, military bands play and a choir sings. There is no speaking other than that of a clergyman and saying prayers. At the end of the ceremony, thousands of veterans pay their respects as they march along the spacious avenue past the Cenotaph. The closing of Whitehall to traffic and the performance of this solemn ceremony with its pomp and circumstance transform a secular space of busy traffic into a sacred one of solemn rituals. Other ceremonies are held at the Cenotaph in memory of other events, including the D-Day Landings, the Falklands War, and the first day of the Somme Offensive. At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, there is no large paved surface and no built element to serve as a stage. So on Veterans Day in 2012, a temporary stage was installed at the foot of the hill, close to the path along the wall, and chairs for the audience were placed in rows up the inclined lawn, defining an amphitheater. The audience faced the wall; the speakers faced the audience with their backs to the wall. That same week, the stage also served as the place for reading aloud every single name of those who died in the war, a ritual that has only taken place three times before. On neither occasion did anyone occupy the lawn above the wall, as many had done on the day the wall was dedicated. The National September 11 Memorial, like the Pentagon Memorial and the Oklahoma City Memorial, has no raised elements that might serve as a stage and no space that could choreograph a procession. This seems to be a recent trend in the design of large memorials. The plaza at the National September 11 Memorial is completely flat. It was spacious enough to accommodate a large crowd and a temporary stage for speakers for its dedication ceremony, and can presumably do so for subsequent anniversaries. Only people with invitations, primarily family members, could enter the memorial that day; others gathered on adjacent streets, listening to a broadcast of the ceremony. As on every previous anniversary of September 11, the name of each victim was read aloud, often with additional comments from family members who were reading the names. Other smaller September 11 memorials are also designed primarily for people to visit and not for ceremonies, but particular design features can provide a dramatic and hence suitable setting. At the Staten Island September 11 Memorial, the audience sits facing the memorial and, across the water, the site of the former Twin Towers and the new Freedom Tower (Plate 5.6). Dignitaries, speakers and those reading the names of residents of Staten Island who died all have their backs to that view. During the reading of names in 2014, one woman whose husband was a firefighter 107

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killed attempting to rescue others introduced her son, now old enough to participate in that ritual. One realized then that, in a very visible, public manner, the annual ceremony marks the passing of time. The existence of a site and a ceremony allow this to happen. The ceremonies described so far commemorate people and events that are generally consistent with the subject of the memorial, though the theme and details of the ceremonies may be modified over time to address changes in political regimes, as at the Soviet War Memorial in Berlin. Other times, however, a formal memorial will host a ceremony quite distinct in content and purpose from the subject of the memorial. A notable example is the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. Materials documenting the planning and design of the Memorial make no mention of any intention to hold ceremonies here. They refer only to individual contemplative visits (Thomas 2002). Nonetheless the exterior space of the memorial is excellent for accommodating ceremonial events and large audiences. The wide landing at the top of the grand stairway and the mid-landing can serve as stages, while the audience can occupy the stairs, the platform at the foot of the stairs, the lawn beyond the platform and the full extent of the lawn adjacent to the Reflecting Pool. Speakers or performers face the audience while the statue of Lincoln appears behind them as a highly symbolic backdrop. In 1939, when large auditoriums in Washington refused to host a performance by the famous black singer Marian Anderson, she performed at the Lincoln Memorial. From the 1940s onward the memorial served as the site for a series of Civil Rights demonstrations, including an anti-lynching rally in 1946 led by the singer Paul Robeson. The largest and best-known such demonstration was the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom when Martin Luther King spoke from the steps of the memorial. For that event, the statue of Lincoln was illuminated with floodlights so it could be easily photographed and seen by those watching the ceremony on TV (Sandage 1993). In 2013 on the 50th anniversary of the 1963 march, an anniversary ceremony was held at the memorial with attendees gathered on the full length of the lawns flanking the Reflecting Pool. National memorials are often the sites of politically oriented ceremonies that reaffirm national identities and relationships, or acknowledge official changes in such identities, as at Treptow. The series of eminently political Civil Rights demonstrations at the Lincoln Memorial are a rare example of creating new, albeit related political meanings for a memorial through ceremonial performances.

INVENTING COMMEMORATION At various points in the past, people invented acts of commemoration now widely followed such as anniversary ceremonies, official visits to memorials by visiting dignitaries, and the leaving of wreaths and bouquets of flowers. Traditions that developed long ago, such as the creation of roadside memorials, have become much more frequent in recent years, more varied and installed in a great diversity of locations in public space. Making drawings or writing letters and poems to leave at formal and informal memorials are all creative acts. And what was first made or chosen as a tribute can set a tradition at one site or many. The first hand-made cross at the site of the bombing in Oklahoma City led to many more; the first teddy bear led to many more at many different sites. 108

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Recently organizations, artists and members of the public at large have invented, from scratch, one-time and quite ingenious installations and events, many of which engage others in acts of commemoration. This inventiveness was apparent during the 10th anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center. In Ocean Grove, New Jersey, a local radio station invited people to contribute shoes and fire fighter boots to create the Empty Shoe Memorial in the local public square. The 2,978 shoes and four pairs of fire fighter boots were then donated to the victims of a recent hurricane. The Bryant Park Corporation, which manages and funds the maintenance of Bryant Park on 42nd Street, arranged 2,753 café chairs in rows on the lawn, all facing south, toward the World Trade Center. The installation included an art project by Sheryl Oring: ten typists took down people’s thoughts on the question: “What would you like the world to remember about 9/11?” on small sheets of paper. These were then included in an exhibition. Illegal Art, an artists’ collective, invited people to walk the height of the tallest tower from 5th Avenue to 20th Street and to contribute their own thoughts. On the sidewalk, they marked off the number of each floor, leaving a notice to the public and a cup of chalk. The number of pieces of chalk equaled the number of people who perished in the towers. People may also recognize possibilities that existing formal memorials offer for acts of remembering. Some of these may be unacceptable to authorities, such as the silent dancing that took place at night in the Jefferson Memorial in Washington to celebrate the president’s birthday in 2011. Others may involve a kind of public caretaking. In 2013, to recognize the 25th anniversary of Kristallnacht, groups of residents in Berlin polished the brass Stolpersteine that mark the residences where victims of the Holocaust once lived (Berry 2013). Another took place at the scale of the entire city, creating an installation and an event visible from the ground as well as from the sky, and a means for the public to participate. For the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, brothers Christopher and Marc Bauder created the Lichtgrenze (Border of Lights) that lined a 9-mile segment of the former location of the Berlin Wall, already permanently marked in many places by a double role of cobblestones in the pavement. For the three days of celebration, an estimated 8,000 illuminated, helium-filled, white balloons on 11-foot-high carbon rods formed this “wall.” Christopher Bauder explained: “To contrast the massiveness and heaviness of this original monument, we were thinking of something light and ephemeral, something positive to attract people and then they can make of it what ever they like” (Edelbaum 2014). Members of the public signed up in advance and followed a carefully organized process of releasing the balloons at a set time on the final night. Before doing so they attached their own handwritten messages to them (ibid.). Formal memorials are intended to be sites of commemorative acts; usually they are traditional and predictable. But tributes left at these memorials and at informal memorials show a creativity and inventiveness that are not always predictable, as do the variety of events created at memorials and in other public spaces. While memorials and public space generally offer possible platforms for commemoration, the public is inventive, increasingly eager and sometimes brave in making creative use of the possibilities they discover, as they often are in other appropriations of public space (Franck and Stevens 2007).

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OCCUPYING CONTEMPORARY PUBLIC MEMORIALS are the settings for a very broad and rather surprising range of activities beyond commemoration. At the Diana Memorial Fountain, for example (Figure 1.1), on a warm day, there are people of all ages sitting and lying on the edges of the fountain and the adjacent lawn. Many are barefoot and sit with their feet in the cool running water. Some are in swimwear, others simply have their shirts off and are sunbathing. There are nannies minding children, picnics, and even birthday parties. Here and at other memorials, people use the sculptural forms as chairs and tables or for climbing. They explore these settings’ potentials to support a tremendous variety of body postures and movements: bending, stepping, grasping, running, sliding. Visitors also spend much of their time at these sites looking at other people, rather than at the memorials. Such ways of occupying memorials are surprising when we consider that memorials are typically conceived by their sponsors as solemn, separate places for people to come to remember and honor the people and events being commemorated. Memorial visitors are generally expected to be reverential: to walk slowly, study the memorials’ symbolism, lay floral tributes and engage in other commemorative performances. They might reach out and touch an engraved name. By contrast, the many unanticipated ways of occupying memorials are often unconnected with the people, places and events being commemorated, and may seem distinctly disrespectful to memory. Little previous scholarship on memorials has sought to evaluate the ways people actually occupy them. Scholars of history, memory and art are mostly interested in the intentions guiding commemorative design, and existing studies of visitors’ actions generally emphasize how their bodily experiences affirm the affects intended by the memorials’ designers, demonstrating how these experiences resonate with the events being commemorated. Blair and Michels’ (1999) study of the US Astronauts Memorial is a rare exception, noting that visitors are often oblivious to a memorial’s intended cues, and are distracted from reflection on historic events by experiences within and surrounding the memorial site. Szpunar’s (2010) analysis of young men urinating on Canada’s main war memorial is rather unique in documenting visitor actions in a commemorative space that are grave (if inadvertent) infractions against its sacred purposes. The wide variety of behaviors that can be observed at two key recent memorials—the Diana Memorial Fountain, and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (MMJE)—provide a basis for a wider examination of the wide range of ways that people occupy memorial sites: how and where people move within them, how people engage with them through their various senses, and how they interact with other visitors. These actions illustrate the multifarious 110

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affordances that contemporary memorials, both abstract and figurative, offer for human action. In aesthetic terms, both these examples are simple concrete forms, but in terms of opportunities for occupation, they are complex and richly engaging. The following discussion pursues two different approaches to explore how people occupy memorials. The first proceeds from observation of a range of typical actions observed at contemporary memorial sites—walking, resting, climbing around and social encounters with other visitors—to identify how those settings support these particular kinds of bodily engagements with spaces, objects and other people. The second approach reflects upon three general aspects of people’s engagement with memorials that help us to understand why people occupy these settings for such a range of active, non-commemorative uses. We identify how the uses of memorials are stimulated by the distinctive richness of their sensory experiences and functional affordances. These stimuli often engender playful responses.

OBSERVED USES Circulating One key set of patterns within visitors’ uses of memorial settings is the sequential choreography of how people arrive at them, enter them, move around within them, and stop at particular points. This choreography can contribute significantly to the drama and meaning of a site, through various physical cues and clues to particular expected patterns of moving, pausing and perceiving. In most existing analyses of memorials, the reason that people come to a commemorative site is taken as selfevident: the visitors are mourners. Their modes of circulating are often ritualized and tightly framed. But many of the people who are present at contemporary memorials clearly arrive there for a range of very different reasons. They thus perform a range of movements, views and uses that the memorials’ designers may not have anticipated. Even at very traditional, formal memorial settings like the Soviet War Memorial in Berlin’s Treptower Park, which is surrounded by trees and a high fence and filled with large-scale didactic depictions of dignity, honor and suffering, some visitors come to ride skateboards, cuddle their partners, rest and eat, or shoot fashion advertisements. This memorial is a quiet, open, well-maintained and aesthetically pleasing space, and the park it sits within is a popular leisure destination. People come to Budapest’s Liberation Monument high on Gellert Hill as much for the view over the city across the Danube as to see the memorial itself or pay their respects to the Soviet soldiers it originally commemorated. The more recent Diana Memorial Fountain in London is also part of a large urban park, and is thus scene of many leisure activities including picnics, ball games, sunbathing and jogging. Its location next door to a public children’s swimming pool makes it a particularly popular destination for water-based play. The Canada Memorial nearby in Green Park is also mostly frequented by tourists visiting the park and by parents with children looking to play. Even memorials that are not set in beautiful landscapes are visited by many non-mourners. The vast majority of people who encounter London’s Bali Memorial are tourists visiting the adjacent Cabinet War Rooms, or simply passing by between Parliament Square and St James’s Park. London’s Kindertransport memorial is hard to avoid, standing right outside one entry of the city’s third-busiest railway station. Many memorials are placed in heavily-trafficked locations, whether 111

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to commemorate the history of these specific locations or simply because the memorials’ sponsors wanted high exposure for their subjects. And thus memorials are not always and only conscious destinations for commemorative activities. Many people who engage with public memorials are actually on their way somewhere else. They pass by, through, or over memorials, but their minds and bodies are focused on something other than remembrance. Many people arrive at Berlin’s MMJE without actively seeking it out. Sitting, as it does, in a very busy urban location between many tourist and leisure destinations, its ‘visitors’ include businessmen walking to work; tourists en route to other destinations; people walking their dogs; and adults taking children outside to play. When people arrive here, they are riding bicycles and scooters, talking on mobile phones, laughing, kissing and cuddling their partners, or eating sausages, ice creams and sweets. Children are sometimes carrying balloons, and adults may be wearing unusual costumes. When Germany hosted the 2006 Football World Cup, many teenagers brought footballs into the site and played with them between the stelae. When Berlin’s massive techno music festival The Love Parade took place nearby, people climbed on top of stelae and danced to its amplified music. One man pretended to be a DJ using a low stele as a turntable. Another Love Parade partygoer surreptitiously urinated between the memorial’s stelae. On another occasion, doctors marching in protest to the nearby parliament passed through the site wearing costumes and carrying banners. An art student came to use two stelae as a work surface. The MMJE is occupied in all these ways not only because it is central, but also because it is a very permeable and approachable object. In contrast to fenced memorial sculptures on pedestals that people can only walk past, this is a large space and a set of forms that people can easily enter into, engage with, and move through. People often arrive at this memorial and occupy it without even knowing they are doing so. Many passers-by walk unconsciously over part of this memorial without even noticing it, because the stelae around the site perimeter are flat, level with the pavement, and extend into the sidewalk; the memorial thus overlaps with the surrounding everyday streetscape. Few visitors notice the perimeter signs that demarcate this site’s special meaning and use. The memorial’s abstract form does not help to convey its commemorative intent. When a temporary perimeter fence was installed in 2006 to separate this memorial site from the adjacent tourist flows of the World Cup and The Love Parade, people appeared much more conscious of its specific purpose (Stevens 2012). But generally, many mundane urban activities incidentally spill over into the MMJE site from its immediate surroundings. Large spatial memorials often have defined formal processional routes through them that choreograph particular movements, stopping points and views. At Berlin’s Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park (Figure 6.1), visitors walk slowly up a long approach ramp toward a terminating axial statue, until they reach a wide elevated terrace between two giant stone Soviet flags, and generally stop there and survey the expansive main courtyard beyond. They typically then descend and walk along this courtyard, sometimes looking at the rows of figurative bas-relief sculptures along the sides, which convey the historical course of the war. They ascend the steep stairs at the base of the massive focal soldier statue and peer into the small ceremonial chamber directly beneath it, and look back along the courtyard to the flags framing a statue of a grieving mother near the entry. This prescribed sequence focuses visitors’ attention, bodies and minds. 112

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Figure 6.1 Soviet War Memorial, Treptower Park, Berlin, Yakov Belopolsky with sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich, 1948 Source: Plan by Te-Sheng Huang.

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Washington’s FDR Memorial is similarly articulated as a sequence of enclosed ‘rooms’ where visitors experience in turn the different moods of FDR’s four presidential terms. Some less traditional memorials also frame choreographed sequences of perceptions and actions. At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, most visitors walk slowly down one path ‘into’ the memorial and up the opposite ramp back ‘out’ of it. Some memorials have been sited and designed so that people who are incidentally walking somewhere will be drawn through them, and might engage with their subject in passing. One example is the September 11 Memorial in Westfield, New Jersey, a suburb of greater New York City, entitled “A Walk for Dads.” This memorial features 12 small stone obelisks spaced out along a path that commuters take to and from the local train station. Each bears the name of a local resident who perished in the World Trade Center attack. All were men; all fathers; all commuters who might themselves have walked along this route. The processional form of this memorial seeks to catch the attention of hurried commuters. Rather than defining a single, narrative sequence, the MMJE, the Diana Memorial Fountain and the Pentagon Memorial are very extensive open landscapes that provide a multiplicity of possible pathways for moving through them. People move around freely within these settings, discovering and exploring a wide variety of routes and modes of movement through them. At the MMJE, visitors in wheelchairs follow particular aisles marked for their use because of their relatively flat topography. Parents pushing baby carriages and cyclists also choose these aisles, sometimes by trial and error after they have had difficulty on other more sloping routes. Young people run back and forth, exploring various aisles; they often prefer those with undulating ground. They frequently accelerate along aisles that slope gradually downward toward the center of the site. The stelae also generally become taller toward the center, so visitors’ bodies gradually become more immersed within the mass of the object. Moving through becomes moving into. Many people, especially the elderly, deliberately choose to walk along the outer aisles of the memorial field which do not have constrained views and which generally offer flatter terrain. Other people seem to like exploring the dark, confined interior of the field, turning frequently to change direction or change aisles, or to avoid oncoming strangers, though some visitors specifically enjoy the tension of squeezing past other people in the narrow 900mm gaps. Those who move through the site in groups either form single file to walk through the aisles, or use adjoining aisles. Many seem disconcerted by losing sight and contact with their companions, though others create games of peek-a-boo as they walk. As the stelae increase incrementally in height from ground level at the site perimeter, people often step up onto their flat upper surfaces and walk across the top of the stelae field, striding over their 900mm spacings (Figure 6.2). They explore this upper topography, jumping diagonally between stelae and across different vertical increments. In contrast to the Treptower memorial, within the MMJE, movement through the site has no end point, no focus. People circulate continuously until they feel they have experienced enough. Many pedestrians and cyclists simply go in one side of the memorial and out the other, continuing on their way through the city. Their occupation of the memorial is incidental to their journey. Visitors entering the Diana Memorial Fountain are presented with several distinct options for circulating around the site. People walk circuits up and around the loop to the top of the memorial, where they have the best overview, and back 114

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Figure 6.2 Visitor walking up and across the top of the field of stelae, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin Source: Photomontage Quentin Stevens, 2006. Reprinted with permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline. com, from Q. Stevens, “Visitor Responses at Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial: Contrary to Conventions, Expectations and Rules,” Public Art Dialogue 2(1), 2012.

down again. Visitors circulate in two directions, walking parallel or in file. They walk inside or outside the fountain ring, on the paved path or on grass. The termination of the inner pavement does not deter most visitors from continuing walking a circuit on the grass. Contrary to posted rules, people also walk along the fountain’s concrete edge, extending their arms for balance or holding hands with a companion. Some visitors walk astride the channel. Others walk in the water, either with or against the current, with their shoes off, or in some cases with them on (Figure 6.3). From the entry of the Pentagon Memorial (see Figure 4.2), a paved pathway runs around the perimeter of the gravel field containing 184 benches. There are also six paved cross-aisles within the field. But most visitors initially walk forward across the relatively-open gravel, and stop to look at the first few widelyspaced benches they encounter. As the named benches are laid out in sequence of the victims’ ages, most visitors thus first encounter and engage with the bench ‘representing’ the youngest victim (3 years old), then that for her older sister (8) and three other children (11), all aeroplane passengers, separated by a large space from the mostly adult casualties. As all the benches look the same, each of these more distant adult memorials attracts relatively few visits by strangers. Although elderly visitors and those with wheelchairs, baby carriages or luggage tend to stick to the pathways, the open gravel permits meandering itineraries through the site, and visiting children often weave between the cantilevered ends of the benches, sometimes springing off their inclined faces as if they are runners’ starting blocks. Children also sometimes step or jump across the benches as if the field were a steeplechase, or walk up and over the sloping ends of the benches and run or slide down them (Figure 6.4). 115

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Figure 6.3 People walk along in the water channel, Diana Memorial Fountain, London Source: Quentin Stevens, 2006.

Figure 6.4 Children playing on sloping benches, National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial, Arlington, Virginia Source: Photomontage Quentin Stevens, 2011.

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Although the arrangement of the benches at the Pentagon Memorial is calibrated to give visitors a particularly sympathetic encounter with its commemorative subject, these three memorial cases illustrate that visitors’ movements through large, abstract public memorials are often largely unchoreographed, and that people’s ways of moving around such sites often have no clear links to the sites’ meanings. These site designs do not just open up memory and symbolism to multiple narrative experiences and interpretations; they also open up memorial settings to exploratory circulation which has no links to remembrance. The choreography of visitors’ movements through any given memorial site is punctuated by different places and reasons that they stop. When visitors arrive at large, open memorial landscapes such as the MMJE and the Diana and Pentagon Memorials, they generally pause at the perimeter of the site, to get an overview of the terrain, to plan their route through it, and to take photographs of the memorial and of themselves standing in front of it. At the Diana Memorial Fountain (Figure 6.5), visitors often walk in on the path and stop at the flat bridge over the fountain channel, to have an overview of the whole site, which slopes upward in their field of view, and to decide where to go next. People also often stop at the uphill end of the ring, to enjoy the view back down, and sometimes in the center of the ring, to view the fountain all around them. They pause on the three bridges, to watch the water flow underneath, and adjacent to other variations in the fountain channel, to watch and listen to the water’s flow and the ways other visitors engage with it. Where else they stop depends on whether they are willing to walk off the paved paths and onto the grass or onto the edge of the fountain channel, and what kinds of close engagement with the water they are seeking. At the MMJE, many visitors walk some way into low, open perimeter of the memorial field before they stop to perform a panoramic reconnaissance of the site. As they walk further in, visitors also often stop again at a point just before the stelae rise above their eye level. Some visitors pause at this point simply because it is their last opportunity to have a wide view and take photographs across the site. But many visitors are clearly unwilling to move deeper within the field than their eye level. They turn at 90 degrees to their descending path, to walk a skirting route of the memorial field that doesn’t take them any deeper into it. People often pose for photographs between or behind stelae at their neck height, ‘swallowed up’ by the memorial (Figure 6.6). These photographs engage consciously and playfully with visitors’ awareness of incrementally moving ‘inside’ the three-dimensional mass of the stelae field. Some visitors appear to have a bodily or even existential fear of getting ‘out of their depth’, ‘drowning’ among the dark waves of stelae. Visitors’ hesitations at this threshold of the MMJE field signal a multi-sensory feeling of enclosure which is stimulated by the surrounding concrete masses. The long, tight rows of stelae restrict views out, robbing visitors of orientation to the surrounding cityscape. Many visitors do not seem to like losing sight of their companions walking in adjacent aisles. The mass of the stelae attenuates sounds from outside. The surrounding concrete masses also stimulate an unconscious haptic sense of enclosure, from the temperature variation caused by shelter from the weather and from air molecules bouncing off the nearby surfaces, which cause a slight increase in air pressure against a visitor’s skin. Many people avoid having too close an engagement with the concrete mass of this landscape. 117

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Figure 6.5 Diana Memorial Fountain, London, Kathryn Gustafson and Neil Porter, 2004 Source: Plan by Te-Sheng Huang.

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Figure 6.6 Visitors photographing friends “up to their necks,” Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin Source: Quentin Stevens, 2006.

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People stop at a range of other places to appreciate the memorial, including numerous vantage points of raised ground among lower stelae, the deepest, most enclosed points, and turning points when new views open up between stelae along cross axes. As Lynch (1960) found, people moving through unfamiliar environments pause at points where they have to make decisions, such as these memorial thresholds, path forks and bridges. Because the Diana Memorial Fountain and the MMJE offer a variety of routes that visitors can explore, navigation is an ongoing process which begins with getting an overview, and then requires further pauses where people weigh up the various new physical affordances for action and experience that they detect in the environment (Stevens 2006). They do not just stop to think about the commemorated subject. Visitors pause where a memorial’s layout blocks their desired passage, where the material landscape supports postures of repose, and where the layout frames encounters with strangers or interesting views. Visitors to these abstract memorials also stop to engage with very localized sensations of sound and touch, such as listening to the reverberation of voices and feeling the flow of water. These ostensibly commemorative landscapes are just as likely to encourage people to run or to be distracted by idle sensory pleasures as they are to make them stop and think. People touch memorials that are positioned at ground level with many different parts of their bodies and in a variety of relaxed postures: leaning, squatting, kneeling, sitting, and lying down. People standing next to the low perimeter elements of the Diana Memorial Fountain and the MMJE often place one foot up on them, to steady themselves when taking photographs or to stretch their leg. Many people step up onto the low, flat, firm edge surfaces of the MMJE and Diana Memorial Fountain to better view or photograph the memorials. These visitors generally appear unaware that they are standing on the same commemorative object that they are photographing. Photographers squat, lie, and cantilever their bodies on, against and between the memorial forms in a multitude of unselfconscious postures to frame particular views onto these memorial landscapes. People use these memorials as tables, putting down their clothes and children on them, and opening their bags to rummage through them. One university student spent an entire hour at the MMJE using two stelae as a work surface. She spread paper and adhesive tape right across the top of one stele. People sit on or lean against stelae near the periphery while they eat something, smoke, drink beer (Figure 6.7), read the newspaper or study a map, or talk on their mobile telephones. People also often sit on these memorials to rest. They sometimes sit crossed-legged on top of the memorials with their eyes closed, meditating. Some look at other visitors, read books, or check their telephones. Many visitors to the Diana Memorial Fountain sit on the fountain edge with their legs facing outwards or stretched along the edge, or cross-legged on top of it, to be close to the water without getting wet, while also staying in reach of their shoes, bags and baby strollers. They sit across the channel with their legs bridging over the water. While seated, they lower their hands or feet into the flow. In summer, many visitors sit reading with their legs in the water. People sit on this memorial in every orientation, facing in or out of the ring, and facing in or out of the channel, or sitting astride the edge with one foot in the water and one out. More people tend to sit on the channel’s outside edge than the inside one, because the paved path around the outside facilitates access to it. Some of the fountain’s edge sections have an abrupt drop into knee-deep water; others have a low, raked incline where people lean back 120

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Figure 6.7 People sit and eat, smoke, drink beer, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin Source: Quentin Stevens, 2006. Reprinted with permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com, from Q. Stevens, “Visitor Responses at Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial: Contrary to Conventions, Expectations and Rules,” Public Art Dialogue 2(1), 2012.

and gradually slide their feet in. Some people sit on the edge of the memorial’s three flat bridges, where they spread their legs to watch the water run between, dangle their feet in the water, or bend forward to place both hands in it. The MMJE stelae are too far apart for people to sit bridging between them, but some visitors sit suspended with their bodies wedged between the opposing faces of two stelae (Figure 6.8). Visitors also sometimes sit on the ground between the stelae with their knees drawn up, using them as a backrest, especially when the weather is hot. Visitors often lie down on top of both the Diana Memorial Fountain and the MMJE, in many different orientations. Unlike sitting, this posture is never a means to see and learn more about the memorial. People lie on these memorials to rest and to sun themselves, and this depends on comfort. People only lie when the stone and concrete are warm and the weather is sunny but mild. Visitors recline on their side, on one elbow, with a knee raised; or flat on their backs, with clothes, bags, or the laps of seated friends cushioning their heads. The MMJE stelae are long and wide enough that two people often lie adjacent on top. At the Diana Memorial Fountain, people lie on their backs or prone, sometimes with their arms or feet trailing in the stream. The memorial’s lowness and breadth let people easily lower themselves onto its edge and maneuver close to the water.

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Figure 6.8 People climb wedged between stelae, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin Source: Quentin Stevens, 2006. Reprinted with permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com, from Q. Stevens, “Nothing More Than Feelings: Abstract Memorials,” Architectural Theory Review 14(2), 2009.

Acting Memorial objects also provide physical support to a wide range of more energetic visitor actions. People pretend to push over the MMJE’s concrete stelae, and use them as DJ turntables. Two young boys with cowboy hats and toy pistols use the edge of the Diana Memorial Fountain as a hideout from their parents. Visitors interact with the poses of commemorative statues. People explore the material properties of water, try to hold back its flow, splashing friends with it, and taking water out with containers and pouring it onto the ground. Climbing on abstract memorials is quite common. People can easily step up onto the low perimeter edges of the Diana Memorial Fountain and MMJE. Many people then proceed to step across the fountain or over the gaps between the stelae, or stand astride them. Visitors often use the MMJE’s stelae as a set of graduated steps, walking across their top surfaces from flush with the ground at the perimeter to a height of over 4 metres in the memorial’s center, where they can be photographed or enjoy a wide view or the vertiginous thrill of jumping across the precipitous gaps. Even small children often walk or jump between the stelae. Some visitors engage with greater challenges such as sudden shifts in height, tilted stelae, or traversing longer diagonal gaps. Visitors to the MMJE also try to climb onto its taller stelae by running and leaping up, pulling themselves up with their hands, being pushed or pulled up by a friend, or by wedging their body between the masses of two stelae with their back and feet and then inching their way upwards. Many visitors also test their 122

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jumping abilities against the varying profile of the stone channel of London’s Diana Memorial Fountain, and the watercourse within it, for example, by leaping back and forth in zig-zags up and down the memorial’s length, or balancing on the channel’s narrow edge, which is in parts only wide enough for one foot. In one section of Washington’s FDR Memorial, teenagers step, jump and climb up onto the staggered stone blocks of artificial ‘cliffs’ surrounding a large fountain pool (Figure 6.9). For small children, the incline of Canberra’s Sandakan Memorial and the low benches at Washington’s Pentagon Memorial are also challenging objects for climbing and jumping. People sometimes slide, roll or run down the inclined surfaces of memorials. Many young visitors to the MMJE accelerate into a run as they move into the memorial along its downward-sloping ground surface, after which they twist and turn through the memorial’s tight corners in games of tag. Young children enjoy running down the short, steep, grassy embankment inside the Diana Memorial Fountain. Some visitors to the Soviet War Memorial in Berlin’s Treptower Park lie down and roll to the bottom of the very tall, steep, grassy tumulus at the base of its massive central statue (Figure 6.10). Others do the same at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance (Carlisle 2013). Children often slide on their bottoms down the steep, polished stone surface of London’s Canada Memorial, when its flowing film of water had been turned off for maintenance (see Figure 8.2). Children even test out sliding down the rough-stone-finished sloping end of the benches at the Pentagon Memorial and the Sandakan Memorial in Canberra, and sliding their bottoms sideways down the roughened edge of the channel of the Diana Memorial Fountain. Visitors also engage with the inclined surfaces of memorials with the aid of wheels. People cycle along the smooth but undulating ground between the

Figure 6.9 Boys climbing “cliffs” and jumping, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, Washington. Note warning sign Source: Quentin Stevens, 2011.

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Figure 6.10 People lie and roll down the steep, grassy tumulus, Soviet War Memorial, Treptower Park, Berlin Source: Quentin Stevens, 2012.

MMJE’s rows of stelae. They roll on inline skates and scooters down the smooth, curved slopes of the Diana Memorial Fountain’s paved paths. Skateboarders and cyclists at Berlin’s Soviet War Memorial wind their way back and forth down the long, wide, inclined approach path, which offers many meters of slow momentum for practicing balancing and executing tricks. Cyclists and skateboarders also test the usability of Melbourne’s Suffrage Artwork, ‘The Great Petition’, which has curving folds of concrete that resemble skating ‘half-pipes.’ Variations in the hardness, friction and width of all these slopes afford differences in comfort, speed and risk. The Bali Memorial in Melbourne is not sloped, but its numerous steel edges and raised ledges have made it extremely popular with large groups of skaters for grinding, jumping and flipping their skateboards (Figure 6.11). The popularity of these very active ways of occupying memorials suggests that the remainder of the pedestrian realm lacks adequate settings where people can enjoy such experiences in safety and tranquility. People visiting memorials also play with objects on their surfaces. At the Pentagon Memorial, one group of visiting children rolled a baseball up and down the angled end of a commemorative bench. At the MMJE, visitors who brought soccer balls into the site during a World Cup promotion threw or kicked them against the vertical faces of the stelae as they passed along the aisles. At the Diana Memorial Fountain, people place shoes, leaves and even paper boats into the flowing water and follow them in the current, sometimes having races. Small children play with toy vehicles on the channel edges, driving them into the water, scooping up water with tractors, buckets and spades, and pouring it out onto the ground. People also put their hands or feet into the water to ‘interact with’ it, testing its force, and playing different games with its flow, including trying to hold it back. 124

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Figure 6.11 Skateboarders grinding, jumping and flipping, Bali Memorial, Melbourne, Melbourne City Council, 2005 Source: Quentin Stevens, 2013.

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All these actions demonstrate that touching a memorial can involve doing, and is not limited to passively receiving sensations (Stevens 2006; Paterson 2011). Touch is a highly involved form of interaction with objects, an interaction which accordingly has great impact upon the visitor and upon the setting itself (Rodaway 1994; Latham 1999). People’s different ways of touching the water in the Diana Memorial Fountain, for example, reshape its currents and sounds. Berlin’s planned Memorial to Freedom and Unity (see Figure 7.8), commemorating the peaceful civil protests that led to national reunification, is a rather unique case of a memorial whose design is centered around the idea that visitors will be physically active. Indeed, this memorial is designed so that visitors can move it. It has the form of a 50-meter-wide concave semicircular shell. Visitors can enter at the low central point and walk up onto the face of the shell. Designed by a choreographer and a scenographer, the memorial is a giant see-saw that will tilt when a sufficiently large number of people move in a coordinated group from one side of the memorial’s surface to the other. The project’s title is a German word play, perhaps best translated as “citizens’ movement.” The prizewinners’ statement emphasizes that this memorial “is open to variety of uses: spontaneous, informal, playful or even official;” it is “‘occupyable’ in the truest sense of the word” (Deutsche Gesellschaft e.V. 2012).

Visitors Interacting Contemporary public memorials are spaces of engagement not only because of the varied close encounters visitors have with the commemorative objects, but also because of the encounters that frequently occur between visitors. Being photographed by someone is one such form of interaction. In addition to being photographed standing in front of contemporary memorials, people now often sit on part of a memorial in the foreground, or step up and stand on it. They jump from one part of a memorial to another or pose in other stances on top of them (Figure 6.12). They pose emerging from behind objects, and imitating or adding to figurative scenes depicted in the memorials. Through such actions, visitors demonstrate a range of particular relations of seeing and being seen that are framed by contemporary memorial designs: their fronts and backs, their stages, their entrances and exits, their focal points. Memorials have become theatrical sets for both staged and unexpected social encounters. People also often casually photograph strangers at memorials, meaning that visiting a memorial may not be the private, introspective experience some might be seeking. At major contemporary sites of remembrance, visitors often spend time watching and being watched by hundreds of other people. They also often overhear other visitors and brush up against them. The sights, sounds, smells, and physical closeness of the many other people present in these settings, and their unanticipated actions, offer a range of multi-sensory stimulations. People appear to find large memorials to be comfortable places to sit and spend time with other people. A large group of young Goths chose the grassy center of the Diana Memorial Fountain as the venue for a birthday party (Plate 6.1), reflecting its physical comfort, pleasant acoustics, pedestrian safety, high quality of design and maintenance, stimulating public atmosphere, and its lack of scheduled events. These qualities are sometimes lacking in contemporary public space generally. People explore a wide variety of social arrangements that are possible on the Diana Memorial Fountain’s concrete channel. Friends often sit adjacent, with 126

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Figure 6.12 Visitors posing for photographs, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin Source: Quentin Stevens, 2007. Reprinted with permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com, from Q. Stevens, “Visitor Responses at Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial: Contrary to Conventions, Expectations and Rules,” Public Art Dialogue 2(1), 2012.

one extending their legs into the water and the other turned with their legs stretched along the edge of the channel, or turned away from the water and toward other friends who stand on the adjacent path. Friends often sit on opposite sides of the channel with their feet meeting in the water. Visitors often stand on one edge of the channel and photograph companions on the other. At the MMJE, people sit next to each other on low stelae, even sometimes sharing a stele to play a board game. They also often sit and talk face-to-face or at 90 degrees on adjacent stelae (Figure 6.13). The abstract forms of the Diana Memorial Foutain and the MMJE both provide a large number of ‘secondary seating’ options at a variety of heights and orientations at comfortable distances for conversation (Sommer 1969; Whyte 1980). The Pentagon Memorial has ‘benches’ but they are mostly too widely spaced for this use; some visitors sit and their companions have to stand. Several large memorials in Washington, including the FDR, Navy, and National Law Enforcement memorials, have extensive seating consciously integrated into their designs, and thus people do sit and pass time in these settings, whether or not they have come to mourn and remember. By contrast, some other major popular memorials, including Washington’s VVM and World War II Memorials, provide almost no seating, and so visits and social interactions within these sites are constrained by the time that visitors—often elderly veterans—are willing to stand. The Diana Memorial Fountain is usually very crowded in warm weather. People often sit in very close proximity to strangers, both next to them and across the low channel; particularly considering they are often in their swimwear. These ‘near’ social distances (Hall 1966) are rendered less confrontational by the intervening watercourse, and also by the options of sitting facing in opposite 127

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Figure 6.13 Varied seating orientations, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin Source: Quentin Stevens, 2006.

directions on the same channel edge. Strangers also appear comfortable sitting backto-back on the same stele at the MMJE. But the narrow aisles between the stelae (900mm) cause rather intense, multi-sensory encounters between those who sit on stelae and anyone who walks past them, and those who encounter others coming the opposite way along an aisle, who have to squeeze past. Visitors often have very sudden, unexpected close encounters with other people around the corners of stelae, when their trajectories along perpendicular aisles intersect. In one instance, two children playing tag met literally head-on. Social congestion also happens where the Diana Memorial Fountain ’s entry path crosses a bridge over its fountain. People circumambulate this looped memorial in both directions, on adjoining paths or in the watercourse itself. When doing so, they parade past others sitting on the edge and encounter many others coming the opposite way. Visitors often avoid such encounters by stepping aside or changing direction. Such avoidance is also a form of bodily engagement; it is a major element of how people occupy public memorials. Two forms of social encounter at the MMJE reflect that some social groups want to gather in public places while also remaining hidden from the wider population. Within the darkened, unpoliced, secluded areas between the memorial’s tallest stelae, teenagers hide from their guardians, often slouched against opposing stelae. At night, it is a refuge for young couples and cruising homosexuals. Young people find here a vertiginous escape from the everyday, where they can run, scream, smoke, drink and kiss as they please. Many visitors to busy public memorials like the MMJE and the Diana Memorial Fountain see the other people there as a positive stimulus. They copy the actions of other visitors, or compete against them (Figure 6.14). They chase each other, play hide and seek, or ‘followthe-leader,’ leaping across the tops of stelae and jumping zig-zag across the Diana Memorial Fountain’s channel. Sometimes people pretend to push friends into the water. People sometimes mirror other visitors’ postures, for example, each raising one foot up onto the fountain channel or a stele, or turning when seated to dip a hand into the Diana Memorial Fountain’s watercourse. 128

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Figure 6.14 Copy-cat parallel jumping across stelae, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin Source: Quentin Stevens, 2006. Reprinted with permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com, from Q. Stevens, “Visitor Responses at Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial: Contrary to Conventions, Expectations and Rules,” Public Art Dialogue 2(1), 2012.

These uses all show visitors focusing their attention and shaping their actions around other visitors, rather than directly on the substance and rhetoric of the memorial itself. Each visitor’s experiences of these public memorials—the sights, sounds and tactile perceptions—are in large part defined by the ways other people are behaving around them. These intense, various, continuous social engagements compromise the possibility of the passive, solemn, introspective contemplation often associated with memorials.

UNDERSTANDING USES The remainder of this chapter reflects on the preceding observations to explore what it means to ‘occupy’ a memorial. It looks at how and why memorial settings engage the attention and the bodies of visitors, and what stimulates visitors to the rich diversity of actions described above. Part of the answer is that contemporary memorials in public settings offer an extremely wide range of physical and social stimuli to action. Another part of the answer lies in the especially broad physical and social openness that many memorials present. ‘Occupying’ is a two-way engagement between a visitor and a space. Visitors give their attention to memorials and act in relation to them, and their actions vary depending on what knowledge, capacities and moods they bring with them. But memorials also engage the various senses and the bodies of visitors, and prompt certain forms of action, even in ways that visitors do not consciously plan, choose or recognize. 129

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Sensing People’s ways of occupying contemporary memorial settings reveal their engagement with the rich varieties of sensory stimuli that these settings present. Memorials have always had strong multi-sensory impacts on their visitors. This is most obvious with the chilling sense of awe generated by the massive, sublime scale of many traditional monuments (Dovey 1999). But minimalist sculptures, because they lack figural detail, make it easier to notice the numerous other nonrepresentational ways that memorial landscapes capture visitors’ attention. It is only in representational terms that these memorial designs are minimal. While the terms ‘abstract’ and ‘minimal’ might be thought to imply a diminution of visitors’ engagement, the visually simpler forms of some memorials heighten other sensations that also encourage visitors’ exploration (Fried 1967). In contrast to memorials that present a composed visual message that can be observed by a detached body at rest, and analyzed until it is understood, contemporary memorial designs often engender continuous, varying, multi-sensory engagements. The following observations on the interactions between sensory stimuli and visitors’ actions at memorial sites draw on a combination of visitor observation and direct personal experience. Visitors spend significant amounts of time looking at memorials and photographing them. This is even true of minimal memorials such as the VVM, the MMJE and the Diana Memorial Fountain, despite their lack of visual representations to ‘read.’ These designs present complex and perceptually stimulating visual phenomena. People seem particularly fascinated by the repetition and variation in the MMJE’s rows of stelae, their sharp contrasts of light and dark and their shifting shadow patterns. Many visitors are attracted by the darkness of the spaces at the center of this memorial. Another strong visual stimulus is the many changes in the course of the flowing water within the Diana Memorial Fountain. At Lisbon’s Monument to the Overseas Combatants, many visitors experiment with photographing themselves in the angled overhanging mirrors of the setting’s sculptural centerpiece, and have relatively little interest in the surrounding walls that list the dead. One visitor to the MMJE became similarly fascinated with photographing their own shadow, cast in sharp contrast against the flat grey surface. People also spend a lot of time taking photographs of strangers within the MMJE stelae field, simply to capture the colors, shapes and contrasts that people form against the gray, flat, repetitive backdrop. The photographs that visitors take here of other people do not often show commemorative acts with any link to the memorial’s historical subject. These visual experiences are purely and abstractly aesthetic, separate from any chains of reference to particular people, places, things or ideas. Visitors to public memorials also listen to them and respond to the distinctive auditory experiences that are framed within these spaces. The sense of interiority at the MMJE is in large part an acoustic impression. Deep within this memorial, external sounds of the city are blocked by the surrounding concrete mass. This quiet zone is filled by the sounds of young people calling out loudly to their unseen friends, yelling or slapping the stelae to test the reverberation of the space, or simply expressing their delight while running around. They explore the soundscape by testing the possibilities of locating or deceiving other people with their calls. At the Diana Memorial Fountain, people listen to the wide range of stimulating sounds created by 130

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variations in the water’s flow: bubbling, cascading, splashing and rippling. Their attention also seems drawn to the contrast of its quieter, more tranquil sections. People pay attention to one segment of the stone channel that has been specially crafted with rows of small holes that produce loud popping sounds as water runs over them. At this memorial, too, people actively contribute to the soundscape through the ways they move their hands and feet in the water. Visitors engage with memorials in varied ways through the sense of touch. At the VVM and the National September 11 Memorial, people run their fingers over the incised lettering of the victims’ names and the smoothness of the surfaces in between. At the VVM, this touching is ritualized and recorded through the taking of rubbings on paper with charcoal or crayon. At the MMJE, people walking between the close rows of stelae put their hands out to test their hardness, smoothness and weight (Figure 6.15). Visitors run their hands across the stelae as they pass, tap them rhythmically, feel the sharpness of their edges, and push against them. When the stelae are wet, people skim their hands across the shallow pools on their tops. Visitors to the Diana Memorial Fountain scoop its water in their cupped hands, flick it, and skim their hands across its surface. One person was observed to squat and wash his hands and face in the fountain, and rinse his mouth and spit, as one might on the edge of any rural stream. Visitors put their hands in the fountain’s flow to feel its current, as the water varies in shape, speed, pressure and turbulence according to the changes in the depth, width, slope, and surface texture of the channel (Figure 6.16). Water is an abstract medium that cannot easily be made to look like something, but it can engage visitors through their other senses. The FDR Memorial in Washington is deliberately tactile, and richly and didactically so.

Figure 6.15 A visitor puts her hands out to test the stelaes’ hardness, smoothness and weight, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin Source: Photomontage Quentin Stevens, 2006.

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Figure 6.16 Visitors touching water, Diana Memorial Fountain, London Source: Quentin Stevens, 2007.

Responding to FDR’s own disability, the design includes several walls and poles covered with relief sculptures that depict people, events and activities connected with FDR’s presidency, as well as Braille versions of the various captions and quotations. Many of these are rubbed smooth and shiny by frequent contact. Visitors do not only feel memorials through their hands. They also sense through their bodies when sitting or lying on these abstract memorial forms. They lean their shoulders and backs against the MMJE’s stelae. People lie sunbathing on the flat, warm upper surfaces of the MMJE and London’s Diana and Canada Memorials. Such close bodily engagements are relatively unlikely with figurative sculptures on pedestals. People’s actions are shaped by the memorials’ distinctive microclimates. They position themselves in response to variations these memorials offer in terms of temperature and exposure to the sun, breezes and moisture, relative to the ambient conditions. On very hot days, people sit in the deep cool shadows between the MMJE’s stelae, and at the Pentagon Memorial, visitors sit on the commemorative benches that are shaded by trees in preference to the very exposed seating at the site’s periphery. On summer days, people flock to the Diana Memorial Fountain, bringing swimsuits, towels, and cool drinks, and they sit or lie down in its flowing water (Plate 6.2). Even when the weather is cooler, people often inquisitively dip their hands into the raised fountain. Visitors’ touching of memorials is thus often a search for bodily comfort and rest or for sensual stimulation. Touching a memorial is not always an attempt to better understand its meanings. Visitors also feel memorials constantly through their feet. At the Diana Memorial Fountain, many people remove their shoes and dip their toes in the 132

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water. Even women who wear traditional headscarves often expose their feet here. Many people stand in the shallow water, to feel it flow over their feet, or walk within the water channel, even in winter with their shoes on. Many visitors also walk barefoot along the narrow stone edge of the channel. Grooves have been added here to enhance safety. People also sit on the raised edge of London’s Canada Memorial to put their feet in its cool, thin film of water, or stand within it. People engage with memorial sites’ topographies through their feet as they walk around them. At the relatively traditional Soviet War Memorial in Berlin’s Treptower Park, visitors walk slowly up a very long approach ramp to the wide elevated terrace overlooking the massive main memorial courtyard, and then step slowly down into it. At the VVM, people walk slowly down the inclined entry pathway and back up it. The frequent twists and turns of the pathways in Washington’s FDR Memorial and Ottawa’s Peacekeeping Monument slow people’s movements through the sites and direct their attention to various elements ahead. At Berlin’s MMJE, visitors constantly adjust the length, speed and trajectory of their stride as they negotiate the undulating ground surface. These effects are amplified for visitors who walk up onto and across the tops of the stelae field, where there are wide voids to step across and large height variations between stelae. At all these sites, the ground engages visitors’ bodies directly, rather than being a neutral backdrop to acts of viewing. By varying the risk, speed and effort of walking, these surface conditions heighten kinaesthesia, the sense of the body’s own movement through space. They affect the visitor’s sense of balance. Those who walk along on the narrow, inclined edge of the fountain channel of the Diana Memorial Fountain often wobble and have to extend their arms, or hold onto a companion walking on more stable ground. Most of their attention is thus on what their feet have to do, rather than on remembering. The sense of touch offers a much richer and more intimate range of engagements with memorials than does vision (Latham 1999). Whereas memorial designs focused on imagery and text encourage people to stand back to view them from a distance, touching is physically immediate. Touching also includes a very wide variety of stimuli. People feel the temperature, pressure, closeness, hardness and surface texture of a memorial setting constantly through the skin and muscles of many parts of their bodies. Memorials set low to the ground and close to pedestrian pathways engender an especially wide range of bodily contacts. People explore different ways of occupying these settings according to the new sensations offered by touching parts that have different shapes, materials and textures, and in response to frequent changes in temperature, pressure and sound caused by the sun, water and wind. How a memorial feels changes according to one’s own bodily actions. Experiences of touching memorials prompt constant exploration, reconsideration and reaction. People also touch memorials unintentionally, often even unconsciously, and whereas visitors normally think about and interpret what they see and hear, sensations of touch stimulate visitors’ bodies and emotions directly, and often affect them subconsciously. These forms of memorial engagement contrast with the idea of memorial as spectacle: something distant, visual, frontal, flat, and unresponsive; only capable of reproducing familiar, conventional meanings, and asking for nothing more than concentrated attention (Debord 1994). Memorials that stimulate touch encourage active rather than passive reception. 133

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Using Active touching is one key means by which visitors explore memorials’ potentials to stimulate sensory experiences and to facilitate bodily postures and actions. Gibson’s (1979) theory of affordances provides a useful framework for understanding how various people perceive such opportunities, and the resultant diversity of ways that they occupy memorial settings. By affordances, Gibson (ibid.: 127) means all the physical properties of a setting, understood in terms of what possibilities for action they offer to an animal, “either for good or ill,” in relation to that animal’s specific needs and capacities. The MMJE and the Diana Memorial Fountain are particularly rich environments in terms of their varying physical proportions and the opportunities these offer for resting the human body (Figure 6.17). The relative scale of these landscapes against the heights of visitors’ knees, waists and heads are important because people can come into close contact with these memorial objects and adjust their body position around them. Incremental variations in the heights of such elements within the sites ensure a goodness of fit for various actions of different people. When people sit, lie, or rest cups and bottles on top of the MMJE and the Diana Memorial Fountain, it shows that these abstract forms have a very good, unintended secondary functionality, confirming Gibson’s (1979: 127–8) observation that: The human species in some cultures has the habit of sitting … if a surface of support with the four properties (nearly horizontal … nearly flat … sufficiently extended (relative to the size of the animal) and if its substance is rigid … [and it] is also knee-high above the ground, it affords sitting on … It may have various shapes, as long as its functional layout is that of a seat.

Figure 6.17 Variety of body postures, Diana Memorial Fountain Source: Quentin Stevens, 2007.

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Many contemporary memorials in public settings do not provide much purposedesigned seating, especially considering the advanced age of many of their visitors. But people explore the affordances of memorials to meet their needs, and when they are tired from walking, thinking and taking photographs, they sit wherever they perceive places to sit (Whyte 1980; Gehl 1987). Fortunately, the simple lines and the varying dimensions and sculpture profiles of many minimalist memorials inadvertently provide a great variety of secondary seating options. People sit on memorials even when it is difficult or prohibited, if there is insufficient public seating nearby. They often sit on the plinth of the Kindertransport memorial, directly outside London’s Liverpool Street Station. This is one of the city’s busiest railway terminals, but only two benches have been provided for the waiting public. This historical memorial depicts Jewish children rescued from Nazi Germany who wait standing with their luggage for transportation to foster families throughout Britain. Today’s passengers wait sitting next to the sculptural figures. Along two sides of the plinth, raised metal plates listing the names of German cities that the children arrived from seem intended to pre-empt sitting. These make sitting much less likely and less comfortable, but they do not prevent it. At the Pentagon Memorial near Washington, the terrorist attack’s victims are represented by 184 ‘benches’, as the site’s information brochures note. On a very hot summer day when many tourists and mourners visit the site, quite a few people sit down on these benches, both singly and in groups, especially the elderly. The benches are the right height and, though cantilevered, are very stable. They have flowing pools of water underneath them and small shade trees clustered around them, making them very desirable places to sit. This is even though these ‘memorial units,’ as the memorial’s website terms them, are apparently not for sitting on. The National Park Rangers who manage the site reprimand those who do. People who sit down on memorials are not necessarily trying to view them better, or even to engage with them more closely. Indeed, sitting on memorials very often means facing away from them, and it is difficult to look at a memorial when you are lying on top of it. Visitors also often cover the low horizontal surfaces of minimalist memorials with papers, drinks, and their bags and clothes. These bodily engagements with memorial settings often preclude viewing a memorial and thinking about what it might represent. Minimalist memorials with their easy and varied affordances can be contrasted to representational memorials that are typically designed just for looking, where sculptural form gets in the way of secondary functions like sitting. They are also in contrast to public street furnishings, which are often designed according to ‘target hardening’ principles, specifically to prevent them being used for undesired activities (Clarke 1983; Flusty 1997). The forms of contemporary memorials, as complex but inherently functionless sculptural objects, can support, stimulate and provoke an extremely wide range of actions. Such possibilities reflect Wortley’s (2001) criminological analysis of many ways that built environments, rather than just allowing specific undesirable actions to occur, also provide a range of “situationally-generated motivation to the hitherto unmotivated” (Cornish and Clarke 2003: 42). Observations on one minor design detail at the Diana Memorial Fountain illustrate this point. Posted rules request that people do not walk on the concrete edge of its fountain channel. At each of the memorial’s three bridges, the channel is sunken below the ground and its concrete edge is flush with the circulation pathway. This appears to encourage people who might not consciously 135

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climb up onto the fountain to turn off the path and continue their walk along the concrete edge. Sometimes the environment’s precipitation of such exploratory acts operates below the level of consciousness; people are not deliberately violating behavioral rules (Wortley 2008). As noted above, this is very often the case with the sensations of touching memorials. In other cases, play is a conscious way of engaging with the strong and unusual stimuli that memorial landscapes present to visitors’ senses, bodies and emotions.

Playing Many of the varied visitor actions that can be observed at memorials are playful, exuberant, and indulgent: running and laughing, climbing, jumping, sliding and dancing, drinking alcohol, taking shirts off to enjoy the sun, kissing and hugging, carrying balloons and playing games (Figure 6.18). Through their play, people temporarily forget their more practical needs and wider social concerns. They skirt around the seriousness and social conventions often associated with commemorative settings and the behavioural rules often posted at them. In some kinds of play, people also engage with other visitors around them (Stevens 2007). Memorials are typically intended by their sponsors and managers to be serious, highly emotional places. So why do people play at memorial sites? Formal variety is an important factor, and in this context, abstract memorials may be more varied and stimulating to action than figurative sculptures, the forms of which are typically limited to people, horses and weapons. Abstract memorials often provide a great diversity and multiplicity of physical elements for

Figure 6.18 Playing a card game, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin Source: Quentin Stevens, 2006.

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engagement and use. People test their own bodily capacities by engaging with a range of physical challenges that memorial settings present: their sheer faces and wide gaps and narrow edges for balancing, their uneven, curving, sloping and slippery surfaces. People practice Parkour moves against or between blank walls and skate along stone and steel edges. Visitors enjoy the kinaesthesia of their bodies’ own motion across memorials’ unusual, complex topographies of stone, water and grass, either slowly as they walk, or at greater speed as they run or roll on in-line skates, scooters and bicycles. People also play at memorials in less exuberant ways. They explore the diverse sensory excitations these settings offer—their hardness, texture and temperature, and the sound and feel of moving water—by pressing their bodies close against memorials. Visitors play in different ways in response to the varied width, depth, speed, force and sound of the water in the Diana Memorial Fountain. They move around memorials to explore their sublimely large objects, precipitous heights, disorienting pathways, unstable and slippery surfaces, and dark, cool, cramped interior spaces. Through various postures of sitting and lying on memorial forms, they explore ways of orientating and balancing their own bodies. They develop different games around the MMJE’s extensive network of aisles, the varied heights of its stelae, and the varying differentials between these heights. The ways that children run, slide and jump across the benches of the Pentagon Memorial are shaped around the different spacings and orientations of those elements. These differences give people of different interests and capacities varying opportunities to test themselves. These memorials thus present even more varied opportunities for play than they do for sitting and resting. Visitors to these large public memorials do not all follow the same scripted journey, occupy the same spaces or encounter the same objects. They are dispersed throughout the sites, and are looking and moving in different directions and stopping at different points. These individual trajectories mean that people engage with the memorials in many different ways. Playful use of contemporary memorials is also stimulated by the large, varied publics that gather at them. Opportunities for play are informed and encouraged by informal observation of other visitors’ actions. Popular memorials bring a diversity of actors and audiences together. The Diana Memorial Fountain and MMJE are formally neutral backgrounds that provide excellent opportunities for seeing and being seen, which stimulates playful displays, such as striking silly poses together with the memorials, and contests of skill. These landscapes are often composed of a large number of discrete elements. This supports many people playing at the same time, which aids the development of collective forms of play and people imitating each other’s engagements with the memorial setting. In addition to the variety of forms and human action that can be encountered at contemporary memorial sites, a second overarching reason they are often popular sites for play is their great openness to public access and use. Visitors can often move freely within these settings and engage with them very closely. Berlin’s MMJE has no boundary fence. The families of the victims commemorated in Melbourne’s Bali Memorial intended that its site to be used regularly by local youth. Minimalist sculptural forms in particular are often positioned directly on the ground, within easy reach, and have a very human scale. Abstract memorials are also psychologically more open to exploratory engagement than representational memorials, where recognition of specific images and subject matter tends to fill the 137

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eyes and minds of visitors and inhibit their behavior. Because visitors to abstract memorials are not preoccupied with trying to comprehend their ‘purpose’ or ‘meaning’, they are open to considering and playfully exploring their material conditions. A further reason these memorials are engaged with in such a wide range of playful, exploratory ways is, ironically, precisely because these public settings, unlike most open spaces and street furniture, have not generally been designed to suit specific functions. Abstract memorials are predominantly conceived in terms of visual aesthetics. They have not been designed to suit particular actions, or to prevent particular uses. Two indicative oversights are the designers Gustafson and Porter not realizing that large numbers of visitors to the Diana Memorial Fountain might put their feet in the fountain and walk on its wet, smooth, sloping surfaces (Bowman 2009), and Eisenman’s (2005) admission that he did not imagine the incrementally-rising stelae of the MMJE might be used as steps. Because the designers of memorials often do not anticipate that visitors might play around them, they do not try to inhibit such uses. These settings thus tend to retain a very broad usefulness, and visitors’ playful, creative behaviours explore the diversity of opportunities that these landscapes open up. Because playful actions explore opportunities, playful uses of contemporary memorials are illustrative of the wide range of ways that people have close sensory and bodily engagement with these spaces and forms. In most cases, these stimuli and actions have little or no connection to the subjects being commemorated. Playing in these sites is convenient and interesting, but not relevant to their intended purpose, and to some who observe these actions, not appropriate. These experiences are, rather, often distractions from reflection upon the commemorative subjects. Engagement with contemporary memorial landscapes does not necessarily encourage engagement with the past.

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INTERPRETING MEMORIALS ARE DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTS. Designers shape mute materials to evoke people, events, ideas and places from the past to shape the emotions and experiences of audiences in the present. These effects depend on visitors’ interpretations of what they experience. In contrast, written texts carved into memorials provide more explicit explanations of what a memorial commemorates and suggest how visitors should feel. However, they are effective only when a visitor understands the language used and its rhetorical implications. A memorial’s imagery, sculptural form and other sensory cues to meaning, and the meanings of its spatial relationships to other sites, also require literacy on the part of visitors. The intended non-textual meanings of memorials can be complex and may be missed or misunderstood. When visitors read them correctly, they may oppose, unpick or rework them. Visitors’ actions also bring new, unanticipated meanings to memorials. While it has been argued that a memorial’s presentation of “the Word in Stone” requires of their audiences “nothing but complicitous silence” (Dovey 1999: 68, citing Taylor 1974 and Bourdieu 1977), this is rarely the outcome when the public can engage freely with them. Even traditional figurative statue memorials, whose explicit referents are largely unambiguous, can imply a range of attitudes and values that trouble some audiences, and these are seldom accepted in silence. Published critiques of public memorials by journalists, architecture critics, scholars, other visitors and those with personal connections to the memorial offer valuable information on the diversity of ways that people interpret the meanings of memorials, as do first-hand observations of how people find and create the meanings of memorials when they visit them. We use these various sources to explore how visitors interpret the meanings of memorials that are not explicitly denoted through text (Goodman 1985). The memorials that receive the most attention in the media and in academia tend to be those whose meanings are the most problematic; such cases thus generate the most material for analysis. Two key cases are the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM) in Washington and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (MMJE) in Berlin. They stand out here because they are rare attempts to make large-scale public statements about controversial events by employing abstract forms. The meanings of these two memorials and the subjects they commemorate remain controversial. These memorials are neither affirmations of power, like memorials to military and political leaders, nor small-scale critical statements that people can easily ignore or dismiss. People draw meaning from memorials by seeing and mentally reflecting upon them as well as by occupying, experiencing and acting: that is, as engaged 139

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spectators and as active performers. What they experience and what they discover seem to differ substantially according to the degree of abstraction or representation in the memorial’s design. Abstraction presents a broad challenge to meaningfulness. Representation, with its greater clarity of meaning, also presents its own difficulties.

ENGAGED SPECTATORSHIP The visual qualities of many memorials receive considerable attention for what they are seen to convey, or not, about the event or person commemorated. Interpreting through seeing is not a passive act. Even at the most didactic memorials, visitors do not simply receive dictated meanings; they discover them. Interpreting forms is a highly engaged process, particularly in recent decades as the designs of memorials increasingly “do not embody unambiguous coded narrative renderings of politically motivated messages about history,” but “demand the active participation of spectators in their interpretation” (Carrier 2005: 220–1). People often find meaning expressed within particular design characteristics of memorials; from these, they “read” what they believe the memorial has to say about the event or persons being commemorated. When memorials depict people, meaning is often drawn from the postures and facial expressions shown. Traditionally, hero monuments and war memorials have shown military officers in full uniform proudly astride a horse, suggesting prowess, courage and valor. Many of the early interpretations of Auguste Rodin’s portrayal of the citizens of Calais as dejected or worried were critical that their expressions and postures did not convey them as being courageous heroes to be admired, but instead, unexpectedly, as people much like the viewer, with understandable human frailties. A desire for the portrayal of heroism, rather than frailty or victim-hood, is also illustrated by the National Socialists’ removal in 1934 of a 1929 figurative World War I memorial by Ernst Barlach outside Magdeburg Cathedral. Barlach’s sculpture was expected to show fighting soldiers, inspiring the population to seek revenge for their defeat, but it instead depicted three soldiers confronted by “a helmeted skeleton, a veiled woman pressing her fists together in agony (i.e., a widow) and a bare-headed man with a gas mask … clutching his head in despair—rising from the ground” (Evans 2006: 165). Finding this portrayal a mockery of war volunteers, the Nazis replaced the work with a sculpture by Hans Wissel of brown-shirted stormtroopers striding forward with raised fists (Wijsenbeek 2010). In other situations, where heroism is portrayed, some audiences would prefer instead a depiction of pain and suffering. This was a common response to the sculptural ensemble The Revolt of the Prisoners (Fritz Cremer, 1958) at the concentration camp site in Buchenwald that shows the defiance of prisoners, including a child, but ignores their experience of being victims (Kattago 1998). The posture of a soldier or an officer in a memorial is a significant source of meaning, and the posture of the lone soldier often used in World War I monuments was often debated, in particular whether the soldier should be shown at rest or engaged in combat. In an analysis of the Memorial to Ulysses S. Grant in Washington, Charles Griswold notes that the horse’s tail is between its legs, suggesting that Grant is stationary and not “attacking”: “Grant is watching a battle plainly heard by the horse, a battle which Grant’s side may or may not be winning. 140

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But there is no emotion in his face” (Griswold 1986: 702). The memorial also shows Union soldiers in battle. The scenes are chaotic and frightening, reminding viewers of the pain and suffering of war, not of glory. Griswold suggests the memorial is thus somewhat ambiguous in its meaning. The postures of figures and the relationships between them are also read for possible meanings. The Emancipation Memorial in Washington, also called The Freedman’s Statue to Abraham Lincoln (Thomas Ball, 1876), shows Lincoln standing, holding the Emancipation Proclamation in one hand with his other placed upon the head of a slave kneeling at his feet. It is seen to portray, and reinforce, black Americans as passive, dependent, grateful subjects (Savage 2009). A kneeling Native scout at the base of a memorial to explorer Samuel de Champlain, founder of New France (1915) (Figure 7.1) was read in a similar way, placing members of the Native Indian population in a subservient, submissive, demeaning position (Osborne and Osborne 2004). In the bas-relief of the Robert Gould Shaw and 54th Regiment Memorial in Boston, which commemorates the commander and the soldiers of the first black regiment of the Union Army, Shaw is shown on his horse riding not in front but alongside his black soldiers on foot. This arrangement generated multiple readings: a white leader marching in step and alongside his troops, but also elevated above them. Such readings led to its acceptance both by the African American citizenry and by the white elites who sponsored, designed and approved it. In a detailed analysis of the sculpture, Kirk Savage (2001: 136) points to the detailed and realistic portrayal of the soldiers, each in uniform, each different, each an individual in his own right, a significant contrast to the depiction of the freed slave in the Emancipation Memorial as semi-nude wearing nothing but chains (Savage 1997). The postures of female figures in monuments often draw attention, particularly in their relation to male figures. Frederick MacMonnies intended the male and female figures in his sculpture Triumph of Civic Virtue (1922), originally located in front of New York’s City Hall, to be allegorical: the male, representing virtue, carrying a sword, stands atop two females lying beneath him, representing the vices he has conquered (Bogart 2012: 509). From its dedication up until the present, and despite all MacMonnies’s own statements, the sculpture has been read not as symbolizing good government, but as demeaning to women, showing them as temptresses and subjected to male violence. In the Vietnam Women’s Memorial in Washington (Glenna Goodacre, 1993), the women are three army nurses gathered around a wounded soldier, who lies cradled in the arms of one of them (Figure 7.2). The sculpture’s main focus is the soldier, even though the memorial’s purpose is to commemorate women’s contributions to the war. In addition, commentators have noted the marginal, passive roles of the nurses: “One of the nurses looks [for an approaching helicopter], but she does not point. The locus of action thus remains the wounded soldier” (Johnston 2001). That visitors leave flowers on the body of the suffering soldier suggests the same reading. In its focus on the American soldier’s suffering, this memorial has also been seen as “a thoroughly right-wing recuperation of the war, sentimentalized as an altruistic, innocent and unfinished American adventure” (Doss 2002: 65). People interpret particular postures and facial expressions of figures in memorial sculpture, relationships between these figures, and even single formal characteristics to be metaphoric expressions of specific social values and relationships. 141

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Figure 7.1 Monument to Samuel de Champlain, Ottawa, Hamilton MacCarthy, 1915, showing original location of Anishinabe Scout, installed 1918, relocated 1997 Source: © Jeff Thomas, 1992.

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Figure 7.2 Vietnam Women’s Memorial, Washington, Glenna Goodacre, 1993 Source: Quentin Stevens, 2011.

A design feature of many memorials that commemorate the lives of soldiers or the victims of a disaster is the listing of the names of those who died. People can read the extent of loss simply in what may be a vast number of names. Conversely, one interpretation of the mere 16 names scattered widely across the massive black face of the National Astronaut Memorial at Cape Canaveral (Wes Jones, 1991) is that it “conveys that … deaths in the U.S. space program … are unusual” and “accommodates the possibility of future losses” (Blair and Michel 1999: 44). Traditionally, memorials have tended to organize the names of the dead alphabetically and perhaps according to military unit, but in more recent cases the rationale for their sequence is not immediately clear. At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, for example, they are laid out chronologically by the date of death. Visitors may well find relationships among the names, which bring new layers of meanings. For instance, they reflect on comrades who fell together in battle (Berdahl 1994, citing Scruggs and Swerdlow 1985). Others may note how many fell on a particular day or set of days. Being able to focus on the names and fates of individual soldiers may bring home their fates in a more personal, more emotionally powerful way than statues of nameless soldiers, which may be more likely to encourage people to “see the war in abstract terms” (Foss 1986: 332; Donohoe 2002). Even textual content may present information that requires further interpretation. At Track 17 of the Grunewald railway station in Berlin, a 1998 memorial commemorates its earlier use of deporting Jews to concentration camps (Figure 7.3). Imprinted text on each metal platform plank simply states in chronological sequence the date of departure of a train, its destination and the number of Jews it carried. When one looks and thinks further, more detailed information can be discerned: that deportation trains originally ran regularly on 143

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Figure 7.3 Track 17 Memorial, Grunewald railway station, Berlin, Hirsch, Lorch and Wandel Architects, 1998 Source: Quentin Stevens, 2012.

weekend nights when there were fewer people around, were rare in summer and did not run on public holidays; that the numbers of deportees were very carefully managed and increased; and that the trains initially ran to distant conquered eastern territories but were later constrained and became more erratic due to Soviet advances. The memorial does not tell visitors all of this, but it allows them to discover it. With abstract forms, visitors’ attention is drawn to the spatial and material qualities of the memorial. Abstract designs seem to shift the viewer’s interpretive search onto the simple properties of visual form: shapes, proportions, surface conditions, color, and tonalities of light and dark. The dark shape of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial descending into the earth has been interpreted as communicating shame, horror, degradation, defeat, sorrow and guilt (Sturken 1991; Winters 2002). Because its form is the opposite of what European cultures generally expect for celebratory monuments, this memorial has been seen as an inversion or a parody of traditional memorials, and indeed of the very idea of monumentality (WagnerPacifici and Schwartz 1991). By not glorifying war, it has been interpreted as a political statement of pacifism (Sturken 1991). Femininity has been read in the reflectivity of the walls because this elicits empathy from visitors (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 1991). Its vastness is seen to express the enormity of loss (Foss 1986: 337; Winters 2002) as do the size and extent of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Another important source of meaning is formal similarities between a memorial and other things. People draw associations between the formal, spatial or material qualities of a memorial, and other places or objects, and they find metaphoric potential in these comparisons. The memorial may not be intended to 144

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resemble the thing in question but the resemblances that people identify help them understand the memorial and its subject. Goodman (1985) calls this “mediated reference.” Washington DC presents several examples of mediated reference: that is of abstract memorial designs that evoke different readings by different audiences. The first, unbuilt design for the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in 1960 consisted of eight very large concrete stelae set at angles to each other on concrete platforms. Commentators characterized the design as “bookends” and an “instant Stonehenge” (Hyman 1995). Two decades later, the first abstract memorial actually built in Washington—the Vietnam Veterans Memorial—evoked a broad range of associations to other places and objects. Its dark, low, sunken form was interpreted as a violent cut or “wound” in the earth and, by implication, in the American nation. It has also drawn comparisons to a “trench,” a “grave” and a “wailing wall” (Sturken 1991; Winters 2002). Some commentators consider its form “womblike” (Foss 1986). The descent of the pathway is interpreted to be like a ship sinking or as “a descent into hell”, and the inscribed wall as reminiscent of a tombstone (Foss 1986: 337; Winters 2002). The memorial has also been compared to a battlefield where one must sort through the names as one would sort through the scattered bodies of the dead (Scott 1990). For some people, it even “represents a book ... open partway through … [with] the suggestion that the Vietnam War is a chapter in the book of American history … [and] that further chapters have yet to be written, and read” (Griswold 1986: 708). Abstract memorials elsewhere receive similar metaphorical interpretations from visitors, to connect these forms to events the memorials commemorate. The 16 backlit names distributed across the massive black face of the Astronauts Memorial at Cape Canaveral have been compared to “constellations strewn throughout the evening sky” (Blair and Michel 1999: 203). Many people describe the stelae of Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe as looking like the gravestones of a Jewish cemetery, more precisely the one in nearby Prague. This interpretation is reinforced by visitors leaving stones and flowers on top of the stelae, conventional emblems of remembrance that are commonly placed on graves. The memorial’s long rows of dark rectangular, slightly tilted concrete blocks have also been read as dominoes (Piepgras 2005), another interpretation related to the tragedy being remembered. The number of stelae—2711—has been seen to represent the number of pages in the modern Torah. People frequently seek to compare abstract memorial forms with other things, even though such memorials usually do not attempt to depict particular people, objects or symbols. It is precisely because of their simple shapes and lack of explicit referents that abstract memorials can be seen to resemble a wide range of things. Indeed, the initiator of the VVM, Jan Scruggs, noted that its dark, symmetrical, abstract form resembles a Rorschach test, an intentionally meaningless but richly evocative shape designed to encourage people to impose their own psychic frame of mind onto it (Schnedler 2002). Visitors to figurative memorials also make associations between their designs and other places, objects or symbols to interpret the memorials’ meanings. Such metaphoric readings include seeing the Lincoln Memorial as a “temple” and Lincoln as a “god” (Griswold 1986; Vale 2008). Rather than being the main route to identify what the memorial’s meaning might be, such interpretations are layering of additional, enriching meanings onto a subject that is already generally understood. The same can be said of interpretations of Käthe Kolwitz’s (1937) sculpture, Mother 145

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with Her Dead Son, reproduced in enlarged form for Berlin’s Neue Wache in 1993 as the centerpiece of a “‘new’ unified German national memorial for “victims of war and oppression’” (Till 1999: 253). This composition of a kneeling, grieving mother cradling her dying son is widely recognized as a symbol of suffering (Figure 7.4). People also recognize the sculpture’s specific resemblance to Michelangelo’s Pietà, and so it has been seen as a symbol of Christian sacrifice and salvation, and also critiqued for suggesting German women were as passive and holy as the virgin mother (Till 1999, citing Koselleck 1993). Another critique of inappropriate iconography relates to the Gay and Lesbian Holocaust Memorial in Sydney (Figure 7.5). This design includes a pink triangle (the symbol that Nazis required homosexuals to wear) and a black triangle (the symbol that Nazis required lesbians to wear), which are loosely overlapped in “a fractured Star of David” (De Saxe and Lovett 2011). This has been interpreted by “Jewish academics [as] equating the Holocaust with homosexual persecution” (Koymasky and Koymasky 2013). The memorial design conflates icons and meanings that people think should be kept distinct.

ACTIVE PERFORMANCES OF MEANING While seeing and thinking about a memorial’s visual appearance constitute one common mode of interpreting, another equally powerful way that memorials become meaningful is through visitors’ embodied, multi-sensory experiences. Many recent memorials are not simply looked at and contemplated in terms of how they represent historical figures, events and social values. They also afford tactile, haptic, kinesthetic and sonorous experiences that potentially “touch” people and “resonate with” their understandings of the past. Through the “mnemonics of the body,” a visit to a memorial site often provides “a knowledge and a remembering in the hands and in the body … it is our body—at a subconscious level, rather than our mind—which ‘understands’” (Connerton 1989: 95). The designers of both the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and the Diana Memorial Fountain focused on bodily feelings as a means of provoking engagements and responses from visitors that could transmit meaning. It is interesting to consider how visitors have actually responded to analogic perceptual experiences and bodily engagements anticipated by these two designs. This manner of interpreting—of discovering what a memorial is like physically—relies foremost on actions and sensations rather than passive looking. These interpretations are acted and felt rather than read. Interpretation is, in this sense, “the rendering of a dramatic part, music, etc., so as to bring out the meaning, or to indicate one’s particular conception of it” (Dictionary. com, emphasis added). Active performances of meaning also have audiences: these two cases show that the multi-sensory ambiance of a memorial and the meanings that people interpret from it are in part created through the actions that visitors themselves perform at the site. Architect Peter Eisenman intended that visitors to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe would find its physiological stimulations subconsciously uncomfortable and that these disturbing feelings might prompt visitors to interpret their experience. He proudly tells of one visitor, who had been an inmate at a concentration camp, who came in tears to tell him that his memorial design recreated the feelings she had then (Eisenman 2005). There is some evidence that people perceive and respond to these sensory cues. As visitors move into this 146

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Figure 7.4 Mother with Her Dead Son, Käthe Kollwitz, 1937, copy installed in Neue Wache, Berlin, when it was re-dedicated as the Central Memorial for the Victims of War and Tyranny in 1993 Source: Karen A. Franck, 2010.

Figure 7.5 Gay and Lesbian Holocaust Memorial, Sydney, Russell Rodrigo and Jennifer Gamble, 2001 Source: Quentin Stevens, 2013.

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memorial, and the ground plane slopes downward and the stelae rise in height, many people stop and linger at the point where the stelae have risen to approximately their eye level (see Figure 6.6). What is particularly significant is that many visitors are then reticent or even unwilling to move any deeper into the stelae field. Some turn at 90 degrees to their descending path, to walk a skirting route that doesn’t take them any further inside. Some visitors, especially older ones, deliberately choose to walk along one of the outer, lower aisles of the memorial field that do not have confined views. The numerous people who pose for photographs among the neck-high stelae appear to be consciously and playfully dramatizing the moment of being “swallowed up” by the dark concrete field. Many visitors seem to have a bodily, existential fear of getting “out of their depth.” For these visitors, the memorial seems to induce feelings of confinement, disorientation, alienation, destabilization and threat. Similarly, when some people walk down the path into the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, they find the increasing scale of the artwork to be an “overpowering” experience of “our growing involvement in the war” (Ehrenhaus 1988: 53). The interpretation of a “descent into the conflict” is coupled with a reading of the subsequent ascent back to ground level as a slow emergence from the war (Hubbard 1984: 20). This “vertiginous trauma” is often seen as a therapeutic journey that ultimately has a positive psychological impact (Abramson 1996: 702). A detailed study of 62 Vietnam veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder who visited the memorial found that many treated the treeline surrounding the memorial, the nearby benches and the statue of the Three Servicemen as places of refuge where they could view the wall, “prepare” for their approach to it, and rest after confronting it (Watkins et al. 2010). While some visitors to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe connect their bodily “sinking feeling” to the negativity of the commemorated event, other visitors to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial interpret their experience of spatial confinement there positively: as “engulfing, nurturing, and enfolding, creating a safe and secure place for the viewer” that is “inviting, non-threatening” (Foss 1986: 333). A third example of an abstract memorial whose meanings are inferred from visitors’ bodily engagements is Maya Lin’s later design for the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. Sitting as it does within the white urban context of the former capital of the Confederacy, this black stone memorial has been interpreted as a disruptive “black body” projecting out over the sidewalk. Because it physically confronts passing pedestrians, it is seen as experientially analogous to the social movement and the people it commemorates (Blair and Michel 1999). This reading conforms to Fried’s general interpretation of a minimalist artwork as a protagonist that confronts the viewer and “gets in his way” (1967: 16). Both figurative and abstract memorials may offer opportunities for visitors to engage with them physically, and so visitors perform and contribute to the memorial’s meanings through their own postures and actions. At the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, visitors often pose standing dejectedly at the end of a sculpted dole queue, imitating the statues (Figure 7.6). In doing so, they act out the historical experience of waiting in line, rather than looking at it from a distance. They also stand next to the sculpture of Roosevelt in a wheelchair, placing a hand on his shoulder, and pat his dog. These actions go beyond interpreting what the sculpture represents; the actions themselves represent, and they also directly affect the visitor. Simulative performances give visitors an active role in acknowledging and embodying the memorial’s meanings. 148

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Figure 7.6 Depression Bread Line, George Segal, 1991, at Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, Washington Source: Karen A. Franck, 2012.

Sometimes people act out a scene that is prompted by the representational content of the memorial. The Women are Persons! Memorial in Ottawa is a tableau of five famous suffragettes drinking tea and displaying the newspaper announcement of women’s right to vote in Canada (Figure 7.7). The composition provides empty chairs, spaces between the statues, and plain stone blocks that all invite the public, including children, to enter into the scene and interact with the sculpted figures. Beyond simply posing as an equally empowered citizen within the group, visitors act out more specific meanings signified within this work. The extended hands of statues have been worn smooth from the grip of countless visitors. People hold the free corner of the newspaper and the handles of teacups on a table, purse their lips next to a teacup proffered by one statue, and sit on statues’ laps and their extended arms. Both adults and children also act playfully at the Diana Memorial Fountain in London. Many bring swimwear, towels, beach balls and other props (see Figure 1.1). Through such actions, people contribute to the memorial’s intended meaning, even if not consciously, since the design was intended to make children happy by producing sensory enjoyment, and thereby to have the effect Diana herself had on children. The postures, movements and sounds of the human bodies engaging with this landscape contribute to its meaning by shaping the experience of other visitors. The selected design for the future Memorial to Freedom and Unity in Berlin also proposes that the bodily actions of its visitors will produce and communicate its meaning. This memorial will be a large, concave, pivoting platform that groups of visitors can rock from side to side or try to balance (Figure 7.8). This public “see-saw” has been interpreted critically as an overly literal application of the idea of the citizens’ movement that led to the country’s reunification after 1989 149

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Figure 7.7 Visitors at Suffragette memorial Women are Persons!, Ottawa, Barbara Paterson, 2000 Source: Quentin Stevens, 2011.

Figure 7.8 Proposed Memorial to Freedom and Unity, Berlin, 2011 Source: © Milla & Partner.

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(Fritze n.d.). But this design is in fact exactly the opposite of literal. This memorial only communicates through the bodily actions of its visitors. The memorial’s form will encourage and facilitate social action and interaction, rather than attempting to represent them. At large, very public memorials, it is rare for visitors to be alone. The actions of other people strongly affect each visitor’s own experiences and interpretations of the memorial and its subject. Similarly, the existence and the disposition of an audience encourage or discourage given actions and lend particular meaning to them. The dramaturgical performances of visitors to memorials are themselves accordingly subject to the interpretation and critique of other visitors (Lennard and Lennard 1984; Lofland 1998). The design and management of the Oklahoma City National Memorial create spatial relationships that define roles of performer and onlooker. The area containing the 168 chairs that represent the individual bombing victims is fenced off. Rather than providing families and friends of the deceased with privacy, this fenced-off area defines a stage where mourners perform their relationship to the deceased by visiting and engaging with a particular chair: kneeling in front of it, sometimes standing behind it and hugging its backrest, but never sitting on it. These actions and inactions express the meaning of the chairs as representations of the loved ones who never returned to family dinner tables. Playful actions at memorials may trouble other visitors because these actions are seen to undermine or dishonor the memorial’s meaning. At the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe some visitors appear disturbed when other visitors act in ways that seem disrespectful or unmindful of the seriousness of the Holocaust. The frequent characterization of the memorial as a playground comes not from direct analysis of the physical object—it does not look like a playground— but from observation of how visitors use the site (Mangos 2007; Whybrow 2011; Spiegelmann 2011). When a university student used two stelae at the memorial as a work surface, most passing visitors watched, bemused. But one elderly man came past to inspect what she was doing, and stood nearby for several minutes looking on in great anger, because of the student’s apparent failure to recognize the memorial’s meaning. His expression conveys his own interpretation of the memorial as a sacrosanct object and of the student’s action as sacrilegious. The Bali Memorial in Melbourne commemorates the 202 victims of the 2002 Bali bombings, emphasizing the 22 who came from Victoria. This memorial is extremely popular with large groups of skateboarders who find its steel edges and raised ledges excellent for grinding, jumping and flipping skateboards (see Figure 6.11). The group that commissioned the memorial, comprising relatives of those who died, anticipated this activity and welcomed it as an appropriate form of remembering the mostly-youthful victims. But others, particularly those who live nearby and who are troubled by late-night skateboarding, find this use unacceptable at a memorial and have asked that skateboarding be forbidden. People who pass by may only see a park, not a memorial. Mourners only tend to visit this memorial in groups on anniversaries of the bombing, and there are few tourists, so conflicts of action and interpretation among visitors are not nearly as common here as at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. People are continuously, actively interpreting memorial settings through their own performances. While these meanings are not necessarily translatable into static words and images, they are communicated from one visitor to another in 151

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other ways: through actions performed at the site, watching the actions of others, or imitating them. This active role of visitors and wider publics in interpreting memorials demonstrates that their meanings are not fixed; they are constantly being developed, performed, engaged, explored and disputed.

OPEN AND CLOSED MEANINGS Existing scholarship about memorials and our own observations of people’s activities at some of the most abstract examples suggest that abstract memorial designs are more likely to be ambiguous to visitors and invite a variety of interpretations, whereas the meanings of figural memorials are more easily read and more definite. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe are particularly notable in presenting open invitations to visitors to project or add their own memories, feelings and performances into their blank spaces. More traditional, figurative memorials may generate some differences in interpretation, but not to the same extent. Each approach has its respective advantages and its drawbacks; each may be appropriate for particular subjects and commissioning groups. The lack of explicit representation in abstract memorials has been seen to free visitors from the obligation to “read” prescribed, collective, “correct” meanings. Jan Scruggs noted of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial design that it makes no explicit statement but is evocative enough to invite the visitor’s own interpretations (Schnedler 2002). Ehrenhaus argues that: “The power of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial results from our encountering silence where we expect ‘speech’” (1988: 55). He suggests that abstract memorials which lack obvious meanings encourage active efforts of interpretation: they are “writerly” rather than “readerly’”(Barthes 1974). In its object-silence, the Memorial places both the burden and the freedom upon us to discover what these past events mean … We become responsible for attuning ourselves to the call of conscience that accompanies encounters of silence. In answering that call, we have the opportunity to find our own truths as we walk along the wall … Implicit in the Memorial’s invitation … is its reluctance to embrace and preach collective Truths. (Ehrenhaus 1988: 55, emphasis added) In contrast to the typical didacticism and universalism of traditional monuments, abstract memorials have been seen as both therapeutic and personal, offering spaces where mourners can deal with their private grief (Griswold 1986; Savage 2009). While the psychological potential of these kinds of memorials have been recognized and pursued by designers and theorists of art and architecture for several decades, recently they have also been acknowledged in the field of psychoanalysis (Danto 1985; Vidler 1992; Rowlands 1998; Homans and Jonte-Pace 2005). Much has been written about the specific experiential and symbolic potency of reflective surfaces in memorials, and the consequent appearance of the self within commemorative contemplation (Griswold 1986; Ochsner 1997; Smith 2000). Abramson notes, “In academic discourse, nearly every critic emphasizes how the 152

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[memorial’s] low, black, abstract walls [and] … reflective surfaces psychologically engage the beholder” (1996: 684). The dim surface of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has been described as a screen, both in the sense of providing a blank surface where thoughts can be projected, and hiding the reality of the commemorated event (Sturken 1991). This surface has also been seen to have a “double” therapeutic function of psychological engagement and release: If one sees the monument as a window, one is imaginatively drawn into the past and the war itself, into memories or imaginings … if one sees it as a mirror, one’s attention is deflected away from the wall and the past, and outwards onto the Mall and its surroundings. (Homans and Jonte-Pace 2005: 269, emphasis added) In this case, the engagement that the memorial enables partly involves deflection of, and resistance to, expectations and conventions. Its difficulty is part of what makes it so engaging and psychologically effective. By not didactically projecting particular symbols and meanings, abstract forms can appeal to people with different perspectives. In the case of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, this even included anti-war protesters (Foss 1986). Abstraction is thus seen to have the potential to engage wider audiences. Žižek’s more critical, psychoanalytic interpretation of the less-is-more approach of minimalist art is that its advocates believe that “this very loss will generate additional meaning and create a kind of depth” so that with minimalist works, “an enjoyment is generated by the very renunciation of enjoyment” (2012: 990). Žižek implies that abstract memorials may not in fact offer more meaning. Rather, it may be that visitors accept that these objects are meaningful because they do not offer easily accessible meanings. Yet people generally want tragic events to have some meaning, and for the most part they want to make commemorative objects meaningful. With abstract memorials, this takes more effort. Architect Peter Eisenman claims that his Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe gains moral significance through visitors’ projections of specific memories or meanings onto it, as when they interpret the number of stelae. People may project meaning and bring specificity by making physical additions to an abstract memorial. London’s July 7 Bombing Memorial in Hyde Park is a field of 52 stainless steel stelae that are marked only with the places, date and times of the four attacks. In order to prevent trauma if certain stelae were to be vandalized or otherwise damaged, they are not marked with the names of individual victims. Visitors nonetheless add ribbons to particular stelae to commemorate their specific loved ones (Rodrigo 2011). People’s creative readings and actions can thus add depth and strength to the links between commemorative form and history, and help people develop individual emotional attachments to the memorial. The simplicity and representational emptiness of abstract memorials seem to stimulate visitors’ attentiveness to their own relationships to the memorial elements and the wider landscape (Fried 1967). Abstract memorials also heighten visitor’s multi-sensory experiences and encourage a range of actions. This is particularly true of minimalist memorial designs that facilitate close bodily engagement with the object and interactions among visitors. These bodily feelings and actions are meaningful in themselves. They provide ways of interpreting meaning and also of presenting those interpretations to other visitors. Our observations show that visitors 153

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do respond to the analogic perceptual experiences and bodily engagements that the designers of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and the Diana Memorial Fountain anticipated. The spatial aspects of such memorials are key: other abstract memorials that are single objects, such as the Berlin Airlift Memorial, keep the viewer remote, and so retain the “spectacular” distance (Debord 1994) that historically has characterized figurative memorials. Visitors can usually see and understand the correct meaning of figurative memorials at first glance. By contrast, the novelty, indecipherability and unexpected experiential subtleties of abstract forms can engage and sustain visitors’ interest. They can reward prolonged and repeated visits, under changing conditions and in different moods, as visitors’ responses to such forms gradually develop (Foss 1986). The wide range of anti-monumental approaches to memorial design developed since the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the broad scope of relevant meanings that people have found in them and the acknowledged contribution of this new vocabulary to re-igniting the public’s passion for commemorative works are all testament to the symbolic potency of abstract art. The openness of abstraction clearly has advantages but there are also drawbacks. Unless visitors know in advance that an abstract design is a memorial or they see a sign giving its name, its ambiguity may prevent people from recognizing its special commemorative significance. This is true for many people when they encounter the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe for the first time. An extensive survey of high school students visiting the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe found that 40 percent felt the memorial “means nothing,” and 20 percent were too distracted by its architecture to concentrate on thinking about the Holocaust (Sion 2008: 217, citing Saehrendt 2007). One member of Washington’s Fine Arts Commission criticized Marcel Breuer’s 1966 design for the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, a set of large triangular granite walls in a pinwheel arrangement, for having “no meaning” (Hyman 1995). The harsh critiques of Maya Lin’s original design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial show that when people do find meanings in abstract forms, these readings may undermine what people understand the memorial’s purpose to be, leading them to see its design as a mistake or even an affront. In this case, unwanted ambiguity and contradiction were partly resolved though later figurative additions that provided more explicit information and meanings. The designers and sponsors of both the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe saw abstraction as a means of avoiding the perceived limitations of traditional representational memorials. Abstraction provides a way forward because it does not present an explicit statement of the history it commemorates. It allows a greater range of ways for people to read and respond. But, consequently, abstract forms present a new problem: being more open to interpretation also means being more open to confusion and criticism. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in particular reveals great nuance in people’s interpretations of apparently simple forms. In some cases the ambiguity of meaning resulting from abstraction may be a conscious political gesture—a way to avoid conveying particular messages about the event being commemorated. Some conservative critics read in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial “‘the clear political message’ … that the design symbolized a silence the memorial was supposed to overcome” (Berdahl 1994: 92, quoting National Review, 16 Sept. 1981). Levine wrote of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial that it “takes refuge in 154

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ambiguity and treats it as a virtue,” but only avoids the historical lies that public memorials inevitably tell “by not really saying anything” (2006: 130). Abramson notes: “Early on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was insulted by populist critics as minimalist, a slur intended to connote obscurity, arrogance and elitism … Lin’s dark, abstract walls seemed to refuse the viewer any purchase on its meaning” (1996: 703). In her commentary about the design for the first Separation Memorial in Canberra’s Reconciliation Place, Strakosch similarly concludes that abstract forms are most likely to be used in memorials commemorating “events in which the memorializing nation is implicated as perpetrator” and to “events in their history with which they have a greatly ambivalent relationship” (Strakosch 2009: 5, citing Young 1998), whereas the victims of the events “tend to seek out more pedagogical, emotive, figurative, and traditional memorials to their experiences” (Strakosch 2010: 274). Abstraction allows official actors who may be implicated as perpetrators of an historical event to avoid articulation of their own culpability. Conversely, those affected by the event seek to clarify its impacts. The political shelter and acceptance that the ambiguity of abstract forms achieves are coupled with the loss of the didactic power that traditional monuments have to convey specific information, stimulate memory, and shape future behavior (Carrier 2005). Figural memorials often incorporate design elements familiar enough that most people recognize the object as a memorial and many interpret its formal language, even when they do not know who or what is actually being commemorated. When researchers asked residents of St. Catharines, Ontario, whether they knew the purpose of the statue monument outside the city hall commemorating Private Watson, a local resident who died in the Northwest Rebellions in 1885, only 6 percent of them did, despite the subject’s name being engraved in the pediment and an explanatory plaque (Johnston and Ripmeester 2007). But the residents did associate its archetypal form, a standing soldier with a rifle, with sacrifice, bravery and, more generally, citizenship. Johnston and Ripmeester conclude, “It never needs to be critically examined because residents know or believe they know for what it stands. It never needs to be ‘read’ because the details may, ultimately, be unimportant” (ibid.: 129). But interpretation of symbolic and historical details is often critical. The explicitness of figural memorials can generate difficulties when visitors feel that depictions are misleading, erroneous or objectionable. The first commemorative art work called Separation installed on Canberra’s Reconciliation Place (Graham ScottBohanna, Andrew Smith, Karen Casey, Cate Riley and Darryl Cowie, 2002), purportedly commemorating the large-scale government removal of Indigenous children from their homes (the “Stolen Generations” subsequently raised by white foster parents) showed only “images of happy or neutral” children (Figure 7.9). It made no reference to the impact of these removals on the lives of individuals and communities, and to the Indigenous community, this was seen as an avoidance of the State’s responsibility for the crimes and for the victims’ suffering (Strakosch 2010: 273). The responsible government minister argued that “people will be able to read into [this design] what they feel is appropriate,” but the concern was that people would not be able to read what was not represented (ibid.: 272, quoting Ruddock 2001). Sometimes statues of human figures are intended to be allegorical, but their postures and relationships can be read more plainly in terms of what they 155

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Figure 7.9 Separation version 1, Reconciliation Place, Canberra, Graham Scott-Bohanna, Andrew Smith, Karen Casey, Cate Riley and Darryl Cowie, 2002 Source: Quentin Stevens, 2013.

actually depict, and criticized on that basis. In the Triumph of Civic Virtue, a male figure represents morality and female figures represent vice; from its dedication on, this explicitness was a liability. The resultant literal reading of the statue was sufficiently problematic to lead to its removal from near New York’s City Hall in 1941 and its eventual banishment to Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery in 2013 (Figure 7.10). In the Judeo-Christian world, women in public sculpture have usually been presented as allegories of social virtues that are actively being pursued by men or as ideals of nation, home and family, or conversely as sexualized seductresses among men who have higher public standing, but almost never as actual individual participants in public life (Warner 1987; Johnson 1995). Problems with the meanings of figurative memorials may also arise from what is not represented, as audiences recognize that particular relevant objects and meanings have been excluded. Käthe Kollwitz’s sculpture, Mother with Her Dead Son, since 1993 the centerpiece of the national memorial at the Neue Wache in Berlin, has been criticized as exclusionary. Its iconography is explicitly Christian, which is problematic in ignoring the wartime fates of Jewish and other non-Christian Germans. Historian Reinhard Koselleck argues that this sculpture “closed out the public memory … of women who were sent to the gas chambers or who died in other ways during the war.” Through this sculpture, “women were not defined as socially relevant actors, let alone considered as perpetrators” (Koselleck 1993, translated in Till 1999: 270–1). At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the addition of the statue of three soldiers, intended to redress the original memorial’s perceived lack of ambiguity, engendered another critique: that the statues were misleading for suggesting that 156

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Figure 7.10 Triumph of Civic Virtue, Frederick William MacMonnies, 1922. Originally in City Hall Park in Manhattan; moved to Queens Borough Hall in 1941; restored and moved to Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn in 2012 Source: Karen A. Franck, 2014.

only men had served in Vietnam (Foss 1986). This critique led to the addition of another figural memorial, the Vietnam Women’s Memorial. The decision in the project brief to use female nurses to represent all women’s service immediately excluded the wide variety of other, often more active roles that women played in the war (Evans n.d.). It also ignored the many male nurses who served (Dixon Vuic 2011). Here too, a war memorial’s explicit depiction of women cradling dying men was seen as problematic in portraying women as passive sufferers or at best supporters of men, and not as active protagonists in historic events. The statues added to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial illustrate another broader problem common to all figurative war memorials. Such memorials represent idealized soldiers, in contrast to walls of names, which identify particular, actual human beings. What such figures risk is: giving a false impression of immortality and allowing us to avoid the anxiety of individual mortality. It denies soldiers an individual death by giving a mere representation in the form of nameless, ideal soldiers. Those who view the statues are confronted with ideals, not with individual, human death. (Donohoe 2002: 238) Artists’ sculptural depictions, whether triumphant or shattered and despairing, risk misinforming and displacing the real memories and emotions of visitors. 157

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Those who commission memorials, design them and choose among proposals all face the challenge of deciding which artistic approach best suits the subject being commemorated, the ambitions of the sponsor, and the needs of those who will be directly and personally affected by the memorial: a design that leaves its meanings open to interpretation, one that projects a clear message, or some combination of both. Regarding memorials on the subject of war, Foss argues that media images are so plentiful in today’s society that contemporary memorials cannot hope to compete by depicting the events: What are needed instead are unconventional, unusual images or symbols that attract attention because of their freshness and unpredictability. These images thus will stand out from those to which we are exposed daily and cause us to stop, inquire into, and examine the issue of war. (Foss 1986: 338) The ambiguity of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is also seen as suitable for a topic “too important for agreement” where the historical events themselves do not provide clarity and reassurance (North 1992: 877). It is broadly accepted that this memorial offers no conclusive judgment either in favor of or against the war. Some see this apparent polysemy as ultimately reaffirming faith in America: “in keeping with America’s admirable tradition of reflective and interrogative patriotism” (Griswold 1986: 713). Donohoe suggests that in its openness to interpretation, the VVM can “confront us with space for public discourse”, where its visitors are “reminded of those whose perspectives are different from our own” (2002: 240). Rather than making specific controversial statements or trying to provide satisfactory answers, abstraction can be valuable in opening up questions and debate. The forms and experiential opportunities of abstract memorials are novel. Their innovative forms make them suitable for new commemorative subjects that lack established symbols, and to convey new messages about familiar themes. Not surprisingly, the novelty and ambiguity of abstraction do not suit conservative tastes and aims, which favor classical and vernacular styles. In the 1930s, Germany’s National-Socialist government dynamited and replaced Walter Gropius’s expressionistic 1922 Märzgefallenen memorial in Weimar, a lightning bolt commemorating trade unionists killed by right-wing extremists, even though they were sympathetic to its subject, because they found its abstract style “cultureless” and “inappropriate” (Forty 2005; Wijsenbeek 2010). Abstract language is more primitive and archetypal, potentially linking into the collective unconscious (Dovey 1993; Cooper-Marcus 1995). By contrast, conventional figures such as standing soldiers, kneeling slaves and grieving mothers are often seen as inadequate to commemorate the victims of contemporary tragedies that have no clear precedent. Representational Holocaust memorials in particular often come in for criticism, with the obvious and explicit iconography of barbed wire, chains, Stars of David, broken swastikas and emaciated bodies considered by many as inadequate, being insufficiently powerful or sublime to convey or evoke the events (Marcuse 2010). Similarly, Peter Eisenman, in explaining his non-representational design for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, critiques the idea that the Holocaust could be represented through figural sculptures in the mode of Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais, “looking all weepy” (Eisenman 158

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2005). For him, the traditional motif of sad faces and postures cannot adequately address the Holocaust. Alfred Hrdlicka’s Memorial against War and Fascism (1988) in Vienna, a sculptural ensemble that includes a bearded man kneeling on the ground scrubbing the pavement, has suffered this kind of critique. Prominent Austrian Holocaust survivor and writer Simon Wiesenthal’s critique was that “one cannot represent the Holocaust by means of a figure.” His reasoning behind this “rejection of figuration” was “that the street-washing Jew was both too limited and too literal” (Gillman 2004: 165). The installation of barbed wire over the figure, to prevent people sitting on it, created an additional representational problem (Figure 7.11). In response to the criticisms, the City of Vienna commissioned a second official Holocaust memorial, expressing a preference for non-figurative proposals (Carley 2010). The winning scheme, Rachael Whiteread’s Nameless Library (2000), is a small bunker-like building with an exterior resembling thousands of identical books, their spines turned inward, making them unreadable (Figure 7.12). As the search for how to represent events and consequences of the Holocaust perhaps requires, this memorial includes figural references but its abstraction frustrates them. Its façade elements “are books and are also not books;” the design “both beckons and excludes, both extends and withholds meaning” (Gillman 2004: 163, 167). For Wiesenthal, an abstract form such as Whiteread’s could not, unlike a prostrate figure, seem undignified. But indignity is part of the event in question. The abstraction of memorial form unavoidably abstracts the ideas and historical facts surrounding the event being commemorated. For the artist Hrdlicka, his “street washing Jew” was essential as a specific, critical, historical reference to the Nazi past of Austria in general and the then President Kurt Waldheim in particular (Bunzl 1995). Vienna is a rare case where an abstract memorial was commissioned in order to offset the perceived deficiencies of a figurative memorial. It is far more common that the reverse occurs: figurative elements are added in an attempt to clarify the meaning of abstract memorials and to convey specific details about the histories they commemorate, such as happened at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. Another example is the Royal Australian Air Force Memorial in Canberra. The original 1973 design by Inge King was a set of sleek aluminum shafts that conveyed the sense of a formation flight. In 2011, a low, dark stone backdrop was added with etched images of aircraft, personnel and battles, and lists of battle honors. These examples show that memorial sponsors and audiences do not necessarily want uncertainty or ambiguity about the past. Abstraction is more likely than explicit representation to convey unintended and undesirable symbolism, though figural memorials attract their own share of controversy. In an ancient Indian parable, six blind men who touch different parts of an elephant argue about what the whole animal is like. The story illustrates the limits of individual interpretations that arise from widely different experiences. Abstract memorials suggest an analogous situation of six sighted people viewing a particular sculptural form. With their different backgrounds, different literacy toward public art, and different attitudes toward the events being commemorated, it is not surprising that their readings of the meaning of such a memorial will vary. Disagreements over the meanings of memorials are not usually over what the thing is; disagreements mostly emerge over what a memorial means. Even largely critical or ‘incorrect’ readings of memorials’ meanings can be beneficial when they 159

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Figure 7.11 Detail of figure in Memorial against War and Fascism, Vienna, Alfred Hrdlicka, 1988, covered in barbed wire Source: Image courtesy of Peter G. Kreoger.

Figure 7.12 Nameless Library, Judenplatz, Vienna, Rachael Whiteread, 2000 Source: Quentin Stevens, 2008.

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generate debate that compels people to articulate their knowledge and feelings about the past––to do the work of remembering. The mediated references of abstract forms and of figurative works keep evolving through people’s physical engagements with a memorial, and their mental reflections upon these engagements. What varies is the openness of a particular form in “allowing a meaning to come forth (or not) for each viewer, rather than imposing a particular reading on each visitor,” and the extent to which it “can evoke a multiplicity of interpretations in varied experiences of it” (Donohoe 2002: 238–239). People hold quite divergent views as to whether abstract memorials express particular meanings and whether their silence, their vagaries, or their difficult statements are appropriate to the task of remembering. While some people find these characteristics of abstract memorials especially potent, they can also leave their intended audiences cold. People take away very different things from their experiences of such sites. If we accept that the task of remembering ultimately rests with people, not with objects, and that the value of memorials lies in what audiences get from them, which increasingly extends beyond what their sponsors and designers intended, then this plurality of interpretations would seem to be one of the strongest endorsements of this approach to commemorative form-making.

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PART III

MEMORIALS AS RESPONSIBILITIES

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CHAPTER 8

MANAGING “THIS IS A VERY SPECIAL PLACE,” declared several Port Authority signs attached to the fence separating the site of the former World Trade Center from the adjacent public sidewalk when the fence served as an official, interim memorial to the September 11 attacks. One might assume that such a sign would not be necessary since visitors and passers-by would have been well aware of the importance of the site. The phrase, however, served mainly to justify the rules of conduct that were posted beneath it. The sign and the rules made it clear that though the sidewalk might appear to be just another public sidewalk in New York, in fact, it was not. This same declaration could well be posted at permanent memorials with the same purpose. Although they constitute a distinctive type of public space, spatial memorials often appear to be extensions of contiguous public spaces. This combination—that memorials are in and of but also different from ordinary public spaces—poses significant challenges for managing them. In many ways their role as places of commemoration makes them sacred, requiring different forms of conduct than what are typically expected and accepted in profane public spaces, and giving their appearance and maintenance more significance. A key management responsibility, implicit in the sign on the World Trade Center fence, is to establish a distinction, in use and appearance, between the sacred precinct of the memorial and surrounding public space (Figure 8.1). At many permanent memorials the distinction between the memorial and other public spaces is conveyed through the memorial’s design and name and through the performance of ritualistic commemorative events. But on an everyday basis, a memorial’s distinctiveness as a special kind of public space relies on additional ways of framing visitors’ actions and experiences. Ongoing responsive and proactive management practices are needed to fulfill the commemorative and educational functions of memorials, to maintain their nearly pristine appearance, to keep them relevant and to respond to requests that they be changed. The open expanses of flat and stepped space in spatial memorials allow for actions that commonly occur in other public spaces but are inconsistent with the commemorative purpose of memorials. Athletic pursuits of running, rollerblading and bicycling may overflow from adjacent public spaces. Other design elements invite close bodily engagement, leading visitors to engage in actions that are both risky for the memorial and for themselves (Figure 8.2) and that are out of keeping with the decorum that sponsors and mourners expect. Managing use is an important management responsibility that differs from managing the use of other public spaces where a greater diversity of activities is expected and tolerated. The conduct of visitors and staff conveys more symbolic meaning than similar activities would in other types of public spaces with more prosaic recreational or transportation functions. 165

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Figure 8.1 Rules at the Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne, prohibiting activities common in public space Source: Karen A. Franck, 2012.

Figure 8.2 Enjoyable but risky activity at the Canada Memorial, Hyde Park, London, Pierre Granche, 1994 Source: Quentin Stevens, 2005.

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A great many people visit many large-scale memorials. Their simple presence and their bodily engagement with memorial objects create wear and tear. Indeed, any memorial, regardless of the number or actions of visitors, will deteriorate over time. Such wear and tear and deterioration undermine the sacred qualities of the site. This makes attentive and ongoing maintenance and repair imperative. Memorials now serve educational purposes as well as commemorative ones. Managers of memorials are increasingly acknowledging and promoting their pedagogical function. Finally, because memorials often have powerful emotional resonances for the public, and since their meanings may change over time or may vary for different groups, particular parties often request, or demand, changes be made to them. Along with addressing uses of the space and its maintenance, management staff also participate in decisions regarding whether and how to change memorials physically. Managing a memorial includes the challenging responsibilities of ensuring that it is, indeed, a special place and at the same time enhancing visitors’ experiences. This requires being proactive, not only reactive, and taking a clearly affirmative and supportive approach toward who comes to the memorial, and how those people can best engage with it. All this must be done within a complex physical, social and political milieu that is continuously changing.

MANAGING USE In the public spaces of squares, plazas and parks, managers have the responsibility of controlling or regulating people’s behavior and also responding to their needs, which may change over time. Carmona et al. give prime importance to the “regulation of uses and conflicts between uses” by listing it as the first of four interlinked delivery process for public space (2008: 66). In distinguishing the design of public space from its management, Carr et al. write: “Management is the process of controlling the use of the resulting place and of maintaining and adjusting its form to satisfy changing needs” (1993: 247). Managers of memorials also need to regulate people’s activities and respond to their needs but they need to do so in ways that are consistent with the commemorative function of memorials and that vary substantially between one memorial and another according to the memorial’s particular design features and the rationale behind them. More so than in other public spaces, managers of memorials have the responsibility to constrain the actions of visitors and also to offer ways for them to engage with the memorial. In this sense, staff on site are not as much guards as they are hosts.

Constraining Visitors The sign on the fence of the World Trade Center construction site announcing it was a special place went on to say: “Please help us maintain this site as a very special place. Please do not purchase any items or services here or donate money to people soliciting here so that this place can be fully appreciated by all visitors.” Like signs at many memorials, it was intended to ensure a particular kind of atmosphere deemed appropriate to memorials, even temporary ones consisting largely of a fence directly on a city sidewalk. At the same time, unlike similar signs at many memorials, it asked visitors to join in a collective effort to maintain that decorum (rather than simply saying “no commercial activity”). 167

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Subsequently other signs were posted, giving a more complete list of activities that the Port Authority “prohibits.” These included: commercial activity, “continuous expressive activity as part of a group of 25 or more persons in the absence of a permit,” climbing on fences, as well as an activity that was always very common at the fence—“attaching any items to walls, posts, fences or other property.” The Port Authority seemed to recognize if not condone this last practice with another small sign, posted earlier: “Please understand all articles left behind must be removed.” The apparent rationale for these rules is shared by rules at many memorials: to ensure a desired atmosphere suitable to the memorial, to maintain its good appearance and to keep visitors safe. Many of the rules regarding unacceptable activities forbid pursuits that are commonly pursued in other public spaces, many of which the flat surfaces of spatial memorials could easily accommodate: bicycling, rollerblading, skateboarding, running, ball games, dog walking, smoking, eating and drinking. At memorials that lie along assigned bike routes, such as the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial and the Martin Luther King Memorial, cyclists are requested to dismount and walk their bicycles through the memorial. Visitors may find it difficult to make appropriate distinctions between what is generally acceptable in public open space and what is acceptable at a memorial. In Germany smoking is generally not restricted in outdoor public areas and public drinking is legal. Not surprisingly then, some smokers and drinkers at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe are surprised when guards reprimand them for doing so in what is ostensibly a public open space. The same applies to the ban on dogs, since, in Berlin, dogs are permitted on trains and in stores and restaurants. Another reason for their surprise is that the rules are not easily visible because they appear only on plaques inserted in the memorial’s ground surface. Explicit regulation of noise is rare. A few memorials in the US prohibit “the use of amplified devices” but only the Columbine Memorial in Colorado makes a more specific request: “Please take cell phone calls outside of the memorial.” Signs at both the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials call generally for “Quiet,” but inside each of these memorials one can hear the hum of many people talking to each other and on their cell phones. Walking on the grass or in other planted areas is also frequently prohibited, possibly to ensure appropriate behavior but also to preserve the appearance of the memorial. At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, such a sign reads: “‘Honor Those Who Served’ – Please Stay on Sidewalks.” Other signs address safety and decorum: “No Sliding Down Bannisters” (Lincoln Memorial); “Please Respect the Memorial. No Wading. No Coins” (Roosevelt Memorial). “No coins” also aims at preserving the good condition of the memorial, as does the sign at the National September 11 Memorial: “Please Do Not Throw or Place Anything in the Memorial Pools.” The inclined planes of the Canada Memorial in London seem to encourage children to climb the slopes, which they do despite a sign that reads “as a mark of respect please keep off the monument.” A sign common at many Washington memorials addresses the safety of visitors: “Caution Slippery Conditions”; as does the suggestion at the Diana Memorial Fountain “to avoid using glassware.” All these rules seem reasonable and necessary as a means of informing visitors of what would generally be acceptable in parks and plazas, which are often adjacent to spatial memorials, but not in the memorial itself. What is more complicated is that what is acceptable at one memorial is often not at another. 168

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Sitting is one action that is extremely common and acceptable in public space generally and at many memorials, where visitors even sit on the floor (for example, inside the Lincoln Memorial) or lie down. Indeed, the earliest versions of spatial memorials invited sitting by incorporating a bench below the figural sculpture within a single memorial composition, as at the Admiral Farragut Memorial in Madison Square Park in New York (see Figure 1.2). However, sitting is not acceptable at all memorials, even when physical design features invite it. Signs placed on the long flights of steps at the Anzac Memorial in Sydney state “No sitting on the steps,” though the regulation is frequently ignored. The Pentagon Memorial features an array of what the designers and commentators commonly call “benches,” dedicated to each of the victims, that have the distinct physical appearance of benches (see Figure 2.4). People do sit on them, but even in 100-degree weather a security guard may well approach them, asserting “This is not a bench.” This suggests that even when a practical use is intended, it may not be acceptable to those who see the memorial as sacred. The expected degree of decorum may vary according to the design of the memorial, the intentions that lie behind its design, and in response to activities that have taken place there that have since been forbidden (Figure 8.3). The Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials are temples that enclose statues of the former presidents. Unlike memorials in Washington that lack an interior space, each has a sign reading “Quiet. Respect Please,” as well as another one which says “Please respect the Memorial and help preserve the atmosphere of calm, tranquility and reverence. Consequently, no demonstrations allowed.” These signs are largely the result of a court case brought by a group of dancers. The phrase on the sign—“an atmosphere of calm, tranquility, and reverence” is a direct quote from the court’s statement (U.S. Court of Appeals 2011: 11). The court’s decision illuminates differences between interior memorials’ spaces and exterior ones, at least regarding degree of solemnity and how it is to be maintained. In 2008, just before midnight on the eve of Jefferson’s birthday, a group of 18 people began to dance inside the memorial, each alone and each silently with earphones. After being told to disperse, and after she asked several times for the reason, the group’s leader was arrested by the U.S. Park Police. She subsequently brought a suit against the U.S. Park Police claiming that the National Park Service’s regulation prohibiting her “expressive dancing” violated her First Amendment right to free speech and assembly. Local courts ultimately decided in favor of the National Park Service, finding that although the interior of the rotunda, which they distinguished from the memorial’s exterior areas, is open to the public, unlike the “public forum” of sidewalks and squares, it is a “nonpublic forum reserved for the tranquil commemoration of Mr. Jefferson’s legacy” (ibid.: 4). Dancing, however silent, “was a conspicuous expressive act with a propensity to draw onlookers” (ibid.: 7). Even late at night when few visitors are present and even though silent, “[t]he conduct is nonetheless prohibited because it stands out as a type of performance, creating its own center of attention and distracting from the atmosphere of solemn commemoration that the Regulations are designed to preserve” (ibid.: 7). The Court of Appeals noted that crowds do fill the rotunda and many are busy talking on their cell phones and taking pictures but asserted: “none of this conduct rises to the level of a ‘conspicuous demonstration’” (ibid.: 11). The National Park Service subsequently confirmed that dancing could take place outside the rotunda. 169

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Figure 8.3 Sign posted inside the Jefferson Memorial in Washington after dancing took place there Source: Karen A. Franck, 2012.

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Engaging Visitors By design and by intention, many memorials are less solemn than the court’s characterization of the Jefferson Memorial The designer of one memorial took the further step of creating a playful setting; management practices there are consistent with that purpose. People’s playfulness at the Diana Memorial Fountain fulfills landscape architect Kathryn Gustafson’s intention for the memorial: to commemorate Princess Diana’s liveliness and rapport with children. However, no one anticipated that playfulness at this memorial might involve risk of bodily harm, and when it first opened, three people were injured while walking in the fountain. Subsequently, the surfaces of the memorial beneath and next to the water were roughened to provide a better grip, a fence was installed to control access and rules were posted. What is unusual about these rules is that they suggest precisely what visitors both can do and should not do. “For your own safety and enjoyment, as well as those around you, we would ask you not to walk on the Memorial itself and not to walk in the water” is followed by the suggestion “Feel free to sit on the side and paddle your feet or hands.” Here is a very clear direction for how people can physically engage with the memorial. This explicit encouragement of a particular kind of bodily engagement is unusual in memorial signage, which more commonly prohibits activities or directs people on what attitude to take such as “Honor Those Who Served” or “Please respect the memorial.” The sign at the Diana Memorial Fountain is unusual in yet another respect: it acknowledges the differences and potential conflicts among its uses by asking “Whatever the purpose of your visit, please remember that people come to the Memorial for many different reasons. Please be tolerant and respectful towards other visitors.” Acknowledging the variety of activities that occur is implicitly to sanction them and the sign asks people to adopt a particular attitude toward other visitors, not just toward the memorial itself. Explicit suggestions to visitors about how they may engage with a memorial appear in signs at few memorials. At the Anzac Memorial in Sydney, a sign in the Hall of Memory invites visitors: to release a commemorative star representing an Australian service man or woman killed while serving their country or since deceased. Stars can be released into the Well of Contemplation from the viewing area in the Hall of Memory any time the Memorial is open. Stars are available at no charge from the reception desk in the exhibition area. You are welcome to write a specific name on the back of your star. The sign goes on to explain that the stars will be collected each week and kept for burning, with the ashes to be distributed later on biannual pilgrimages to key battlefields. At the National September 11 Memorial in New York, an invitation to engage with the memorial is jarringly paired with a request that visitors also police it: “Visitors are invited to touch the names panels. If you see anyone scratching, sitting on, or otherwise damaging the names panels, please alert memorial staff.” These examples suggest some ways management seeks not only to constrain visitors’ behavior but also to encourage certain activities that can enrich their experience of the memorial. Other initiatives may be adopted to meet that objective. One way, similar to the provision of stars at the Anzac Memorial in 171

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Sydney, is offering visitors red paper poppies on the relevant holidays commemorating wars, because throughout the UK and the Commonwealth the red poppy is a sign of remembrance of soldiers who have died in war. The Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne offers visitors such poppies throughout the year. Management may also take the initiative to modify the design of a memorial to support and make safe unanticipated activities, such as visiting the memorial at night. After a group of veterans lit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at night with candles in glass vases, permanent lighting was installed to support visiting at night. Similarly up-lighting was added along some aisles of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. In this book we often refer to “visitors” in a generic sense but those who come to memorials are not a homogeneous group and management must often respond to different kinds of needs, as the sign at the Diana Memorial Fountain implies. Some people who visit come on a kind of pilgrimage, seeking the memorial as a place to pay respects and to mourn. Others, often in large groups, may come as tourists eager to see what is a well-known and possibly historic site. While the first kind of visitor seeks quiet and tranquility, the second group may be far less concerned with experiencing or maintaining these conditions. Pilgrims may be disturbed by the actions and attitude of tourists. One distinct group to whom management is highly responsive is those with personal connections to the subject of a memorial. At the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, a special room is dedicated for use by the families of victims; at the Oklahoma City National Memorial, only relatives have access to the Field of Chairs. Often relatives of victims are consulted on the design of a memorial and on what any museum connected to the memorial will display.

Guards or Hosts? The evolution of the police response to dancing in the Jefferson Memorial raises the question of how on-site staff can best help maintain the appropriate atmosphere at memorials. In response to the first episode of unauthorized dancing in 2008, several officers of the U.S. Park Police assigned to the memorial “ordered the dancers to disperse.” Without explaining the reason, even when asked twice, the officer arrested the leader and, according to her, “used more force than was necessary, ripping apart her ear bud, shoving her against a pillar and violently twisting her arm” (U.S. Court of Appeals 2011: 3). In the 2011 episode of silent dancing by five people, who were protesting the court’s decision upholding the ban against dancing, videos show police officers handcuffing dancers and body slamming and choking one of them. Investigations were made into the possible use of excessive force. Several weeks later the police simply dispersed a demonstration of hundreds of people and closed the rotunda for a short period of time. Only this last response was in keeping with the court’s ruling on the intended atmosphere at the Jefferson Memorial and with what seems to be appropriate staff conduct at a memorial. If memorials are indeed different from everyday urban public space, and visitor conduct is expected to be consistent with the purpose and desired atmosphere of the site, so should the conduct of staff be. Restrained guard behavior at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe provides a useful illustration. Guards constantly patrol this site, mostly around its perimeter, looking inward. 172

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Despite the many transgressions of rules of conduct that the guards observe, such as climbing the stelae, they are very measured in their admonishment of visitors, often walking slowly toward people standing on stelae and only addressing them politely from up close. Groups of yelling, running children are a common occurrence here because of many school tours that come. This behavior is seldom policed: it is less dangerous, causes little apparent anxiety to other visitors, and is difficult to prevent because of its scale, speed and frequency. Rule enforcement at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is a delicate matter, given its subject and Germany’s fascist past. As Sion notes: “Germans are sensitive to the presence of uniforms, fences, normative signs, bans and other symbols of power that remind them of fascist dictatorship, the victims of which are precisely remembered in these sites” (2008: 210). Mangos (2007) also highlights that overt constraints or pedagogy in connection with this memorial are roundly criticized in the media as the return of a police state. Furthermore, the memorial’s architect wanted visitors to see and reflect upon contemporary everyday life in Germany, and the boisterous play of innocent children is part of that. At the Diana Memorial Fountain, the primary responsibility of staff is to ensure safety, specifically that visitors do not stand or walk in the fountain. Calling them “wardens” or “custodians” and giving them colorful red jackets were intentional management choices to lessen the perception of them as guards. In democratic contexts, managing contemporary public memorial sites is clearly not just directed toward preventing particular thoughts or behaviors. Hosting visitors also means aiding and enabling an expanding variety of ways people engage with memorials. Public memorials have increasingly become places of exploration, agonistic confrontation and debate over society’s history and values, not only in memorial policy and discourse as Young (2003) has noted, but also in activities at memorials. “Hosts” is a better way to conceive of the role of all those assigned to manage memorials, whether they are staff employed by the memorial, members of a police force, private security guards or National Park Service Rangers (Figure 8.4). As hosts they can welcome visitors as guests, provide help and information, increase people’s understanding and experience of the memorial and also ensure that visitors are safe and follow expectations for activities appropriate to the site. At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, volunteers and members of the National Park Service help visitors locate veterans’ names on the wall and offer explanations of how the names are arranged and what the small symbols next to the names mean. At many national memorials in Washington, National Park Rangers give scheduled tours of the sites. Security guards at the National September 11 Memorial offer information about the memorial, and help visitors locate the names of particular victims. At the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, custodians open the glass vitrines for visitors who wish to locate the names of relatives whose names are inscribed in notebooks of all World War II veterans from the State of Victoria. At the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, guards offer visitors brochures in at least 12 different languages that explain the memorial. In welcoming, assisting, guiding and educating visitors, staff and volunteers fulfill the role of hosts.

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Figure 8.4 National Park Service Rangers answer questions and lead tours at Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, Washington Source: Karen A. Franck, 2014.

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MAINTAINING A GOOD APPEARANCE The physical condition of memorials carries symbolic significance. Serious deterioration demonstrates their importance is no longer recognized or even remembered, as Shelley depicted so poignantly in his poem “Ozymandias.” Even a slightly deteriorated site or one with litter or other evidence of minor neglect undermines the purpose of a memorial and, indeed, suggests disrespect for the events or people being commemorated. In other urban public spaces such conditions may be unattractive, depressing and possibly dangerous but they carry far less symbolic significance.

Wear and Tear Without sufficient funding and attention for ongoing care, memorials begin to look worn and, being outdoors, can easily deteriorate. Their endurance as physical objects and places and their appearance of still being valued require time, effort and funds. Memorials require ongoing vigilance, maintenance, and often, over longer periods of time, major repair and renovation. It is possible for designers and managers to anticipate possibilities for serious deterioration in the initial design and to make changes accordingly. An early rendering of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, based on Maya Lin’s winning competition entry, showed green lawn sloping down to the vertex of the memorial with figures standing on the lawn and no indication of pathways or barriers anywhere (Plate 8.1). During design development it became apparent that a covered gutter would be needed immediately in front of the wall to prevent runoff from collecting at the base of the wall. Maya Lin agreed to a paved stone path in front of the wall. After the dedication of the complete memorial in 1984 with its added statues, and in light of the unexpectedly high numbers of visitors walking on the grass, chains and stanchions were installed along the length of the access path, and paved paths were added to connect the memorial to the Mall’s existing pathway system (Lecky 2012). Kathryn Gustafson’s winning proposal for the Diana Memorial Fountain similarly featured a sculptural stone form set in a sloping lawn, completely unencumbered by pathways or fences. As at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the unanticipated crowds and rain transformed the lawn into mud, requiring replacement of the grass with harder-wearing turf and the addition of paved paths around and through the memorial. Hans and Tory Butzer, the designers of the Oklahoma City Memorial, had envisioned that the Field of Chairs would be accessible to all visitors but difficulties maintaining the lawn where they are set led management to enclose the field with a low chain so that the Field is open only to relatives and for ceremonial events (Sturken 2007). Grass is always a challenge. Water presents even more difficulties. Any water feature requires funding and attention for operation, cleaning and repair. The costs can be significant. At the National September 11 Memorial, the estimated cost of operating and maintaining the Reflecting Pools—to filter, pump and precisely monitor the flow of the water— is $4.5–5 million annually. Indeed, the annual maintenance budget for this memorial is as large as the budget that the New York City Parks and Recreation Department has for maintaining the 2200 works in their care for the next 50 years (Kuhn 2011). 175

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The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, installed in 1930, underwent a $34 million renovation between 2010 and 2012, only to then have algae growing on the floor of the pool. The Diana Memorial Fountain had to be closed several times shortly after it opened, due to cracks in its granite, flooding when leaves blocked its drainage, and because people slipped when wading in the channel. The pump stopped and had to be replaced. A fence had to be installed to prevent dogs swimming in the fountain. All the upper surfaces had to be roughened and the filtration system had to be changed to prevent algae developing (Hill et al. 2004; Jeffries 2004). Even for more modest traditional fountains, the cost of maintenance and repair may be more than a city government can afford, as with the September 11 Memorial fountain in Jersey City that was left dry and empty by 2011. Canberra’s Nurses Memorial was designed with a small pond, but this was drained and filled with shrubs because it posed problems of maintenance, cleanliness and safety. Many memorials are deeded to local governments who must then locate funds to maintain and repair them, or this responsibility may remain with the sponsoring group that raised funds for the memorial’s construction and must continue to do so for ongoing maintenance. The private patron for the Canada Memorial in London, which has a sheet of water sliding down an inclined surface, was not able to finance its upkeep. Ultimately the Canadian government had to assume responsibility for its maintenance but, nonetheless, it has been fenced off since October 2012. The maintenance and repair of fountains and other water features are so costly and so problematic for the ongoing public use of memorial sites that Canberra’s National Capital Authority has ruled that no new memorials in Canberra may include them. Renovating memorials after a long period of decline can also be very costly. The small temple on Washington’s Mall in honor of local residents who died fighting in World War I, dedicated in 1931, was restored and rededicated in 2011 at a cost of $3.6 million with funds supplied by the federal government (Ruane 2011). Without ongoing maintenance and repair, a memorial may deteriorate sufficiently that all text on it wears away, making it a truly anonymous element in the public landscape (Auster 1997). Shanken (2012a, 2012b) describes such a memorial in Verona’s Piazza Pradaval that has become a favored hangout for local teenagers who have marked it with graffiti. Even the city historian could not identify the subject of the memorial or the artist who created it. When a memorial consists of multiple elements that are dispersed and integrated into everyday urban public space, its maintenance is even more likely to be inadequate. Individual elements may be disturbed by ongoing maintenance and upgrading of pavements and other urban infrastructure. Sarajevo Roses are memorials formed from red resin poured into small pavement craters created by artillery shells during the city’s siege in the civil war in 1992 to 1995. Each marks a site where at least three people were killed. They fade and crack from the impact of foot traffic. Some sections of sidewalk pavement containing roses, or parts of roses, have been removed during post-war reconstruction, without being reinstated (Ristic 2011). Similarly, one of the 22 brass strips forming the Trail of Remembrance along Cologne’s streets, marking where the Nazis deported the city’s Sinti and Roma, disappeared after street works. Designers and managers of memorials can make some decisions in advance of construction to protect design features and materials from wear and tear, or choose to exclude elements such as fountains because they will incur high maintenance costs. If there is lawn that will be walked on, sufficiently strong sod 176

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needs to be used and drainage must be addressed. The cases of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Diana Memorial Fountain suggest that wide, welldrained paths are a necessity for memorials to subjects that capture the general public imagination. The stelae of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe were given an impermeable coating to protect the memorial against graffiti, despite the architect Peter Eisenman’s belief that defacements would in fact help illuminate contemporary society’s diversities of opinion and the continuing dangers of fascism (Ouroussoff 2005). Only rarely has the memorial been blighted with swastikas, which were quickly removed (Cortez 2009). Much more frequent is defacement of the memorial by writing or scratching words, images or random marks into the stelae’s concrete surfaces. Large cracks have also developed in the surface of over a thousand individual stelae due to weathering. They have expanded and contracted with changing temperatures, and the water sitting on their horizontal tops has run into hairline cracks, frozen and expanded. These severely minimalist, planar forms lack opportunities for a designer to provide the hidden expansion joints that more traditional, figurative forms have. The contractor covered the cost of repairs since they occurred within the defects liability period, but fundamental design flaws can be hard to rectify for the long term.

Tributes During official ceremonies and on particular anniversaries, perishable offerings such as floral arrangements and candles are often placed at public memorials. As these tributes are left in place, they enliven the memorial’s appearance, giving evidence of the public’s continued engagement with the memorial and its continuing role in active commemoration. There are often particular places defined within a memorial for wreaths or other offerings. A sign at the Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial in Ballarat, Australia, indicates the precise location for placing wreaths. Some staff at the National September 11 Memorial in New York indicate to visitors that it is best to place flowers in the trough of water beneath the engraved plates of names (Figure 8.5). In large, well-maintained memorials, as tributes slowly deteriorate and flowers die, staff generally remove them. At smaller or more remote memorials that lack official staff, decayed offerings may remain for longer periods of time. One ongoing challenge in maintaining the appearance of a memorial is what to do with the many objects that visitors leave at memorials. At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the National Park Service set a precedent by collecting and archiving all non-perishable items that visitors leave. Objects that visitors continue to leave at the fence in the Oklahoma City National Memorial are also collected and stored in an archive in its Memorial Center, including more than 3,000 teddy bears. In 2003, staff at the center began to send stuffed animals that bear no message or signs of personalization to children in Iraq and Afghanistan (Sturken 2007). At the National September 11 Memorial, tributes left on the panels of names around the pools (Plate 8.2) are first photographed in situ and then stored, with the expectation that some will be displayed in future exhibitions in the museum. At this memorial, staff place roses at victims’ names on their birthdays and a sign at the memorial announces this practice. At other sites, visitors may be explicitly requested not to leave tributes. The interim memorial at the World Trade Center on Church Street warned visitors that such items would not be kept. Prior to the dedication of the National World War II Memorial, the National Park Service informed all local chapters 177

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Figure 8.5 Bouquet placed by visitors in trough at National September 11 Memorial, New York Source: Quentin Stevens, 2011.

of Veterans of Foreign Wars that it would not be collecting and archiving items left at that memorial and that such contributions should be given to local chapters instead. Informal memorials are often temporary and are often made almost entirely from perishable offerings. Some such memorials may be long-lasting, particularly those created by individuals or tightly knit communities, such as Angels’ Circle on Staten Island or Zachary’s Corner in Berkeley. The individuals who initiated such memorials may well take responsibility for their ongoing maintenance and appearance. But public officials and other organizations often face the question of how to respond to the accumulations of items in informal public memorials, as over time they weather, deteriorate, and appear shabby and messy. Many people see these decaying piles as suggesting a kind of disrespect to those being commemorated, and creating an eyesore in public space. At the same time, they also serve as shrines, and authorities often recognize their responsibility to treat them with respect (Figure 8.6). In London, after the July 2005 bombings, staff at King’s Cross Station took great care in moving the many bouquets of flowers from a street-side location to a more secluded one and even posted a sign to direct people to that location: “All Floral Tributes can be left in the garden area to the right. Thank you.” Following the attack on the World Trade Center in 2011, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation allowed the accumulation of candles, flowers, photographs, signs, drawings, flags and other items to remain in Union Square for two weeks. At many informal September 11 memorials, tributes were collected, and several organizations created archives of them, including the Smithsonian and the New York Historical Society. Among its many collections the September 11 Digital Archive, hosted by George Mason University, provides digital 178

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Figure 8.6 Police and other emergency services staff relocate and arrange bouquets after July 2005 bombings, King’s Cross Station, London Source: Quentin Stevens, 2005.

photographs of items left at various informal memorials. The National September 11 Memorial and Museum also gives online access to such pictures. Three months after the bombing of commuter trains in Madrid in 2004, the national railway company collected nearly 70,000 messages and other items contributed to informal memorials at three train stations, intending to bury the materials underneath the official memorial. Instead, upon request, they donated them to the newly established Archive of Mourning at the National Research Council, for preservation and analysis (Sanchez-Carretero 2011). Following the killing of children and staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, shortly before Christmas in 2013, the town was inundated with informal memorials in public spaces and in private yards, composed of decorated Christmas trees, balloons in the school colors, candles, teddy bears, dolls, and sports trophies. Two weeks after the killing, the town’s mayor Patricia Llodra decided that all items would be collected (Rivera 2013). She first alerted many community members by phone, telling them that organic material from the trees and flowers would be used in a future permanent memorial and that nonorganic items would be turned into bricks and other building materials for the memorial. In personal letters, she invited each of the victim’s families to visit the memorials and take any items they wished to keep. On December 28, police closed the streets around the memorials for two hours to facilitate such visits. That night, town employees collected all remaining items and stored them. Ms. Llodra’s explanation expressed sentiments common to many authorities when faced with the question of how to manage informal memorials: 179

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We knew the memorials can’t stand forever,” she said. “And after being weathered … I mean, we had bad rain, we had a storm, we had wind, we had snow. So I knew the time was going to come where we really had to move the memorials. Not only because the tributes themselves started to look unkempt and start to communicate a message that wasn’t part of the honoring that the donor intended; it also signifies a moving on, a readiness for the community to go to that next step. (Rivera: n.p.) Longer-term informal memorials, intended by their makers to be permanent, also pose a challenge to government agencies who seek to maintain safe, orderly, if not tidy, public spaces. For example, municipal governments have adopted different approaches to Ghost Bikes, those bicycles painted white and placed at the site of the death of a cyclist, now a tradition in many cities around the world (Figure 8.7). In some cities the bike is taken down immediately or after a few weeks. For some years, the New York City Sanitation Department treated Ghost Bikes as trash and after some period of time collected and disposed of them as such. In 2010, the department proposed rules for the removal of all abandoned bikes. After comments and testimony from supporters of Ghost Bikes, the department exempted them from removal unless they pose safety problems. Local businesses or residents sometimes remove them. However, if a Ghost Bike in New York is visited and maintained and supported by family or community members, it has a chance of remaining (New York City Street Memorial Project 2014). In Albuquerque, New Mexico, all Ghost Bikes are officially recognized and treated as permanent memorials, following a state law that

Figure 8.7 Ghost Bicycle, Brooklyn, New York Source: Karen A. Franck, 2009.

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legalizes an age-old Mexican and Spanish tradition of creating descansos (resting places) by erecting a cross to mark the sitewhere those carrying a coffin from a village church to the cemetery rested (Anaza et al. 1995).

KEEPING THE MEMORIAL RELEVANT While memorials by definition commemorate past events and people, in order to continue to draw visitors they need to maintain some degree of relevance in the present. To accomplish this task, managers may encourage and coordinate ceremonial events and make additions that explain and supplement a memorial with extra information in order to educate the public about its subject matter and to expand its constituency.

Holding Commemorative Events The purpose of a memorial is to remember past events or people. The continued physical existence of a memorial, even if it is well maintained, may not be sufficient to meet that purpose if it is no longer visited. Continuing to attract visitors to a memorial by keeping it relevant often requires additional work on the part of management staff, the sponsoring organizations and other groups. One function of memorials—to provide locations for commemorative events—helps to do that. Even if the memorial is a single object in the urban landscape, its life in society and its role in remembering are supported and enhanced by hosting ritual ceremonies that can attract large crowds, as the Cenotaph in London does every Remembrance Day, and by the publicity it garners through the media and people’s own visual documentation of those events. Ceremonies at large national memorials can be elaborate events, attracting many participants and a very large audience. On Anzac Day in 2014, the 99th anniversary of the Anzac landing at Gallipoli in Turkey, 40,000 people attended the dawn ceremony at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, where more than 10,000 veterans marched. In Canberra, a city of only 380,000 residents, 300,000 people gathered in freezing dawn temperatures in front of the Australian War Memorial on Anzac Day in 2013 (Figure 8.8). The dawn ceremony had been carefully orchestrated to create an intense, multisensory experience. Archival war images were projected onto the front of the Memorial building and a temporary amphitheater of ranked seating was installed.. The ceremony combined hymn singing, prayers, the reading of the World War I poem “In Flanders Fields,” a moment of silence, rifle shots, and a bugle playing “The Last Post.” Annual or semi-annual ceremonies may not be sufficient, however. Management staff at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne seek other ways to draw visitors and acquaint them with what it stands for. Every half hour during visiting hours inside the Sanctuary, the “Ceremony of Light” is held. The beam of sunlight that falls on the crypt at 11 a.m. every November 11 is recreated using electric lights, accompanied by a recording of “The Last Post.” With the passing of most World War II veterans, who previously organized and led many ceremonies, the Shrine of Remembrance staff seeks out schools, other organizations and the children of veterans to continue the tradition of holding ceremonies throughout the year. One hundred and forty ceremonies took place at the Shrine in 2012, inside the sanctuary and under particular trees on the grounds dedicated to certain military units (Figure 8.9). Their Friends of the Shrine Program, started in 2011, is “for the 181

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Figure 8.8 Anzac Day dawn ceremony, Australian War Memorial, Canberra Source: Quentin Stevens, 2013.

Figure 8.9 Ceremony on Pearl Harbor Day in the Sanctuary of the Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne Source: Karen A. Franck, 2012.

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wider community and descendants of veterans to establish a direct connection with their Shrine of Remembrance” (Shrine of Remembrance Trustees 2012: 11). Through a variety of such outreach efforts, the Shrine staff seek to cultivate new stakeholders, indeed new publics. The number of ceremonies, educational programs and exhibits depends upon significant funding from both government and private sources and substantial staff and volunteers, though these events in turn help to engender such support. Similarly, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund website announces that it is “dedicated to preserving the legacy” of the memorial and to “promoting healing and to educate about the impact of the Vietnam War Era” (Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund 2013). It organizes annual ceremonies at the wall in Washington on Memorial Day and Veterans Day with the support of private funding. On Mother’s Day, the names of those who have perished that year from wounds received in Vietnam are added to the wall, while on Flag Day, celebrating the 1777 adoption of the US flag, tribute is paid to those who died as a result of the war but who do not fit the criteria for having their names included on the wall. On Father’s Day, the Fund invites the sons and daughters of those listed on the wall to bring longstemmed roses and messages to the memorial. “Each message is read aloud and each rose is touched to the loved one’s name on The Wall before being placed at the base of the Memorial” (ibid.). Some memorials stay relevant by virtue of their subject matter and the design that accommodates it. A prime example are those memorials intended and designed from the start for additional names or symbols to be added over the course of time to represent additional persons killed in the line of duty or because new information becomes available. Memorials to police officers in Washington and Canberra provide for the adding of names, as do the Ottawa Peacekeeping Monument and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Ceremonies are regularly held at these sites when new names are added. Being able to bring tributes to a memorial at any time is another way that memorials can remain relevant. This tradition is particularly notable at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, where the non-perishable tributes are collected and kept. At the National September 11 Memorial in New York and the Oklahoma City Memorial, a similar management procedure is followed. The opportunity to leave items, knowing they will be preserved, and the chance for other visitors to see them, to study the photographs and to read the letters and messages left, keep the memorial current in a very moving way. Similarly, at durable informal memorials that are well cared for, friends and relatives may leave notes and photographs, cards or other items that signify a birthday or a wedding anniversary of the person who died or a significant event in the ongoing lives of relatives such as birth or wedding announcements. At the memorial to the young boy who died at a traffic circle in Berkeley, his father left a typewritten note announcing his recent graduation from college, addressed to passers-by as much as to his son. Those who care for a memorial may decorate its site seasonally, marking Halloween or Christmas (see Plate 5.3).

Supplementing the Memorial Without staff or volunteers present, visitors’ understanding of a memorial and its subject rely completely on its design and sources of information they may have 183

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consulted before the visit or that they retrieve during the visit using their own mobile devices. Indeed, some memorials now provide Quick Response Codes for visitors to access information that way. Those responsible for managing memorials may also feel that additional textual information needs to be presented physically at the memorial, particularly if its subject matter is not well known or is likely to have been forgotten. This is very common at sites in Berlin, where signage is often added at some distance from the memorial, incorporating images and detailed historical information in several languages about the subject of the memorial and its own history. A more unusual management practice is to create new text on the memorial object itself. This technique was used to explain the originally ambiguous memorial that recognizes the resistance efforts of Herbert Baum and his collaborators in 1942 who set fire to an anti-Soviet exhibition the Nazis had staged in the Lustgarten in Berlin. The text on the original memorial, a stone cube placed in the Lustgarten in 1981 in what was then East Berlin, does not explain the event. The inscription reads: “Bound in friendship with the Soviet Union forever. Unforgotten the courageous deeds and the steadfastness of the anti-fascist resistance group led by the young communist Herbert Baum” (Jordan 2006: 74). Instead of removing the sculpture, which some members of the public advocated, in 2001 two plexiglass panels were installed on top of the original text (Figure 8.10). One gives a detailed description in several languages of the event being memorialized; the other lists the names of all those who participated (ibid.). Information provided by signs and hosts is a relatively modest way to educate visitors. In recent years, managers of memorials and groups that sponsor them increasingly believe that large-scale memorials need to fulfill a larger pedagogical role—through information or visitor centers. The pairing of museums with memorials has become frequent enough to merit a French term for it—historial (Winter 2009). An information center was to be a component of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington but it was cut for budgetary reasons. In 2003, major redevelopment of the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne included excavating the mound it stood on to provide a new subterranean museum, bookshop, administrative offices and space for exhibitions and lectures, as well as two courtyards. This conversion provides space for the educational programs and other events the Shrine now hosts, furthering its goals of educating the public and maintaining its social relevance. An information center was added beneath the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe after Peter Eisenman’s design had been selected. Indeed, below ground is a preferred location for information centers to avoid interfering with views and access to spatial memorials. The Education Center supplementing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial will be at some distance from the wall and below ground; the museum at the National September 11 Memorial is also underground. What information is presented in a memorial museum and what information is excluded can become contested questions, particularly in recent memorials to victims of terrorist acts such as the museum at the National September 11 Memorial and the Oklahoma City National Memorial; both avoid giving any details about the perpetrators of the acts or their motivations. Management solutions may thus reveal some details of events but avoid disclosing others. Such targeted didacticism is very likely when an information center is paired with a memorial that specifically commemorates victims, since such memorials are very concerned about meeting the needs of victims’ friends and relatives. 184

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Figure 8.10 Plexiglass panel providing additional information at Herbert Baum Memorial Stone, Berlin Source: Karen A. Franck, 2012.

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MANAGING MEANING Much of what managing memorials entails is the management of meaning, achieved through constraining certain visitor activities and encouraging others, maintaining the memorial’s appearance and keeping it relevant. If a memorial is not kept in good repair, the end result can be an undermining of its original meaning. If the memorial’s subject is no longer known or recorded anywhere, and it deteriorates sufficiently so that its name and inscription are no longer visible, it has little meaning at all. Another more direct way that management participates in shaping meaning can occur during the process of finalizing the design of a memorial before it is built and deciding on any changes made to it afterwards. Significant numbers of people may well revile a memorial because they believe it misrepresents a historical event or denigrates a particular group of people or because political and social circumstances have changed and what might have once been honored no longer is. What is to become of the memorials whose subject matter is no longer relevant or is the object of rage? While irrelevant memorials may remain mute in the landscape, possibly attracting noncommemorative activities, despised memorials demand a response. Officials may allow them to be fully or partially destroyed and leave them in that condition. They may move them to other less prominent locations, including cemeteries, or allow their original meaning to be modified by design changes or by additional textual information to contextualize their changing relation to history. Groups with particular relationships to the memorial often make explicit requests for modifications. Some requested changes extend or enrich the original meaning; others arise from opposition to the original meaning and are intended to change it. Those managing the memorial, including government groups who have to approve any proposed change to a memorial, can come under intense pressure from stakeholder groups whose interests may be in conflict with each other. Powerful political forces may be in play. Changes that extend or enrich a memorial’s meaning or that modify its narrative may be contested, putting those responsible for the management of the memorial in the center, as arbitrators who must manage competing interests. Dwyer (2004) aptly calls additions to memorials “symbolic accretions” which are often evidence of struggles over how the past should be represented and whose interests a memorial serves.

Extending, Enriching the Original Meaning A memorial’s subject matter may be extended by changing its name or by adding new text or symbolic elements while still remaining true to the original theme, as exemplified by many memorials built to “the War to End all Wars.” The Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, dedicated in 1931, was built to honor those citizens of Victoria who fought in World War I. In 1954, the Second World War Forecourt, the Cenotaph and the Eternal Flame were added to the grounds of the Shrine and in 1985 a Remembrance Garden was dedicated to commemorate all those Victorians who have participated in Australian conflicts and peacekeeping since World War II. A name change may be sufficient to extend the subject of a memorial. Although this is a simple change, it is not easy to make since the constituents of 186

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the memorial, who have a stake in the subject matter that its name delimits, may well oppose the change. In 2011, the World War I Memorial Foundation proposed that the District of Columbia War Memorial on the Washington Mall, originally dedicated to D.C. veterans of World War I, be re-dedicated and re-named as a national memorial to all US World War I veterans, since no such national memorial exists. Residents of Washington and the National Capital Memorial Commission successfully opposed the related Bill that came before Congress, as did the District’s representative to Congress, who argued that it should remain a local memorial honoring veterans from the District of Columbia (Simon 2011). Additions to memorials to bring the information they bear up to date, as with adding names of victims or changing the status of those being commemorated, are often anticipated in the original design of the memorial or, if not, are relatively uncontroversial and made with little difficulty. Australia’s national war memorials commemorate those confirmed dead, and so after the 1992 unveiling of the Australian Vietnam Forces National Memorial in Canberra, three concrete blocks were added adjacent to the main memorial’s three approach paths, each bearing plaques with the names of two servicemen who were missing in action at that time. By 2009, their bodies had been found and repatriated, and further plaques were added to the blocks with these details. Originally the Shaw Memorial in Boston, honoring the only black regiment in the Union Army, only listed the names of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and other white officers who were killed. In 1982, the names of the 62 black soldiers who died were added to the monument, an addition that in fact met a request from Shaw’s sister that these names be incorporated in the original design (Whitfield 1987). In Washington, additions to memorials that extend or enrich the original meaning in a substantial way are rarely made. Those parties responsible for approving memorial designs seem generally unwilling to make changes. In most cases the responsible groups prefer to preserve a memorial’s original, officially approved design, which itself is often the outcome of an arduous process of negotiation and modification. As a result, they have a stake in maintaining that design. They may hold to the principle that memorials should not be changed after they are erected or they may see making changes as generating too much controversy. As a result, parties with a strong interest in adding to a memorial to extend or enrich its meaning have to make concerted and extended efforts to achieve the changes they desire. For ten years, women veterans campaigned to have a Vietnam Women’s Memorial added to Washington’s original Vietnam Veterans Memorial to recognize their service, feeling that the existing wall and the added sculpture of three servicemen did not do so. All parties responsible for authorizing this addition rejected it, requiring in the end a resolution from Congress. One argument against the addition, presented by the Commission of Fine Arts, was that allowing this sculpture would open the gates to claims from additional special interest groups for more additions, such as Air Force pilots, Navy seamen, and Native Americans (Evans n.d.). Similarly, a Congressional resolution was the only way the National Organization on Disability could succeed in their effort to have the memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt modified to clearly show the former president sitting in a wheelchair (Figure 8.11). These additions arose from the demands of particular stakeholder groups to include what they believed had been insufficiently acknowledged in the original memorial. The additions did not change the overall narrative. 187

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Figure 8.11 Statue of President Roosevelt in wheelchair by Robert Graham, 2001, added to Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, Washington Source: Karen A. Franck, 2012.

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In 2011, the sponsors of the Korean War Veterans Memorial proposed to Congress the addition of a glass Wall of Remembrance to list the names of all the veterans who died as well as information about service personnel from other countries. The National Park Service opposed these changes on several grounds, including that the wall would too closely “mimic” the wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and that including some names and not others would be too painful for families. In the conclusion of his written testimony to Congress, the National Park Service’s Regional Director also revealed his desire to avoid any controversy that the addition might generate: “The Korean War Veterans Memorial is a place of honor and dignity and we should avoid any intrusions that will become a source of contention or controversy” (Whitesell 2011).

Changing the Original Meaning Other changes to memorials that require approval serve to alter their overall narrative. These may be small-scale accretions that add a new narrative to the memorial but that in no way undermine or counter the original one. For example, in 2003, text was engraved into the terrace of the Lincoln Memorial, indicating where Martin Luther King stood when he gave his iconic “I have a dream” speech during the historic Civil Rights march on Washington in 1963. The change resulted from one citizen’s request to his Congresswoman; he “wanted the events of 1963 to come alive to all who toured the Lincoln Monument” (Northrup 2000). The inscription basically added a second very modest memorial to the original grand one. Other requested changes are intended to contest a memorial’s original meaning. It is increasingly clear that the subject matter and the design of many memorials represent exclusively the point of view and experiences of those with power at the expense of those without. The rights of previously marginalized groups to have their histories commemorated in the form of memorials is now more likely to be recognized than in the past, as memorials to the Japanese internees and the victims of lynching in the US demonstrate. New memorials, however, cannot address the biased and exclusionary narrative apparent in existing memorials, many of which depict the actions of conquerors, making invisible the counter-narratives of those conquered and who were unjustly victimized by the very person or event being honored by the memorial. This hegemony is increasingly critiqued, resulting in decades-long debates over particular memorials. Nonetheless, the decision whether to change a memorial and in what ways remains the purview of government agencies that retain the power to say no, or to agree only to certain kinds of changes. While the influence of previously marginalized groups has increased, those with sufficient political influence or those in positions to approve or reject requests continue to shape the memorial landscape. One means of countering an existing narrative that management is more likely to accept is the addition of text to an existing memorial to present an opposing perspective on the event or person being commemorated. For instance, in 1994, a new plaque was added to the Explorers’ Monument in Fremantle, Australia, erected in 1913 to commemorate the deaths of white settlers at the hands of local Aborigines: This plaque was erected by people who found the monument before you offensive. The monument describes the events at La Grange from one 189

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perspective only, the viewpoint of the white settlers. No mention is made of the right of the Aboriginal people to defend their land or the history of provocation which led to the explorers’ deaths. The ‘punitive party’ mentioned here ended in the deaths of somewhere around twenty Aboriginal people. The whites were well armed and equipped. Lest We Forget Mapa Jarriya Nyalaku. (Harris 2008: 38) Another possible means of presenting a counter-narrative is for those managing the memorial to sponsor the addition of a second full-scale memorial near the original one. Such a solution was finally reached at what had previously been called Custer Battlefield National Battlefield, which had previously only honored General Custer and his soldiers, with no acknowledgment of the loss of life of American Indians. Finally, after two demonstrations by the American Indian Movement in 1976 and 1988, the name of the site was changed by an Act of Congress to Little Big Horn Battlefield, and under the guidance of the National Park Service, a design competition was held and a second memorial was added in 2003 to honor the Native Americans who died. A memorial can also be moved to a less prominent site, making it both less visible and removing the collective endorsement of its meaning that a prime location represents. In Selma, Alabama, in 2000, a pro-Confederacy group erected a bronze bust of Confederate General Nathan Forrest on the grounds of a cityowned museum in an antebellum house that had served as a military hospital during the Civil War. Residents of the surrounding African-American neighborhood protested the placement of the memorial and the failure to include any reference to Forrest having been a slave trader, his massacre of black Union troops, or his association with the Klu Klux Klan (Dwyer 2004). Some in the black community argued for the addition of a plaque or mural that would present the additional information. Others critiqued the memorial’s location on public property in a black neighborhood. After intense public debate and pressure from the business community, the city council moved the Forrest Memorial, without making any changes to it, to the existing Confederate memorial in the city cemetery. Removal is not always possible, even when official agencies favor it. Since at least the 1950s, the Soldiers Monument in the central plaza in Santa Fe, Mexico, has been a source of contention. The inscription on the 1868 obelisk dedicates it to “the brave victims who have perished in various wars with the savage Indians.” In 1973, in response to demands from the American Indian Movement, the city council agreed to remove the monument. However, this was not accomplished: the plaza is a designated historic landmark, and after the city council’s decision, the National Park Service threatened to withhold financial support for the plaza’s renovation (Staeheli and Mitchell 2008). In 1974, a young man in full daylight in the presence of others neatly removed the word “savage” with a chisel. This excision persists and a new official plaque reads: Monument texts reflect the character of the times in which they are written and the temper of those who wrote them. This monument was dedicated in 1868 near to the close of a period of intense strife which pitted northerner against southerner, Indian against white, Indian against Indian. Thus, we see on this monument, as in other records, the use of 190

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such terms as ‘savage’ and ‘rebel.’ Attitudes change and prejudices hopefully dissolve. (Staeheli and Mitchell 2008: 25) The outcomes of this case—retaining access to federal funding, accepting the illicit removal of offensive text and adding a new explanation—illustrate some of the key responsibilities that the management of a public memorial seeks to reconcile: ensuring its maintenance, keeping it relevant, responding to requests for change, and coordinating the demands of different stakeholders. These actions allow an old memorial to remain a special place, even if a somewhat different one to what its sponsors originally intended.

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PLANNING THE INCREASING NUMBER, variety, and range of uses of memorials in public spaces pose significant challenges for planning. Memorials can have significant impacts on the appearance, meaning and use of a city. City planners seek to manage competing public interests and optimise opportunities by formulating aims and regulations that influence the form, location and subject matter of memorials, and how people can engage with them. Visitors’ engagement with memorials is also affected by their broader spatial contexts. Urban landscapes keep evolving, and commemorative plans and regulations have to address the way memorials and their uses relate to other development concerns such as open space provision, traffic management and economic development. People’s memories and feelings about the past change over time, and so do their values. Existing memorials, like memories themselves, can become neglected, forgotten or loathed. New memorials to new subjects do not necessarily fit neatly into existing commemorative precincts and narratives. Citizens sometimes create new memorials spontaneously, without formal approval. Space also needs to be set aside for unknowable future needs. Governments use special-purpose plans and regulations to shape memorials’ locations, subjects and designs, in relation to other memorials, to the wider structure of urban space, to everyday public activity, to social values, and to future ambitions for city development and collective identity. The complex interplay of forms, meanings and uses among the memorials of older cities such as Berlin, London and New York, and the piecemeal planning that guides them, can be contrasted with the situation in Washington, Ottawa and Canberra, three relatively young capitals that have comprehensive planning strategies to regulate commemoration.

SITES Demand for Sites As history itself continues to unfold, the total number of memorials in cities is increasing. Many victims’ memorials are now being proposed, and these tend to arise relatively quickly after tragic events. Old memorials are not removed as quickly as new ones are installed. Most of East Berlin’s communist-era memorials have been removed, but the growing number of memorials since the city’s and nation’s reunification in 1990 has raised the specter of an “inflation of memory”: the city center continues to stockpile what has been called Germany’s “arsenal of guilt,” and each memorial and the events they commemorate begin to lose their individual visual and emotional impact (Bornhöft 2007). 192

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Public memorials tend to be highly concentrated in the central, dense areas of cities, where space is generally in high demand. The sponsors of new memorials very often want them to be placed in key national commemorative precincts or on the nodes and edges of major axes, to confirm the general importance of their subject and maximize their visibility, or in proximity to or alignment with specific existing memorials, to draw symbolic power from their meanings. In Berlin, many different victims’ groups have sought memorial sites near the Reichstag, both to ensure high public visibility to their fate, and to convey the accountability of the German Parliament. Continued clustering amplifies the physical and representational potency of key sites. Memorials placed elsewhere are, implicitly, of lesser significance. Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth has stood vacant for 150 years, but most choice sites in major cities are already taken. Sponsors are often disappointed and must be encouraged to revise their ambitions (Kempf 2011; Kuhn 2011; Cuthbertson 2012). No entirely new precincts or armatures for placing multiple public memorials have been created in the central areas of London, Berlin or New York for at least 50 years. Preserving adequate space for future memorials in inner-urban locations is made more difficult by the expansiveness of some of the memorials that have recently been built. The size of several recent US victim memorials such as the National September 11 Memorial, the Pentagon Memorial and the National Oklahoma City Memorial reflect desires to see each individual victim separately named or symbolized, and for such memorials to make major political statements. By contrast, the public memorial to the sinking of the steamboat General Slocum (1904), New York City’s second largest civilian tragedy with over 1000 victims, is just a modest fountain. The increasing numbers and scale of commemorative proposals have hastened calls for the decentralization of new memorials (Bornhöft 2007; Kempf 2011; Cuthbertson 2012), but no mechanisms have yet been developed to advance this. In many cities, there are few obvious good sites for future memorials to go, and new proposals are often controversial. When space is tight, it is difficult to introduce spatial memorials that cover large amounts of ground, or to develop collective commemorative schemes. The absence of new, structured commemorative precincts in many historic cities has meant that individual new memorials have been scattered throughout the public realm and in close proximity to everyday life, and that their size is generally limited to small interstitial spaces. In London, the Cenotaph (1920) and Earl Haig’s statue (1928) were placed on small traffic islands in the middle of busy Whitehall, despite the protestations of the Metropolitan Police and Westminster City Council. Despite the absence of any major road-widening projects for London’s narrow streets until 1962, several hundred statue memorials accumulated in the public realm (Heathorn 2008). Spatial memorials are often not amenable to these kinds of integrations into existing public spaces and their flows of activities, because each of them creates its own expansive, distinctive landscape, with specific entry and viewing points, and because their architectural elements are difficult to relocate. Some spaces are large, empty and available for such memorials. Battery Park City in New York, a large area of landfill created in 1980, provided scope for two large spatial memorials. It is also a site that the City government does not control. The low-lying, littledeveloped shorelines of New Jersey and Staten Island have also accommodated numerous large memorials, particularly in response to September 11. One typical planning response to the impact of increasing numbers of memorials in the public realm is to manage demand. In many capital cities, applications 193

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for memorials can only be made ten or even 25 years after the event. Memorials that duplicate themes already commemorated are also generally refused. The US Commemorative Works Act (CWA) also significantly slows down the production of memorials in Washington by requiring a lengthy 24-stage approvals process (Watkins 2008). London’s Westminster generally excludes new memorials from its ‘Saturation Zone’ embracing Whitehall, St James and Aldwych (Westminster City Council n.d.). Many potential conflicts between memorials and their surroundings are thus dealt with through careful review and decision-making about appropriate memorial subject matter, siting and design, consciously distanced from the passions and politics that are stirred shortly after tragic events. Such regulations tend to prioritize broad, edifying national narratives over people’s more immediate needs to mourn and grieve. The planned national capitals Washington, Canberra and Ottawa also all have clear criteria for what counts as a “significant,” “national” memorial, and what does not, and even approved memorials cannot be placed just anywhere. The amended CWA of 2003 placed a moratorium on new memorials in “The Reserve” (Figure 9.1). Ottawa’s Parliament Hill has its own separate approvals process, and historically remained restricted to commemorating monarchs and statesmen, though its scope was deliberately broadened by the Suffragette memorial Women are Persons! (2000), as well as by the National Police Memorial (1994). Memorial plans for Washington and Ottawa establish a hierarchy among available public sites, and criteria for which subjects might be worthy of them (NCPC 2002; NCC 2006). Canberra uses a form of zoning, delineating 17 distinct areas for particular commemorative subjects, including some that have proximity to relevant public institutions (Stevens 2013). Commemorations of foreign persons and events in Canberra tend to be restricted to areas near the relevant embassies. Washington’s planners seek to direct the frequent memorial “gifts” from foreign nations to sites along Massachusetts Avenue—“Embassy Row”—where 27 memorials currently stand (Kempf 2011; Solberg 2014). Planning agencies often encourage relevant government and private agencies to host memorials they have proposed on their own land, as occurred with the US Air Force Memorial outside Washington. Such memorials are no longer a public responsibility (Kempf 2011). But on private land, they also have limited capacity to engage a broad public. Because many mourners are primarily seeking a place to grieve shortly after a tragedy, and may not require a permanent historical marker, memorial regulators in many cities encourage temporary commemorative installations and events, which only impact public space and its other users for a limited time. London’s July 7 bombings were commemorated straight afterwards on sidewalks, in parks and in the doorways of churches and railways stations close to the various attack sites; a permanent, centralized memorial for hosting annual services was erected in Hyde Park only several years later. Planning agencies also curb demand by encouraging other alternative ways of commemorating, such as planting schemes (Kuhn 2011; Westminster City Council, n.d.). One area in Canberra is specifically set aside for only temporary forms of commemoration (NCA 2002). Containing demand for mourning and remembrance only has limited effectiveness. The demand for memorials is, in the terminology of economics, relatively inelastic. A complementary tactic for ensuring that new memorials do not compromise precious public open space in city centres has been to proactively augment the supply of viable, specially designated memorial sites. L’Enfant’s 1791 plan for Washington sought to disperse its future memorials across a wide 194

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Figure 9.1 The Reserve (dark shading) and Area 1 (light shading) on Washington’s National Mall as defined in the amended Commemorative Works Act of 2003 Source: Plan by Te-Sheng Huang, modified by Quentin Stevens.

area. He spread out plazas on topographically prominent points, linked them with axial streets, named them after the 15 states, and expected those states to build improvements at these intersections, including “sponsoring monuments to their own heroes” (Savage 2009: 27). These improvements were anticipated to increase surrounding property values prior to the federal government’s sale of the land, and encourage dispersed, polycentric private-sector development (Reps 1967). In the mid-nineteenth century, many cities gained major new centrally located plazas and parks that subsequently provided sites for many public memorials. These include Berlin’s Tiergarten (opened to the public in 1842) and Königsplatz (1867), London’s Trafalgar Square (1845) and Parliament Square (1868), and New York’s Battery Park (expanded 1872) and Central Park (1873). Modern capital cities such as Washington and Canberra have been able to continue to make new areas available for future commemorations. Both have the advantages of expansive, diagrammatic layouts of streets, large open spaces that have not yet been filled with buildings, and federal agencies whose control over land can resist economic development pressures and other local interests. Washington’s Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials were built on waterfront landfill, following the 1901 McMillan Plan. The recent boom in Washington memorial building began with the 1973 demolition of long-standing “temporary” Navy offices on the northwest Mall, which made room for the creation of Constitution Gardens and, subsequently, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Savage 2009). Washington’s Memorials and Museums Master Plan (NCPC 2006) identified the 100 best sites for future memorials throughout the city, and promoted reserving the very best twenty 195

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for the most significant commemorations (Plate 9.1). These include major intersections on key axes and the city’s two riverfronts. This encouragement of dispersal consciously revisited L’Enfant’s initial strategy (NCPC 1997). In 1965, Canberra developed its central precinct for war memorials, Anzac Parade, named for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps that had first fought 50 years earlier. Only 25 years later, it was effectively full. Several new “niches” were subsequently added along the Parade, but other new commemorative precincts have also been developed. The grounds around the Australian War Memorial, a large museum and archive, accommodate many war memorials that were too insignificant, too small or too late to fit into Anzac Parade. Another precinct within the empty lakefront parklands at the other end of Anzac Parade accommodates quasi-military memorials to the police and emergency services. A third extension precinct is a centerpiece of the Russell Offices, Australia’s Pentagon, where the AustralianAmerican Memorial set a precedent for locating other future memorials and also provided the focal point for a wider urban development scheme (Figure 9.2). A park on a lakeside peninsula accommodates the few recent memorials that are not nationally significant but that commemorate Canberra’s own 100-year history.

Figure 9.2 Australian-American Memorial, Canberra, and wider development of Russell Offices, 2004 Source: © Department of Defence, Australia.

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Ottawa was planned within an existing, compact industrial gridiron town. Its key memorial precinct is on Parliament Hill, which is in the medieval model of a central, segregated citadel (Taylor 1989). Additional space for memorials has mostly been made available through the clearing of obsolete industrial buildings around the riverfront, and the ongoing development of Confederation Boulevard. Many of Ottawa’s main memorials are strung out along this winding looped route and its two extensions (Figure 9.3). Canada’s Peacekeeping Monument is on a formerly unused, inaccessible traffic island. Ottawa plans to redevelop three additional intersections with memorials. While new memorials in planned capitals are generally linked into the visual and representational power of a Baroque layout, Ottawa shows that prominent memorial sites do not necessarily have to be on straight axes.

Conflicts between Memorials and Everyday Use of Public Open Spaces Despite efforts to give public memorials appropriate, distinct sites, they occupy many different kinds of urban locations. Many memorials are located within public open spaces, ranging from minor neighborhood foci to very central urban locations, and from green parks to hardscape plazas. The Parks and Recreation official responsible for authorizing New York City’s memorials often has to reject and redirect requests to install new memorials in the largest city-controlled sites,

Figure 9.3 Central Ottawa showing National Capital Commission plan for Confederation Boulevard Source: Plan by Te-Sheng Huang, modified by Quentin Stevens.

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Riverside Park and Central Park. His view is that “parks are for relaxation, not for ‘engendering death’” (Kuhn 2011; Lewis 1998). The UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport, who manage London’s Royal Parks, have recently accepted large memorials within those green spaces to Princess Diana, the July 7 bombings, and WWII Bomber Command; high-level political demands have taken priority over more quotidian uses. Concerns that the spread of memorials on Washington’s Mall compromise recreational opportunities (Benton-Short 2006; Savage 2009) are perhaps somewhat overblown; there is generally still a large amount of useful open space around the memorials in these and other parks. Central urban plazas tend to have larger numbers of visitors and a wide variety of other, non-commemorative uses, which increases the likelihood of conflicts. Other memorials sit in the medians of streets, like London’s Whitehall, or on roundabouts, as with New York’s Angels’ Circle, London’s Hyde Park Corner and Ottawa’s Confederation Boulevard. At such sites, issues connected with vehicular and pedestrian circulation arise, such as access problems, noise, and air pollution, as well as questions of site ownership and approval authority. Older memorials in streets have often been caught in the midst of wider physical changes and increasing flows of urban activity, and planners have had to make pragmatic decisions to relocate them to reduce functional conflicts. There were few problems with London’s Wellington Arch (1830) and the Cenotaph (1921) standing in the middle of major streets when there was little or no motorized traffic, but over time commemorative visits to these sites have come into conflict with the increasing speed and volume of cars and buses. In 1883, the massive Wellington Arch (1830), the first memorial built at Hyde Park Corner, was moved 60m to one side of that intersection to allow major road widening. The oldest statue in New York, that of George Washington (1865), originally stood on a traffic island at the southwest corner of Union Square Park, subjected to traffic and pollution. When the park was redesigned in 1930, the statue was moved to a more prominent and safer location on the park’s southern plaza. Developments of transportation and public space also required several relocations of Melbourne’s first memorial, to explorers Burke and Wills (1865): from the middle of a busy downtown street intersection (Figure 9.4) to a landscaped reserve in 1886 to allow the installation of tram tracks, and again in 1973 when an underground railway station was constructed at its new site, in 1979, to be incorporated into the design of a new City Square, and once more in 1994 when the Square was remodeled (Hayes 1988; Burke & Wills website 2014). Instead of seeing planning for memorials and other open space needs as conflicting, planners often try to treat them as complementary objectives within a comprehensive strategy. New York’s Battery Park is a 10-hectare site at Manhattan’s southern tip. It contains 21 separate memorials. The park is currently being substantially reorganized to improve pedestrian and bicycle circulation and provide a large open lawn for recreation and public events. To achieve this, 11 memorials are being relocated. The proposed plan rearranges them as nodes along a regular perimeter promenade that is separated from the park proper by a low wall and cycleway (Figure 9.5). The memorials will be clustered thematically as “Explorers”, “Defenders,” and “Mariners” (NYCDPR&TBC 2009, 2010). London’s Hyde Park Corner was just a series of small, isolated traffic islands until it was turned into one large traffic roundabout with an underpass in 1963 (Figure 9.6). The incremental development of several memorials on and near the roundabout, and increasing public visits to them, helped spur efforts to further win this space back from 198

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Figure 9.4 Burke and Wills Monument, Melbourne, Charles Summers, in 1865 at its original location on a busy downtown street intersection. This site now has tram lines running across it and is surrounded by 60-storey buildings Source: Image courtesy of Peter Maltezos.

vehicular traffic. The recently added spatial war memorials of Australia (2003) and New Zealand (2006) complement the themes of the existing British memorials here, and these were also designed to enhance the experiential quality of the site for visitors. The former is a curved perimeter water wall that masks the views, noise and fumes of the intersection’s surrounding traffic. The latter occupies a berm with similar function on the opposite corner. Subterranean access tunnels to the traffic island were replaced by wide crosswalks signalized for pedestrians, bicycles and horse-riders, and Hyde Park Corner is now a heavily patronized link between the busiest Royal Parks. In many places, the construction of new memorials has led to quantitative increases in public space and qualitative enhancements in its amenity, particularly in settings that were previously unkempt and underutilized. Public memorials can be high quality spaces because they often have large budgets for design, construction and maintenance, and are driven by leading international designers. The distinctive, generally non-utilitarian forms that memorials take can create unique possibilities for visitor engagement. Contemporary memorials are often better regulated and better considered, in terms of how they contribute to the public realm, than many other types of ostensibly “public” art, which are often designed as isolated objects and dropped into the middle of public spaces. Spatial memorials take up a lot of space, and so planners and designers often seek to ensure that such projects provide general amenity as public spaces, beyond their 199

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Figure 9.5 Indicative view of proposed plan to reorganize existing memorials in Battery Park, New York City Source: Photomontage Quentin Stevens, 2014. Original images by Starr Whitehouse Landscape Architects and Planners PLLC, New York.

commemorative uses. The Diana Memorial Fountain enhanced the aesthetic quality, affordances and patronage of one corner of London’s Hyde Park, providing an accessible, comfortable setting for everyday recreation. Washington’s Navy Memorial (Conklin Rossant Architects and Stanley Bleifeld sculptor, 1987) was designed to include a large paved open space that can be used for public events, such as lunchtime music concerts, and a large amount of built-in seating. This setting was developed in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue, between the White House and Capitol, to attract tourists to the area and become a catalyst for economic development in its surroundings, much as L’Enfant had desired. In one of Manhattan’s highest-density residential neighborhoods, Battery Park City, created in 1980, two spatial public memorials have been consciously incorporated as accessible landscape elements within the wider urban masterplan: the Reflecting Pool of the New York City Police Memorial (Stuart Crawford, 1997), and the Irish Hunger Memorial (Brian Tolle, 2002). The latter is an especially appealing landscape setting, consisting of a reproduction of a rural Irish hillside, including native plants, drystone walls, and an actual stone house abandoned during the famine. Despite the improvements to the public realm at this site, conflicts have still emerged. The 200

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landscaping has been fenced off, to prevent injury and damage, and this restriction of access eliminates the usefulness that otherwise might justify such incursions into scarce open space. Local residents’ groups have complained that such memorials for mourners and tourists are increasing at the expense of recreational opportunities for local families (Iovine 2003). The planning of entirely new commemorative precincts sometimes also seeks to enhance wider urban amenity. One key aim in developing the looped route of Ottawa’s Confederation Boulevard across the river to neighboring Gatineau, Quebec, was to spread economic and commemorative development there. Similarly, the location and the elongated form of Canberra’s Reconciliation Place (Simon Kringas, 2001), a new precinct in the Parliamentary Zone commemorating the struggles and achievements of Australia’s Indigenous population since European settlement, in part reflects the National Capital Authority’s desire to develop an improved pedestrian link across the expansive car parks between the National Gallery, the High Court, the National Portrait Gallery, and the National Library, a series of freestanding high-Modernist boxes scattered along the city’s lakeshore (NCA 2000; Vernon 2005). This precinct thus uses a commemorative 201

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Figure 9.6 Hyde Park Corner, London Source: Plan by Te-Sheng Huang, modified by Quentin Stevens.

budget to also meet infrastructure needs. This strategy also constrained the scale, form, visibility and audience of the scheme. The NCA subsequently encouraged the promoters of a proposed national memorial to immigrants to pursue the construction of a 400m-long memorial pedestrian bridge, to extend this route across Lake Burley Griffin to the new National Museum (NCA 2004; JSC 2009), but this was scuttled by opposition from local residents and Canberra’s Yacht Club. Planning memorials to meet amenity needs thus has to contend with conflicting needs and power relations among wider constituencies. These examples illustrate that planning decisions about memorials are not just decisions about history and remembrance; they are also decisions that shape the wider ongoing development of the city. Like heritage, they are a way that the present makes use of the past to serve its own needs, in this context to enhance the amenity of public space (Smith 2006). Conceiving commemorative projects in such practical terms is at odds with understanding memorials as essentially, necessarily non-functional and unproductive, as a luxurious use of surplus resources, a form of “wastefulness” which emphasizes the importance that society places on the subject being commemorated (Bataille 1988). However, practical, functional evaluations of proposed spatial memorials become increasingly necessary when there is high and competing demand for urban open space. 202

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DIFFERING COMMEMORATIVE NARRATIVES In democratic nations, anyone can in principle put forward a proposal for a public memorial. However, individuals and groups have very different levels of interest, finance, power and contacts for pursuing public memorials to particular people and events, and so some historical subjects get much more exposure in public commemoration than others. Some cities’ commemorative plans and policies seek to redress perceived disparities. Governments also avail themselves of a right to approve particular memorials that reflect their own current views on history and identity, as well as their own aesthetic preferences (Bogart 2006). Individual planning approvals and wider strategies for commemorative works are thus used to promote the interpretations of “historical significance” held by those with power.

Broadening Commemorative Subjects Military themes tend to predominate among the memorials of many cities, especially national capitals, and there is a relative lack of attention to civil concepts such as democracy and diversity (Fischer 1984; Columbijn 2002; Doss 2008). Memorial planners are keenly aware of this imbalance (NCA 2002; Kempf 2011). One common planning response is to prevent any particular theme from being commemorated twice. But this does little to hinder proliferation. Every war, battle and military branch can be commemorated individually, and remembrance of past wars also keeps expanding through adding plaques commemorating new wars to existing memorials, creating more prominent memorials to replace those deemed inadequate, and commemorating non-combatant war service, such as that of nurses, merchant seamen, and chaplains. Even women and Indigenous people, for whom public memorials are rare, often have their foreign military service prominently commemorated, as with Ottawa’s National Monument to Aboriginal Veterans (2001). Memorials have also been erected to military accidents. In recent decades, commemorative frameworks have accentuated the state’s importance to order and safety in peacetime, extending the logic of sacrifice to include quasi- and nonmilitary subjects, by admitting large, centrally located memorials to international peacekeepers, police, emergency services workers, aid workers, the coastguard, and soldiers killed fighting domestic insurrections. When Walter Burley Griffin developed his plan for Canberra in 1913, he made no allowance at all for war memorials. The only wars that had happened in Australia were those against the Indigenous population, which were in those days not recognized as such (Inglis 2008). The years 1914–1918 changed all that. Already, by 1917, the key site terminating the north end of Griffin’s central land axis at the foot of Mt Ainslie had been allocated to the future Australian War Memorial. By 1925, the landscaped space that Griffin envisaged for this axis, Prospect Parkway, had been renamed Anzac Park, and in the 1960s the space was paved and renamed Anzac Parade, and war memorials began lining its two edges (Marshall et al. 2012). In 1954, the termination of the Kings Avenue axis, originally planned to be Canberra’s market center and railway station, was occupied by a 74m-high eagle-topped obelisk honoring Americans killed fighting to defend Australia in the Pacific during World War II. Now almost all the national government-controlled open spaces north of Canberra’s central lake are given over to war memorials (NCA 2002). At least in 203

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Canberra, as in Ottawa, military memorials have generally remained confined to core precincts, whereas in Washington, they have spread throughout the city. In terms of memorials’ subject matter, Washington’s memorial policy emphatically “does not suggest which individuals or historic events are suitable subjects for commemoration” (NCPC 2006: 1). Only four of Washington’s 150 memorials are specifically to women (Kempf 2011). When asked about the gender imbalance among memorials in Budapest, Hungary, the former head of the city agency that advises on memorial approvals noted that the number of memorials to women was proportionate to their roles in public life. His personal view is that development in the former has to be driven by development in the latter; social progress cannot be made by placing restrictions or quotas on memorial subjects (Szigmond 2013). Commemorative plans for some cities, including Ottawa and Canberra, express ambitions to increase the number and range of civic commemorative subjects. Ottawa’s seeks “To better reflect the identity and diversity of Canada and Canadians and encourage new commemorations that address the underrepresented themes” (NCC 2006: 11). It also specifies particular topics that should be given priority among commemorative proposals, to “ensure a better balance in representing the full Canadian experience”: Aboriginal peoples, ethnocultural communities, women, and the environment (ibid.: 13). But there are few strategic mechanisms to deliver on such aspirations. A Suffragette memorial was erected within Ottawa’s hallowed core in 2000. This required Parliamentary approval. It was justified “because it is Parliament Hill and this Parliament which they [the Suffragettes] changed” (Fairbairn 1997). Additionally, the struggle of Indigenous peoples was recognized and advanced by altering Ottawa’s large 1915 memorial to explorer Samuel de Champlain, founder of New France (see Figure 7.1). A kneeling Native scout statue installed at its base in 1918 was relocated to a nearby park in 1997, because First Nations’ leaders had complained its original placement was demeaning (Osborne and Osborne 2004). Ashton et al. (2012) discovered a significant increase in the diversity of non-war, non-Holocaust public memorials erected in Australia since the 1960s. Their database of 378 examples gives a clear sense of several themes that communities want to see commemorated. Particularly numerous in this study were memorials to migrant and indigenous groups, tributes to groups or individuals who had played an important role in local communities, memorials to tragic deaths, markers of natural disasters, and personal memorials to individuals. Although the commemorative plan for Canberra delineates distinct areas for particular commemorative subjects (NCA 2002), this does not mean there is necessarily a constituency or resources to produce any memorials. Some memorials have recently been erected in Canberra to non-military subjects: several to Indigenous issues within Reconciliation Place, memorials to local bushfires in 2005 and to the Centenary of Women’s Suffrage, the National Workers Memorial, and the SIEV-X Memorial to asylum seekers whose boat sank in Australian waters. A memorial is currently being constructed to immigrants’ contributions to Australia’s development. The SIEV-X memorial is a grassroots project, and Immigration Place is being funded through public donations. Many of the other memorials have been achieved through direct government funding, with relevant agencies being tasked with procuring memorials to under-represented groups. This appears to have sometimes compromised the form, location and meaning of those memorials. The history of 204

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otherness tends to be told in ways that suit the interests of dominant groups. Immigrants, workers and women are large constituencies, but they have had limited roles in promoting or designing the memorials created in their name. Thus, a prominent planned art work commemorating women’s suffrage appears to have been thwarted by a parliamentarian who felt it obstructed their favorite view, and a proposed national memorial bridge commemorating immigrants was stopped by a few local sailors and heritage advocates. Both were replaced by more modest designs on more inconspicuous sites (Stevens 2013). The design of Reconciliation Place has confronted and changed Canberra’s commemorative landscape. But many critics feel it does little to confront the violent history of the Australian State’s mistreatment of the Indigenous population. The scheme’s modest, abstract forms have been criticized as effectively reinforcing the State’s silence on these subjects (Strakosch 2010). It has a marginal, low-profile site, which has no links to the concrete places and events that have established the need for reconciliation. It has also been critiqued as “a conspiracy to undermine and eventually replace the [Aboriginal] tent embassy,” an assemblage of tents, banners, flags and ceremonial fireplaces nearby, directly in front of the former Parliament House, which has stood for almost 40 years as a site of active political protest (Ware 2001). In addition, Reconciliation Place is officially an art work, not a memorial, and can thus be removed at any time. This project is quite unique, however, in placing the struggles and successes of Indigenous peoples outdoors on the national stage. In Washington and Ottawa, such energies were channeled into museums. But this formal commemoration of Reconciliation was not driven by Indigenous political activists; they had already been publicly expressing themselves in Canberra for 40 years. Rather, it was the initiative of a government seeking to project a particular narrative. What the location and scale of Reconciliation Place and Berlin’s MMJE illustrate is that when the State does decide to acknowledge its own role as a perpetrator of past crimes through a memorial, it can use planning to ensure that this is done prominently. These examples suggest that having government and its planners guide the commemoration of marginal groups is less effective in opening up history and memory than empowering and engaging more people to decide which stories should be told and how. In the absence of direct government support for such initiatives, the representation of particular ethnic groups or disadvantaged groups in public memorials depends on their own resources and on their own resolve to do so. It also depends on the extent to which democratic governments do and can make room for different memories and for negative memories. Canberra has recently had several formal parliamentary inquiries into how decisions and planning for public memorials are managed by the National Capital Authority (the administrative agency) and the Canberra National Memorials Committee (the parliamentary decision-making body, headed by the Prime Minister) (JSC 2004, 2009, 2011). These inquiries have highlighted the need to enhance and broaden public engagement in decision-making processes for the commemorative landscape, through such means as public meetings, encouraging online debate, and publishing minutes of their deliberations.

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Supporting Difficult Memories Great national events are usually commemorated by large memorials on prominent locations. But many recent memorials that remember negative events have different forms and require very different kinds of sites. Planners have thus had to develop new, appropriate principles to plan for them and to regulate their designs, so that these “negative” memorials establish relevant relationships with public space and its users and with the other memorials around them. So-called “anti-memorials” often use negative forms to depict or suggest the negativity of specific acts they seek to recall (Ware 2004). The empty library under Berlin’s Bebelplatz, Horst Hoheisel’s Aschrott Fountain in Kassel (1987), rebuilt in inverted form under the ground, and the “reflected absence” of the destroyed World Trade Center outlines all employ dark, sunken or hollow forms to evoke the shapes of things now lost (Young 1999; Sturken 2007). These designs all require space under the ground. The Bebelplatz book-burning memorial needed to be suspended in place when an underground parking garage was later constructed beneath and around it. There has been criticism of the Berlin government allowing an ice skating rink and the tent of an international fashion show to temporarily cover the plaza and its memorial, even though the latter provided uninterrupted public access. It can be more difficult to protect anti-memorials from the incursions of everyday urban activity than their classical counterparts. But planning cannot merely keep difficult memorials separate from daily life. Many anti-memorials in Germany are intentionally placed so they will be encountered by chance during people’s travels through the city. The Monument against War and Fascism sits within the everyday urban space of a public stairway in Harburg’s commercial centre. Pedestrians crossing the middle of Hermann Ehlers Platz in Berlin unexpectedly encounter the mirror-finish stainless steel wall of the Deportation Memorial. Gunter Demnig’s Stumbling Blocks are embedded in pavements that people walk across every day. The intended meanings and audiences of these memorials thus require that planning policies allow them to be closely integrated into everyday urban space, and not set apart like traditional upright memorials. Dialogic memorials such as Hamburg’s Memorial against War and Fascism, Canberra’s Reconciliation Place, and Washington’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial have been created as explicit counterpoints to particular extant, affirmative memorials, in order to contest and modify the official stories that they tell about the past. For Germans in particular, such dialogism offers a way to address the difficult past and express their wariness about traditional monumentality and its mythologizations of identity. For dialogic memorials to be effective in critically recontextualizing the meanings of other specific memorials generally requires that they can obtain sites in close, visible proximity to them (Wijsenbeek 2010; Stevens et al. 2012). Through their sunken, fractured, dark forms, dialogic memorials contradict the positivity of traditional, massive, permanent stone markers that seek to fix a particular view of the past. Through their locations, they puncture the idea that collective memory and commemorative landscapes are consensual, orderly and finished. Opening up a debate around existing commemorative sites and subjects requires the acquiescence of the relevant planning authority, though not all dialogic memorials seek official approval.

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In many cases the inverted formal vocabulary of anti-memorials and dialogic memorials allows them to be easily accommodated within existing memorial precincts. They tend to be smaller and less monumental and assertive than their traditional counterparts. But many recent victims’ memorials are of the spatial type, to provide a therapeutic, existential place of refuge for mourners (Griswold 1986; Savage 2009). These large, discrete, enclosed settings do not easily fit within urban streetscapes or wider commemorative precincts, when compared to the freestanding statues and monoliths of earlier times. They tend to have to sit in isolation in big open spaces. There are three other significant reasons that victims’ memorials can seldom be fitted into existing, formal commemorative assemblages. First, they are usually thematically at odds with the kinds of overarching, positive narratives of culture, national identity and heroism under which statues of prominent individuals can be gathered. Second, mourners seek to create victims’ memorials relatively quickly after an event, rather than working within wider, longer-term plans. Third, some of these memorials have a relatively narrow and personal perspective that limits their relevance to wider publics. There are also circumstances where planning should help to keep new memorials physically separated from the difficulties of the past. The placement of Berlin’s proposed National Monument to Freedom and Unity (see Figure 7.8), a rare case of a contemporary, celebratory German memorial, has been criticized because it is the pedestal of a former “national memorial” to Kaiser Wilhelm, Emperor of Germany’s First Reich. Present-day unity should not be built on the base of past imperialism (AKM 2007). Given Berlin’s checkered history, spatial and thematic continuities with existing or former memorials are not always positive or desirable.

Suppressing Difficult Memories Although not all public memorials reflect the views and interests of the government of the day, and despite recent efforts to support more diverse and contradictory memories, memorial planning tools typically defend and foster a hegemonic discourse of statehood, through the commemoration of subjects such as discovery, conquest, defense, authority, and the rule of law. Governments tend to authorize, provide prominent sites for, and directly fund memorials to the discoverers and founders of nations and cities, and to the development of government and its leaders, even the unpopular ones. Memorials and memorial plans help to ground, affirm and personalize the state in myths about its founding and defense, and its maintenance of leadership and the rule of law. Canberra’s Commemorative Guidelines, for example, give the entire northern half of the city center over to “commemorative works honoring military and non-military sacrifice, service, valor and achievement” (NCA 2002: 8). Germany, a nation that openly struggles with its past, is a rare exception to this logic. Formal commemorative plans and policies for cities have enabled the ongoing accumulation of memorials that help justify the organized violence of war and government authority. Planning for memorials has tended to hide the violence underpinning the state and the regulatory authority of urban planning itself. Washington, Ottawa and Canberra are all planned capitals of states with roots in the British Empire, so many of the memorials’ subjects in these cities affirm the creation and defense of these states. Recently, these three cities’ memorial plans 207

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have extended the narrative to accentuate the state’s importance to peacetime order and safety. There has been resistance to memorials expressing idealized narratives about the historical development of the nation-state. In one of Australia’s state capitals, Melbourne, a set of new counter-memorials inserted in front of a range of existing memorials to constitute the Another View Walking Trail were “intended to produce a subversive counter-narrative to the smooth, masterful story of settlement” told through the older works (Jacobs 1998: 212). The state intervened to subdue this opposition. One of the more controversial proposed elements was never installed due to opposition from the state’s legal fraternity. According to Jacobs, the city council as the scheme’s sponsor prefers resistance to be something which happened then but is remembered now … [non-Aboriginal] Australia wants the grand moments of colonial triumph to be chastened by historically contained memories of Aboriginal opposition ... there is far less comfort with reconciliatory performances which … remind modern Australia that it is still far from postcolonial. (1998: 216–17, latter emphasis added) Reconciliation Place in Canberra is perhaps the only site in any of the three New World capitals that mentions, albeit obliquely, the roots of these states and cities in the expropriation of Indigenous land rights. These commemorative landscapes generally suggest that violence against foreign enemies is noble and necessary, and they mostly ignore the internal struggles of Indigenous populations and other groups. Requiring delays of up to 25 years to commemorate a subject in a national capital takes much of the personal passion out of public commemoration, and favors broad themes that help reinforce the historical continuity of the state. After 25 years, many of the individuals who wish to remember something have already forgotten it or died. In London, memorials to Princess Diana (2004) and the July 7 bombings (2009) were erected only seven and four years after the deaths. Political demands for quick outcomes overruled the long-term aims of planning strategy. Closing certain areas off to any new commemoration, arguing that national history is complete and faultless, denies society’s active engagement with the past. Commemoration in national capitals also often ignores the interests of local landowners and users of public space. Weighing the everyday interests of local residents against the empowered views of experts, bureaucrats and elected representatives and their views on long-term national values is both conceptually and procedurally difficult. Both Washington’s and Ottawa’s processes for making national commemorative planning decisions pursue systematic input from historians, planners and local residents, and keep decision-making independent of present governments (NCPC 2006; NCC 2006; Watkins 2008). In Canberra, procedures had tended to be less thorough and transparent, though changes are underway. Nevertheless, local governments in most capitals lack any control over the symbolic core of the cities they manage. The New York City Parks Department’s memorial planner notes proudly that the US Supreme Court has recognized the principle of “government speech” (Kuhn 2011; Bravin 2009). This means that a municipality does not have to treat all 208

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applicants and all proposed commemorative themes equally under the right to free individual speech; it does not have to approve one memorial subject just because it approved another, because a city’s physical landscape is not a medium for free expression. Governments have the right to selectively express the values of their electing majority through public memorials. These planning principles and practices are at odds with the idea that public commemoration in democracies might be the result of open, agonistic debate (Mouffe 1999). Commemorative planning can be seen as an instrument that helps perpetuate an imbalanced and mendacious picture of social history in urban landscapes. A number of existing memorials in Canberra do not conform to the National Capital Authority’s current plans and policies. The NCA’s Guidelines (NCA 2002) suggest such inconsistencies are part of the city’s “unique cultural tapestry,” and list irreverence as a core national value. Political struggles do occur over memorial proposals, but there is little in the formal planning and approval processes for them that supports irreverence and opposition in practice. It is perhaps difficult to plan strategically for openness to unknown future diversity and disagreement.

PLANNING FOR CHANGING VALUES Incremental Shifts in Historical Consciousness Despite the best efforts of monument builders and planners to create eternal, static statements about history, the one thing we know about history is that it continues to change. This is true not only of the future, but also of collective understandings of the past. After a memorial to a specific person or event has been unveiled, in an attempt to define how people should understand and engage with the past, many things can change. Additional facts about the past emerge, which change people’s views on existing memorials. The public’s ethical and aesthetic values change; there are political upheavals and ongoing shifts in the relative power of specific constituencies. New governments want to make their commemorative mark and longstanding ones want to reinforce their authority or win favor. Public interest in remembering particular events waxes and wanes, because of anniversaries, or perceived affinities with certain historical moments. Calls arise to acknowledge additional groups of protagonists who have been overlooked, such as the Commonwealth forces who fought alongside Britain in the World Wars, the Turkish opponent in the Anzac Gallipoli campaign, and women in the Vietnam War. The growing diversity of memorial supporters, subjects and forms increases the likelihood and the variety of controversies and conflicts among them. People want the story of the past to be rewritten, and to augment or diminish their engagement with particular commemorative spaces and subjects. Sometimes this is achieved by plans that add to, rearrange or remove existing memorials. In different cities and different commemorative precincts, planners employ a range of approaches to adjust existing remembrance that is “written in stone” to historical events and public sentiments that are more fluid (Levinson 1998). Berlin and London are “evolved capitals,” having developed over many centuries, subject to the influence of a wide range of individuals and groups, and as a result of numerous important events, both internal and external (Vale 2008). New memorials placed in these cities very often enter into complex existing contexts of historical sites, events and meanings. Three of London’s key memorial 209

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precincts—Waterloo Place, Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park Corner—originally commemorated Britain’s victories in the Napoleonic Wars of 1803–15. Each has subsequently been reorganized to accommodate several further memorials to later wars and events. At Waterloo Place, created in 1816 to commemorate the recently concluded Napoleonic Wars, the original focal memorial was a 120ft column topped by a statue of the Duke of York (1834), who had been Army Commander-in-Chief. A subsequent memorial to the 1853–56 Crimean War (1861), placed at the junction of then-busy Pall Mall, was progressively joined by five additional memorials to Victorian-era soldiers, statesmen and explorers. In 1914, the Crimean memorial was moved back from the side of Pall Mall and then flanked by memorials to Crimean War contemporaries Florence Nightingale (1915) and Sidney Herbert, Secretary of War (1867), the latter having stood in two previous locations. In 1921, a memorial to Edward VII was added, replacing one to Field Marshal Robert Napier which was moved elsewhere. A memorial to Air Chief Marshal Sir Keith Park, who led the repulsion of the Germans in the Battle of Britain, was then added in 2010, after its sponsors failed to secure their more prominent preferred site, Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth. All these commemorative works were statues, which meant they were narrow, and easy to move and incorporate into existing assemblages. A 1959 statue of Sir Walter Raleigh that originally stood in the middle of busy Whitehall was relocated to the (more appropriate) Royal Naval College at Greenwich to allow the 2005 Women in World War II memorial to be placed close to the Cenotaph. A prominent statue of Major-General Charles Gordon (1888), which had stood in the middle of Trafalgar Square between the two fountains, was removed in 1943, and in 1953 found a new site outside the Ministry of Defence (Heathorn 2008). These various relocations affirmed ongoing adjustments in the collective historical view of Britain’s past. Berlin’s commemorative landscape had been incrementally replanned several times over the 700 years prior to its wholesale destruction and replanning due to World War II. In the nineteenth century, Schinkel masterplanned the city’s main thoroughfare Unter den Linden, punctuated by the Brandenburg Gate and equestrian statue of Frederick the Great. In 1901, Kaiser Wilhelm II commissioned the cross-axial “Victory Avenue,” lined with 32 statues and 64 busts of noblemen, leading to the 1873 Siegessäule (“Victory Column”) at its original location in front of the Reichstag (see Figure 2.1). In 1938, Albert Speer moved the Siegessäule to the “Great Star” intersection deeper in the Tiergarten, and “Victory Avenue” was realigned on a nearby “New Victory Avenue,” because they had interrupted the massive North–South Axis at the core of Hitler’s unrealized plan for Weltstadt Germania. Directly after the war, the Soviet Army built two large memorials to commemorate their 1945 conquest of the city, one right at the junction of these two earlier axes. In 1951, West Berlin installed a large memorial to the Berlin Airlift, and later in the Cold War, East Germany’s socialist government erected statues of Marx, Engels, and Lenin along an eastward extension of Unter den Linden. Today Germans understandably have a general wariness of monumentality and the mythologization of collective identity. Most of the city’s recent memorials, since the 1991 decision to make Berlin the capital of the reunified Germany, focus on the darker aspects of national history, not triumphs. Berlin does not now have a masterplan for future memorials, or even a set of preferred sites. The theme, siting, and design of each individual new public memorial in Berlin must go through extensive public and parliamentary debate. 210

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Many different groups representing victims of Nazi mistreatment have sought memorial sites near Berlin’s Reichstag, both to convey the responsibility of the German Parliament, and to ensure high public visibility to their fate. Relativizing the Holocaust is specifically proscribed by a German parliamentary ruling (BBKM 2008), and the promoters of a victims’ memorial seldom want to see their suffering compared to that of other victim groups (Ladd 1998). But nevertheless, differences in the scale, centrality and prominence of these memorials have stimulated debates about the relative importance, suffering and political clout of various victim groups, and about victims and aspects of history that still remain unacknowledged. The case of Berlin foregrounds the futility of trying to create or uphold an overall commemorative space concept when a city has been spatially and symbolically destroyed and reorganized numerous times (Till 2005; Jordan 2006). Debates and difficulties cannot simply be avoided through a plan or policy; memory and remembrance have no neat, final logic. Indeed, the furore over the National Monument to Freedom and Unity emphasizes that Berlin’s memorial landscape should have formal and spatial discontinuities. Some argue that Germany’s intensive, ongoing process of debating memorial proposals is itself a very important part of the necessary remembering and reckoning with the past (Spielmann 1995; Young 2010). Washington and Canberra are new capitals of reasonably recent nationstates. Although these cities’ layouts and memorials have been self-consciously planned by national governments to further particular myths of national identity, values and history, there have also been surprisingly extensive changes to earlier commemorative arrangements. The 1902 McMillan Commission Plan for the National Mall preserved the Washington Monument, which was at that time the only major national memorial on the site. But it relocated four disparate existing memorial statues there to institutions with which their subjects had been associated, one of which was in Philadelphia. Two large new memorials were planned to close off the Mall’s southern and western ends. Within living memory of the Civil War, the Commissioners transformed Washington’s central commemorative space so that it presented an image of national unity brought about through a series of great leaders (Savage 2009). In 1915, Canberra was gifted its first memorial to commemorate Anzac (the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps) by an expatriate sculptor in Britain, directly after its disastrous first campaign in Gallipoli, Turkey. Bellona was a massive classical bust of the Roman goddess of war that never seems to have found a suitable public setting. Although it was briefly considered for a site directly outside the new Parliament House, it was originally placed inconspicuously in a landscaped median and was then moved seven more times (Roberts 1990). It now stands gathered with many other relatively minor war memorials on a lawn outside the Australian War Memorial. A 13.5m-high memorial to King George V, who had opened Australia’s first Parliament in 1901, was placed right in front of the provisional Parliament in 1935, blocking Griffin’s dramatic axial view to the summit of Mount Ainslie. After the development of the Australian War Memorial (1941) and Anzac Parade (1965), which transformed the aesthetic and symbolic importance of this axial view, the statue was moved to one side in 1968. Another New World example of memorial relocation is from Los Angeles: Ricardo Legoretta’s (1993) redesign of the city’s Pershing Square relocated its existing statue of Beethoven and two war memorials into a walled, palm-filled courtyard, “grouped together like mothballed objects in a museum warehouse” (Newman 211

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1994: 45). Such relocations remove past commemorations from contemporary consciousness. Cities’ pre-existing commemorative spaces and regulations are adapted to the gradual unfolding of history itself and to ongoing shifts in public attitudes about the memories that warrant commemoration, the scope of public engagement with public memorial settings, and the ways that people use the spaces. The ongoing development of the precinct of Washington’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial suggests that when choosing a site for a major new memorial to a significant theme, it is wise to leave room for potential later augmentations. Canberra’s Reconciliation Place presents a unique solution to this need, demonstrating a long-term planning strategy for commemoration that admits the complexity, contradiction and continuity of memory. Its masterplan (Figure 9.7) consists of a large number of fragmentary art work “slivers” by various designers, strung out along a promenade that intersects with Canberra’s main Parliament–War Memorial axis, “each representing in word and image episodes in the reconciliation process” between the Indigenous population and later European colonists (Vernon 2002). The art works range from patches of landscape to primeval carved megaliths to sleek, angular assemblages of photo-etched steel and glass. Visitors can take various paths among the art works, which allows for different readings. The masterplan intends that new works will continue to be added as the process of reconciliation unfolds. Indeed, the precinct’s fragmentary form helps communicate the idea of an incomplete and unresolved narrative. After Indigenous groups protested that one art work, Separation, which ostensibly “commemorates the systematic state removal of Indigenous children from their families during the 20th Century,” was too abstract, and lacked any reference to crimes, victims or perpetrators, they were subsequently permitted to install a far more explicit, didactic art work directly alongside the original (Figure 9.8) (Strakosch 2010: 273). It is a testament to the openness of the Reconciliation Place scheme that it has the capacity to accommodate different community views and representational preferences in this way. Its form and its meanings provide an alternative to the physical, conceptual and thematic traditions and rigidities of state commemoration.

Revolutions in Historical Consciousness, and Iconoclasm As Berlin’s transformations after 1933, 1945 and 1989 show, nations and their capitals do not always evolve slowly and smoothly. London is actually a relative rarity among capitals, in having remained unconquered under a stable system of government for hundreds of years, and, accordingly, having few of its public memorials moved or removed. But many nations have undergone drastic political changes, as regimes are toppled and new forms of government are adopted. In the countries of Eastern Europe after the fall of communism and during the more recent “Arab Spring,” societies became able to express their revulsion towards memorials to events or persons that were once honored. These works do not often remain in place intact. To address radical shifts in public attitudes toward the past and new aspirations, cities’ existing memorials may be modified in situ, moved to less prominent locations, or destroyed. Such changes may be carefully planned or impulsive. During the 1956 uprising against the communist government in Budapest, protesters pulled down a 9-meter-tall statue of Stalin on the main communist parade ground. For a short time, Stalin’s boots remained on the plinth 212

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as a reminder of the act, and for decades afterwards the communists used the empty plinth as a tribune. Similarly during the Iranian Revolution in 1979, crowds cut down a large statue of the deposed Shah outside the Sa’dabad Palace, just above the knees. The new authorities left the Shah’s bronze, booted legs in place. Another option is to remove offending statues from major public spaces. After the fall of communism in 1989, decision-makers in Berlin and many other Eastern European cities sought to remove memorials to tainted Socialist figures. But these plans do not necessarily involve outright destruction of old memorials. In Budapest, by 1993, 41 major Soviet memorials had been removed, “separated … physically and symbolically from their original sites and political meanings”, to the privately run Memento (Statue) Park on the city’s outskirts (James 1999; Foote et

Figure 9.7 Reconciliation Place, Canberra. Aerial view of competition model, 2001 Source: Image courtesy of Kringas Architects.

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Figure 9.8 Two memorials called Separation, Reconciliation Place, Canberra. Version 2 on left by Sharon Payne, Simon Kringas, Marcus Bree, Benita Tunks and Alan Vogt, 2002. Version 1 on right by Graham Scott-Bohanna, Andrew Smith, Karen Casey, Cate Riley and Darryl Cowie, 2002 Source: Photomontage Quentin Stevens, 2013.

al. 2000: 308). This educational venue rearranges the memorials according to a new, critical symbolic plan (Figure 9.9). The Park’s classical façade gathers together the key ideological figures of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Three “unending parades” (looped paths) are lined by memorials to liberation, workers’ movement personalities, and workers’ movement concepts and events. A central pathway representing Socialism as the “only true and right road” dead-ends at a blank wall, framed by two large statues of Soviet Army captains that had previously stood at Budapest’s two southern gateways (Rethly 2010: 21). On the fiftieth anniversary of the 1956 uprising, a replica of the remaining boots from the toppled Stalin statue was installed on top of a replica tribune opposite the Park’s entry (Turai 2009). Similar archival approaches were taken in Lithuania, 31 miles outside Vilnius at a park established by a private entrepreneur. In Moscow, one evening in 1991, the city government removed statues of Dzerzhenskii, founder of the Secret Police, and other Soviet officials from their pedestals in the center of the city, dumping them all in one area on the outskirts. In 1996, the city government repaired all the statues, installed plaques to identify the people depicted, and named the area Park of the Arts. The political nature of the statues is not mentioned on any of the plaques (Forest et al. 2004). Eventually this outdoor museum also began to display contemporary sculpture. The park now contains 700 works and has been expanded to include an Oriental garden and a World War II section. In Berlin, after World War II, the Allies had sought to dispose of the large collection of partially damaged imperialist statues lining New Victory Avenue. 214

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Figure 9.9 Overview of Memento (Statue) Park, Budapest, shortly after its opening in 1994 Source: Photo by Bela Toth © www.mementopark.hu.

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However, the state curator buried most of the statues in the grounds of the nearby Schloss Bellevue, now the official residence of the Federal President of Germany (du Bois 2013). In 1979, they were exhumed and placed in storage at the Spandau Citadel, where a permanent exhibition of both these and Socialist-era monuments will open in 2015. Preserving memorials allows the possibility of their eventual reinstatement. A proposal to return the statue of Dzerzhenskii to its original location outside the former KGB headquarters in Moscow has been repeatedly passed by Russia’s lower legislative house, generating great public debate. But the frequency of moving, removing or re-purposing memorials to better suit the attitudes of later generations illustrates that because of larger-scale urban reconstruction and wider commemorative planning, memorials do not necessarily provide the permanent connections to place and the stable, reliable messages that their sponsors typically desire. Removing memorials from their original locations and collecting them together isolates them from the continuing flows of history, suggesting an end to the history they depict. Although it is difficult to foresee the specific kinds of changes that may occur in and around any given memorial over time, in general, planning for memorials needs to recognize that things will change after they are installed, and that many kinds of adjustments may be necessary. Temporary memorials are one way of responding to the need for commemorations to keep pace with current desires and values.

Informal and Temporary Memorials Temporary, informal, “grassroots” memorials develop very quickly through direct action, without much forward planning, rigorous management, or external control, and often without seeking formal approval (Franck and Paxson 2007; Margry and Sanchez-Carretero 2011). Mourners usually erect temporary memorials in close proximity to the sites of tragic events or the homes of the deceased. Sites cannot be set aside in advance to allow short-term remembrance of tragedies that are as yet unknown. But people continue to leave masses of flowers and notes at sites connected with Diana, Princess of Wales, on anniversary dates even a decade after her death, and this is not the only example. The locations and forms of “do-ityourself” memorials are little impacted by official plans and regulations. Informal memorials are a challenge for planning that has no easy solution, because these practices step outside planning’s values and practices of coordinated long-term action. Open space planning needs to consider how to allow sufficient time and space for these offerings and for people’s intense engagements with them, as a complement to slower, more long-sighted shaping of cities’ commemorative landscapes. Sometimes temporary, informal memorials receive official sanction and are made permanent. Examples include Angels’ Circle in Staten Island, New York, and the graffiti wall on Tel Aviv’s City Hall at the site of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination. The “Memory Fence” in Oklahoma City was originally a temporary wire mesh security fence of the kind typically installed around the sites of bombings and fatal accidents. Visitors informally attached many commemorative objects to it, and a portion of this fence was later ceremoniously relocated to become part of the permanent memorial (Linenthal 2001; Franck and Paxson 2007). Several informal memorials set into public pavements also began as unauthorized, provocative 216

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“grassroots” actions led by artists, but eventually received official sanction, and even government support for maintenance and installation. These include the “roses” of red resin filling the mortar-shell craters from the civil war siege of Sarajevo, Jochen Gerz’s “invisible memorial” outside Saarbrücken Castle, where the names of German towns whose Jewish cemeteries were destroyed are carved on the underside of cobblestones, and the thousands of Gunter Demnig’s Stolpersteine (Stumbling Blocks) throughout Germany, small brass plaques outside the former homes of deported Jews that state their name and place and date of death. These locations were generally not originally planned for such meaningful public uses or for these kinds of collective, participatory designs. But mourners’ and artists’ appropriations of such sites have successfully challenged and altered the way planners think about those spaces’ functions and meanings, and about the potential forms and locations of public commemoration. These informal interventions have the potential to eventually translate into new, more inclusive commemorative principles and plans (Savage 2009).

CITIES AND HISTORY ARE UNMANAGEABLE A multiplicity of incommensurable concerns revolve around public memorials, related to history, memory, urban space, aesthetics, symbolism and human perception and activity. This multiplicity suggests the implausibility of “solving” the complexities of public commemoration. Spatial, representational and functional relationships within cities are typically complex, and they cannot be neatly disentangled to allow a memorial to be a discrete, inviolable setting that provides a tidy historical account and a clear, lasting moral message to a selective audience. “The Reserve” on Washington’s National Mall is the exception that proves the rule. In terms of the aggregation of memorials in a city, it is enticing to think that preventing new memorials, spreading future memorials more widely, segregating memorials from public space, or tidying up the past will neatly eliminate conflicts. But planning is not only about preventing or simplifying things. Planning needs to optimize the complex range of benefits and problems that arise from the desire to remember. The spatial relationships that memorials form with the surrounding city are almost always complex, especially now that many new memorials are not isolated on pedestals. Memorial sites in cities almost always need to respond to a multiplicity of public needs, whether it be a place to sit and eat lunch, the safe movement of traffic, or economic development. Any new urban memorial will have a wide range of potential users and detractors. The planners responsible for Washington’s memorials have attempted to learn from the experiences of other national and state capitals (NCPC 2012). But the approaches to organizing and regulating memorials that are used in planned capitals such as Canberra do not necessarily work in older, more complex cities, such as Berlin and London, or in cities primarily driven by commerce, like New York. The spatial and functional relations that exist in these cities are more complex, and the collective stories that people want to see told are not as simple and fixed as the central governments of modern states might like to portray them. Planning for memorials is also difficult because it involves not just talking about the past, but predicting the future: what people might want to remember, when, where and how, and what people might eventually want to forget. The locations of future 217

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tragedies are unplanned. Major events such as fires, floods and terrorist attacks can be very destructive; they can significantly reshape the cityscape and the possible spaces where such events might themselves be memorialized. The physical and political landscape around a memorial will also continue to change. Shifts over time in political power structures, both locally and nationally, inevitably impact the level of support for particular commemorative themes, both old and new. Memorial planning decisions are very often conflicted, piecemeal and unpredictable, with little certainty about how the memorial landscape can and might develop in future. Each individual public memorial develops in the midst of so many specific contingencies that rigid plans and policies are perhaps unwise. There are many reasons that cities like Berlin, London and New York need not or should not attempt to master-plan memorials. Their respective national governments do not necessarily own the most suitable sites or have sufficient control over urban development. These cities lack an overall spatial order, and have multiple centers of power and of meaning, which befit the complex and ongoing evolution of their histories. These older and generally more populous cities are also more likely to have been the sites of historic events, the locations of which are often not planned. In comparison to showpiece capitals, each city has a greater number and range of other land uses that potentially conflict with national identity and memory. It is perhaps appropriate that these cities generally constrain their commemorative ambitions to small, localized sites such as Hyde Park Corner and Battery Park, and to relatively undeveloped areas like waterfronts. These older cities express their history and meaning in many ways, without relying on selfconsciously master-planned constellations of symbols.

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A SPECIAL KIND OF PUBLIC SPACE THE IDEA FOR THIS BOOK emerged from our shared interest in urban public space and people’s eagerness to appropriate it for their own purposes (Franck and Stevens 2007). We began our research with the premise that the location and accessibility of spatial memorials make them eminently public spaces. Over the years we have observed how memorials function in many ways akin to parks, plazas and sidewalks. However, their commemorative purpose makes them a distinct kind of place, different from the more quotidian spaces that often surround them. Recognizing that memorials, especially spatial ones, are public settings suggests the value of studying them in that light. Researchers interested in the more quotidian spaces of streets and squares can learn as much from memorials as do those with interests in politics, art history and visual communication. The condition of being both public and special generates tensions around the design, meaning, use and management of memorials. We are often reminded of the sign that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey posted on the fence of the interim sidewalk memorial on Church Street next to the World Trade Center site, which announced “This is a special place.” In this chapter we explore how memorials are both public and special, first, by reviewing several key observations regarding what happens at memorials once they are built. Then we consider the planning of formal memorials before they are built by exploring a topic we have not yet covered: how the public participates in their creation. In both respects, memorials are, indeed, “spaces of engagement” at the site itself and in their creation.

ENGAGING MEMORIALS Very early in our research we observed a wide variety of activities taking place at memorials. We also noticed various forms of intimate contact visitors pursued with particular design features. The rich relationships between people and memorials that these observations revealed—involving physical as well as sensual, perceptual, and cognitive aspects—seem best captured by the idea of engagement, of memorials attracting and holding people’s attention beyond just looking at them. Throughout this book we have explored how memorials do this, focusing in Part I on their design, in Part II on how people use and understand them, and in Part III on the responsibilities they generate for managing and planning. Below we review 219

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several key observations from previous chapters about how people engage memorials: how they use them; how they become closely involved with them physically, sensually and cognitively; and the freedom of engagement they afford.

People’s Uses of Memorials The diversity of activities people pursue in memorials has a surprising amount of overlap with the diversity of activities that occur in public space generally. While commemorative uses of formal memorials are common, our discussion of informal memorials has emphasized that commemoration is also very common in everyday settings. The many political, practical and playful uses of memorials reinforce their commonalities with other kinds of public space. In fact, sometimes a memorial’s design is more conducive to those activities than other public spaces are. The spatial expanse and the rich variety of sculptural forms of some memorials support a wider range of uses than do many parks and plazas that have distinct areas programmed and designed with specific users and actions in mind. Conversely, informal commemorative activities occur in ordinary public spaces partly because these settings do not require the major, ongoing investment and attention that formal memorials demand. Such informal installations transform an everyday space into a special one, blurring the distinction between a memorial and the wider public realm. Permanent formal memorials have particular value for remembering the past, even for people who never visit them in person, for example, through their power as icons. Neverthless, our study, drawing on our particular disciplinary interest in how people occupy public settings, and illustrating the great range and intensity of commemorative activities that occur at memorials, reaffirms the importance of bodily aspects of remembering (Connerton 1989). People go to particular spaces to remember. Designers, sponsors and managers intend particular kinds of commemorative actions to be pursued in memorial settings, and they often design them accordingly. Particular design elements may choreograph specific actions that help lend meaning to a memorial, for example, framing a processional route or accommodating material contributions. Some other uses that lend commemorative meaning are more incidental and improvised. In Chapters 5 and 7, we examined a range of ritual actions and collective ceremonies that affirm memorials’ commemorative and symbolic purposes, as well as others that sympathetically extend them. Such bodily performances help forge connections between the memorial’s design, the historical events and meanings it was intended to convey, the audience it was intended to reach and the place where it stands—at least for those who understand and agree with the interpretation of the past that the memorial presents. The construction of informal memorials is itself a commemorative practice through which people reflect and express. Commemorative activities help to keep people engaged with the historic events and with the memorial site over time. Most research about public engagement with memorials focuses on their commemorative uses. Following Casey (1987), Wasserman argues, “really good memorial places” are those that “allow the visitor … the gaining of experiential insight … Through experiencing spaces, viewing and touching artifacts, moving in ritual patterns, and engaging in community activity, the viewer becomes an active participant in the experience of memory” (1998: 43). Although public spaces that 220

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have not been physically configured as memorials can also support commemorative uses, memorials lend shape and structure to visitors’ perceptions and actions in ways that prompt their engagement with particular memories and that bring depth and resonance to that engagement. The concentration of memorials in capital cities and in central urban areas makes their political function clear. In Chapters 8 and 9, we examined the ways that governments seek to produce and maintain particular political functions and messages in memorial settings, and to change their meaning or their form to reflect and serve wider political changes. Memorials, with their attention to great deeds, sacrifices and losses, have a special power to reinforce broader political statements and objectives. In Chapters 5 and 7, we showed how the actions of members of the public can affirm the political, discursive potential of memorials, or appropriate them for a range of political ends. Commemorative events at memorials, such as the official laying of wreaths on anniversaries, help to reaffirm the political messages that the memorials’ sponsors intended. Other actions draw upon the political potency of existing memorials to promote new and even contrary political views. Protestors who pull down, relocate or deface existing memorials clearly recognize their political significance. Informal memorials also often take on wider political roles, even if their core, original purpose is to express personal memory, grief and loss. Individuals contribute text, images, objects or actions that harness commemorated events and memorial settings as platforms to express views about wider social issues (Boime 1998). Like other public spaces, sometimes memorials are also the scenes of political events that have no specific relation to the subject commemorated there. Such events take advantage of the physical openness of some memorial sites, their centrality and visibility and their proximity to other important political sites and institutions such as parliaments. In some cases, people appropriate memorials for political action because they happen to lack the rules that prevent such assemblies in other open spaces, for instance, because they are managed by a different government agency. Governance structures typically recognize the exceptionality of memorials, their need for higher levels of oversight, investment, protection and maintenance than other open spaces. Sometimes the subject matter of a memorial, as a symbol of a tolerant, diverse society, requires that its site management also be permissive. In all these cases, memorials to specific past events become focal points for broader contemporary political engagement. In this way, they acquire new layers of meaning and new political potency. Historical commemoration sometimes locks political struggle in the past; a memorial can idealize freedoms previously won, but can also place significant constraints on freedom of speech and action in the present. At many commemorative sites, rights to protest are restricted, which is one important way of keeping them special. Beyond their distinctive commemorative and political uses, memorials are also good places for a wide range of everyday practical activities. This is because they are often in central locations and exposed to broad audiences; they are physically accessible and they lack the particular programmed uses of many other public spaces. People often sit on memorials to pursue the kinds of everyday activities they typically do in public: resting, reading newspapers, having a drink or snack, chatting with friends, or talking on their mobile telephones. The formally neutral backdrops of many contemporary memorials—planar surfaces of stone, grass and water—are often used as backdrops for family photographs and 221

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professional fashion shoots. While most other public, nominally “open” spaces of streets and squares are often filled up with vendors, café tables, advertising, landscaping and programmed entertainment, groups often gather at large memorials because they provide ample un-programmed, “loose space” (Franck and Stevens 2007). Informal memorials are less likely to provide physical support for everyday actions, because they are generally not made of strong materials, and because they do not last long enough to transcend their key communicative, symbolic, affective purpose. Nevertheless, because they are often inserted into busy everyday spaces such as pathways, stairways and doorways, informal memorials often take forms that accommodate the continuation of these everyday activities. Indeed, their forms generally allow them to be reconfigured to accommodate practical needs. People also make use of memorials in less practical ways, for play. The designs of a few contemporary memorials, such as the Diana Memorial Fountain in London, clearly encourage play, suggesting the possibility that playfulness can contribute to commemoration and that remembrance can involve joy. Visitors’ fingers often play across the engraved lettering of names; no one would say that such play is wrong. People often imitate the poses of commemorative statues, and by doing so they learn something about their subjects. The intense multi-sensory, bodily engagement typical of play demonstrates that meaning is not only established through visual symbols and communicated through passive reading of them. Play’s openness to exploration and risk suggests possibilities for design and symbolism to be less didactic and to allow for a range of different responses. Playful uses of memorials also foreground the role of social interaction, particularly interaction with strangers, in people’s experience of place. Play can happen where it is least intended. We noted in Chapter 6 that the opportunities for play that many contemporary memorials provide seem quite unanticipated. Memorial designers and sponsors almost always overlook the possible playful uses of particular landscape forms because such uses are at odds with the intended formality and solemnity of memorials. Boisterous play is in many ways the antithesis of the introspective, quiet contemplation typically associated with a visit to a place of remembrance. Play at memorial sites reveals the disjunctions and potential conflicts between the activities and needs of different users. In doing so, play foregrounds a public aspect of commemoration: its openness to social difference. The capacity of memorials to provoke active social debate about history and values makes them extraordinary settings. At the same time the playful demeanor and actions of visitors present challenges and opportunities for the design and management of future memorials. The divergent spatial needs of play and various other uses, and the potential conflicts between them, suggest the importance of engaging a wide range of uses and users into the development of memorial designs.

Forms of Encounter Traditionally, by design and following the customs of the time, memorials offered few opportunities for the variety of actions that now take place at commemorative sites. Similarly, with their emphasis on visual experience and prescribed modes of movement, traditional memorials placed visitors in a relatively passive role. In contrast, the design of many contemporary memorials, as presented in this book, envisions visitors as active creators of their own experiences. Memorials create 222

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opportunities for participation as much as for reception, generating various ways that visitors can interact with memorials through sensual, perceptual, cognitive and physical kinds of engagement. In this section we look at these encounters sequentially: how people discover, approach, touch, explore and interpret memorials. Well-known memorials are often destination points: people consciously choose, and may make special efforts, to visit them. They may well be located in distinct and important locations, such as the National Mall in Washington or Anzac Parade in Canberra. But many memorials, even well-known ones, are integrated into quotidian urban public space. And so people may discover them by chance when they are on their way somewhere else or seeking something else, perhaps a view, or somewhere to sit and rest. In Boston, a resident or a tourist might have that experience coming upon a memorial that is not well known, The Garden of Peace, commemorating the lives of homicide victims, located downtown near the State House (landscape architect Catherine Melina, sculptor Judy Kensley McKie, 2004). As one approaches, it appears to be a small park, graced with a statue, where one can sit and gain a bit of respite from the surrounding streets (Figure 10.1). Only upon entering or noticing the inscription, does one realize it is a place of commemoration. Memorials in public space can be something that people simply stumble upon, rather than consciously approach. They may be in close contact to a memorial before they actually notice it. When memorials are placed in or adjacent to a roadway or a plaza, people often engage with them incidentally as they pass by or through. Or a memorial may bear such a close resemblance to a park that people may not realize that the site also has a commemorative purpose. The spacious labyrinth of the Armenian Heritage Park in Boston (2012) certainly suggests a park. People may not discover that the abstract sculpture that is part of the park honors the lives lost during the Armenian genocide of 1915–23 or that each year the two sections of the 12-sided sculpture are reconfigured, an action intended to represent all those who left their countries of origin to begin new and different lives in Massachusetts. Memorials composed of multiple elements distributed throughout an urban area enhance opportunities for more people to encounter them and engage with them and their meanings. They arouse memory in the spaces where people already are, rather than anticipating that people will make a conscious pilgrimage. In an increasingly media-saturated world, where pedestrians are bombarded with billboard advertising and instant messages on their mobile phones, designers have sought new approaches to memorial design that do not just seek to momentarily attract people’s attention and convey information using visual media, but which create distinctive settings that engage people’s bodies and encourage them to spend time there. While classical monuments were often designed to awe and so kept visitors at a distance, people are often able to interact with contemporary memorials by approaching close to them, touching them, occupying them and participating in acts of commemoration. People become part of the memorial setting rather than just passive, detached viewers of it. In Chapters 2 and 3, we charted the development of various spatial and architectonic features that encourage public access to memorial sites, offer active forms of participation in addition to reading text and imagery, and provide an increasing complexity and variety of novel spatial conditions and opportunities for engagement. Closeness can enhance a visitor’s 223

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Figure 10.1 The Garden of Peace: A Memorial to Victims of Homicide, Boston, landscape architect Catherine Melina, sculptor Judy Kensley McKie, 2004 Source: Karen A. Franck, 2012.

empathy with the commemorated subject. It also allows physical attacks on memorials and playful encounters with them. Although many new memorials are discrete, solid sculptures within public space, many other memorials have their own accessible interior spaces, and have become, in Constantin Brancusi’s terms, “inhabited sculpture”: architectural and landscape spaces in their own right (Breitschmid 2007). The void space inside a memorial may have a specific symbolic meaning, for example, as a representation of loss, but whatever their meaning, accessible voids that are integral with the wider public realm easily get filled up with public activity. Our observations of visitors’ actions at memorials show them discovering a range of bodily affordances in design characteristics of a scale and form that facilitate action. People touch text, images and sculptural forms when they are visible and reachable. Text that is raised or incised offers a particular attraction. Names of the dead placed within reach provide a special intimacy within a public context. People reach out to parts of memorials that can be grasped, including water, and parts that can be moved. People also engage with memorials unconsciously, through their feet as they walk, and through sounds that reach them both within and beyond the memorial, in particular, running water and the sounds of other visitors resonating off hard, planar surfaces. Although memorial designers clearly intend some forms of close engagement, the public settings of memorials allow people additional, unexpected freedoms of action. Emotive symbolism, signs and guards do not always prevent visitors’ appropriations of these sites. Individual 224

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visitors bring meaning and use to memorials through their own discoveries and imaginative actions. They decide how and how much to physically and perceptually engage with these settings. Because many contemporary memorials provide a surfeit of sittable surfaces for resting, people are inclined to linger, and thereby to observe and discover still more uses for the site. People spend a lot of time exploring the complexities of the material forms and spaces of memorials, coming close to inspect names, moving along sequences of sculptures and images and craning or crouching to look into voids. Our observations at many memorials suggest that Musil’s (1932) claim about the invisibility of memorials arising from people’s lack of interest in them is not universally applicable. People’s interest in recent memorials is often sustained by the memorial’s formal “unfoldingness” (Banai 1996) or its difficult “writerliness” (Barthes 1974). Contemporary memorials often contrast with the appearance and functionality of their surroundings and with traditional memorial forms: their meanings and uses are not always obvious or familiar. The unfamiliar forms of antimemorials require that people try hard to understand what they have encountered. In Chapter 7, we noted that visitors’ quests to interpret what is not obvious can be an analogous search for the meaning of the historical events thus commemorated. Formal complexity and obscurity can suggest a richness of meanings to be unlocked. In some cases, people’s careful consideration of forms is likely to yield a satisfying answer. In other memorials, the meanings may remain uncertain or contested; the quest for truth may be frustrated. People may be just as unable to come to terms with the aesthetics of a memorial as they are with the events it remembers. The frequent use of abstraction in memorial design has opened up commemoration to more interpretations. It has also created potential openness to action. The new aesthetic, sensorial and spatial possibilities presented by recent designs have led to visitors interpreting and using those settings in some unanticipated ways, and these interpretations and uses in turn have uncertain consequences for the wider meaning and acceptance of a memorial and its subject matter. Unlike most quotidian public spaces, memorials are intended to be meaningful. However, meanings, like uses, are in the eye of the beholder. The public interprets and responds to the meanings of memorials as they see fit. In this book we have identified at least three novel design features of memorials in recent decades that seem to offer significant potential for engaging visitors with a memorial’s meaning. In Chapter 7 we noted the potency of reflective surfaces, including polished stone. These engage people visually with the object because visitors see themselves and the surrounding context within its depth, or superimposed against the memorial’s engraved text and images. In this way, an abstract design element can encourage in visitors a sense of empathy with the object and thereby with the commemorated theme. A second design feature is a rich variety of representational elements that convey a wide range of historical details and thus allow visitors to interpret a memorial’s meaning in different ways. In Chapter 3, we reviewed the increasing diversity of the subjects of memorials and, in Chapter 4, we examined the increasing particularity in their designs. The subjects, imagery and text of memorials engage broad audiences by stimulating a multitude of connections, rather than just presenting unitary symbols and memories that purport to speak for a homogeneous social collective. Complex arrangements of names on memorials can present the sense of a journey and a story that draws 225

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the visitor in, and engages them in understanding or building a narrative, as they search for individual names, or reflect upon listed dates, sites and numbers of deaths. A third example of design features that engage the public are those that invite visitors to make material contributions to the memorial, as described in Chapters 2 and 8. Historically, this typically meant providing places to affix wreaths or flowers. Through such actions, a personal visit to a memorial can be anchored to collective memories and meanings. Several recent memorial designs have explored new means of encouraging contributions that personalize a public memorial for the mourner and for the mourned. These include surfaces that people can write on and places where visitors can deposit or attach mementos. Sometimes such affordances are unintended. People’s contributions can make a memorial more engaging for subsequent visitors, creating a public narrative, and breaking down rigid distinctions between formal and informal commemoration. Through formal qualities such as reflective blankness, rich symbolism and support for contributions, memorials stand out from most other public spaces and artworks. Memorial designers have introduced such qualities to serve memorials’ specialized purpose of physically and emotionally engaging visitors with particular historical events. These observations on how design gives people active roles in contributing to the messages that a memorial conveys extend Connerton’s analysis of how memory is “sedimented” in the practices of the body (1989: 72ff.). It is not just the body’s actions that aid remembering. The physical settings where they occur also shape the practices of remembrance. People participate in remembrance and contribute to a memorial’s meanings through their own actions as they engage with it. People lend meaning not just through the objects and marks they leave, but also through their actions and postures. People engage with a memorial through both bodily engagement with its material and space and cognitive engagement with its appearance and meanings. A combination of bodily and cognitive engagement with a memorial can have a particularly intense, even profound psychological impact on visitors. Bodily feelings can trigger reflections and emotions that make a visit meaningful. The metaphoric and mnemonic potential of such place experience is particularly vivid in the analogies commentators on memorials often draw between visual and mental reflection, physical and psychological thresholds, and spatial and emotional journeys. Through such experiences, a memorial site can become just as memorable to visitors as the historical people and events themselves.

Freedom of Engagement People engage with public memorials on their own terms. Memorials have always been directed at public audiences, and that inevitably implies a broad group of users, many of whom may not notice, understand or agree with an intended commemorative message. Since memorials are public spaces, they allow engagement by all kinds of publics, not just mourners. Guards, signs, brochures and information centers all seek to mold commemorative actions and meanings at memorial sites, but individual visitors can either respond to these or ignore them. As we noted in Chapter 8, management arrangements at several recent memorials intentionally minimize behavioral control and didacticism. An atmosphere of openness and tolerance is part of the intended commemorative meaning of these sites, and that makes them particularly loose spaces. 226

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Yet even traditional, stern memorials may offer more freedom of action than most other urban spaces, for several reasons. Memorials are publicly owned settings that are highly accessible. Like all artworks, they are not designed for predetermined functionality. They do not presume specific user groups, activities or body postures. This is in contrast to most plazas and parks and most other street furnishings, which are programmed to meet the specific activity needs of particular demographic groups, and to serve particular actions and postures. For much of the day and much of the year, memorials host no programmed events. Nevertheless, their public ownership and their sacredness preclude them falling under the permanent control of particular commercial, social or political interests. They remain open. The typically serious, solemn meanings of memorials do not appear to greatly deter people’s explorations of these settings. As we noted in our earlier book, Loose Space: Many urban spaces possess physical and social possibilities for looseness, being open to appropriation, but it is people, through their own initiative, who fulfill these possibilities. The emergence of a loose space depends upon: first, people’s recognition of the potential within the space and, second, varying degrees of creativity and determination to make use of what is present. (Franck and Stevens 2007:10–11) People in all their diversity of interests and capacities bring a surprising range of readings and responses to memorial sites. The intermixing of so many different people and activities at contemporary memorials tends to stimulate ongoing discovery of new possibilities for interpretation and action. The emergence of repeated patterns of playful behavior at some memorial sites shows how much visitors’ engagements with these sites are informed and inspired by the actions of other visitors. The uses of memorial sites are often social uses, concerned with seeing, being seen, and interacting. Using memorials for everyday acts like sitting and playing and for political acts like protest might be seen by some to undermine memory and respect for the past. But we suggest that the public’s political, practical and playful uses of memorials are also an important part of memorials’ role in contemporary public life, and that these acts can even contribute to a memorial’s core commemorative purpose. The locations and designs of a range of recent memorials have helped to integrate commemoration of the past more deeply within the realm of everyday practical, playful and political actions. These innovations have made recent memorials into “living memorials” in a new sense of the term: through newly-discovered functions and meanings, several memorials to historic people and events have acquired considerable significance within the contemporary city, re-energizing discussion about the past and how it might relate to public life in the present.

MAKING MEMORIALS In contrast to the origin of most public spaces, members of the public participate in the making of memorials, directly and indirectly. This is particularly true of informal memorials, where people engage physically in their creation and evolution. It may 227

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be less clear that members of the public also participate in the making and re-making of formal memorials. With their government sanction, formal design and apparent permanence, formal memorials may seem to result exclusively from the initiative and efforts of official agencies. But in democratic countries, it is often individual citizens and groups who generate the idea for a memorial and then work hard: to promote it; to raise funds; to seek support, official sanction and a site; and to oversee its design and construction. Since many formal memorials originate from such grassroots efforts and come to exist largely as a result of those efforts, they have more in common with informal memorials that are identified as “grassroots” than is commonly recognized. The initiative for a formal memorial may start as a grassroots effort but various established organizations join the process and often powerful political forces shape the choice of a memorial’s location and design, as well as the ultimate decision whether to build it or not. Unlike most buildings, the input of a wide range of individual citizens, civic organizations, individual government officials and agencies shape the appearance and the continuing life of many memorials. Both before they are built and long after, their subject matter, location and design may stimulate both praise and opposition from many quarters, drawing considerable attention and comment from writers, architects, artists, academics, politicians and others.

The Idea Informal, temporary memorials start with the actions of a single individual, a family or a small group who bring the first tributes. Then others may follow that lead, particularly if the person or the event is well known. Many informal memorials begin with the desire to mark the space where a loss of life has occurred. Four hours after the murder of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, in Amsterdam, people gathered at the site where he had been killed, before his body had been moved. A woman who lived nearby brought a potted plant from her house and encircled it with six candles. She explained: “Something needed to done; a sign had to be made, a ‘sign of respect’ for him” (Stengs 2011: 78). Then others brought bouquets and the informal memorial grew. In Hamburg, a neighbor who had witnessed a fatal car accident that killed a child suggested to her friends immediately that they take candles, and that “every candle that gets run over by cars, we will light again” (Rulfs 2001: 150). Often those who start the memorial are inspired both by their own personal experiences and by an activist orientation. When Cleve Jones, a gay rights activist, was helping to organize a march in San Francisco, he asked people joining the march to write down the names of those they knew who had died of AIDS. At the end of the march, participants taped the names to the walls of the Federal Building. The sight reminded Jones of a patchwork quilt; a year later he made the first panel for what became the AIDS Memorial Quilt (Howe 1997). Fanita Clark, whose 19-year-old son had committed suicide, organized the first White Wreath Ceremony in Melbourne in 2001. Frustrated by the lack of treatment and attention her son had received and wishing to increase public awareness and improve treatment services, she organized a laying of wreaths on the lawn of the Victorian State Library to honor Victorians who had committed suicide in 2000 (Ware 2004). Now there is an annual National White Wreath Day with ceremonies held in many cities (White Wreath Association Ltd n.d.). 228

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While the idea for an ongoing, or a regularly appearing, informal memorial may originate with one person, usually an organization is established to create, or recreate, the memorial on a regular basis. Alternatively, an existing organization may lead the effort. For example, in August 2014, two organizations in New York dedicated to increasing pedestrian and bicycle safety, Families for Safe Streets and Right of Way, organized a pilgrimage to 15 sites of pedestrian and bicycle deaths in the city. At the site of each accident, participants painted white angel wings and red roses on the surface of a street or sidewalk. Using a stencil created by the artist Robyn Renee Hasty, they paired the painted image with the individual’s name and date of death and a personal message (Figure 10.2). Sometimes the new image was stenciled near an existing memorial: a Ghost Bike or a now faded, stenciled outline of a body (Moynihan 2014). As with the AIDS Quilt and the White Wreath Ceremony, these cases illustrate how informal memorialization is used to commemorate lost lives, and to raise public awareness of the problem that led to the deaths. Formal memorials may also arise from citizens’ twin desire to commemorate lost lives and to change the circumstances that caused the loss of life. The Garden of Peace: A Memorial to Victims of Homicide in Boston is one example. The origin of the memorial lies in the early efforts of Paul Rober, a member of Parents of Murdered Children. The resulting foundation that raised the funds, found the site, chose the design and continues to manage the memorial describes the memorial as “a living reminder of the impact of violence,” and also states, “It

Figure 10.2 Angel and roses stencil dedicated to young man killed by a bus as he crossed the street, New York, stencil design by Robyn Renee Hasty, 2014 Source: Karen A. Franck, 2014.

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is a visual testament for eliminating violence” (Garden of Peace Memorial 2014). Notably, the memorial grew over time as contributors paid the $195 fee to have a stone in the garden’s dry streambed inscribed with the name and date of death of a murdered friend or family member. While the handcrafted appearance of an informal memorial clearly shows that members of the public have made it themselves, the official, professionally designed appearance of a formal memorial, such as the Garden of Peace, often belies its origin in the initiative of a single individual. That individual typically has a personal connection to the subject of the memorial that he or she proposes. One historic example is the Freedman’s Memorial in Washington (Thomas Ball, 1875), later renamed the Emancipation Monument. It began with a former slave’s donation of five dollars to her ex-master. Publicized in a local newspaper, this donation led to subsequent donations by other black residents to a memorial fund (Savage 1997). Jan Scruggs, a Vietnam veteran, began and led the effort to create the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. It was Roger Durbin, a World War II veteran, who started the 17-year-process of building a World War II memorial in Washington by shouting out a question to his Congresswoman in 1987: “How come there is no memorial to World War II in Washington?” (Mills 2004: 1), and then campaigned for it for the remainder of his life. Lea Rosh, a television journalist with the necessary media savvy, played a crucial role in the prolonged efforts to create a Holocaust memorial in Berlin (Jordan 2006). She co-founded and headed the citizens’ action organization Perspective Berlin that called for such a memorial in 1988 and participated throughout in what became a nearly 20-year process. Inge Hunzinger, a well-established sculptor and daughter of a Jewish mother and an Aryan father, spearheaded the effort to commemorate the Aryan wives who protested the arrest of their Jewish husbands in Berlin in 1943 and created the sculptures for the memorial (Block of Women 1995) installed at the site of the protest on Rosenstrasse. Some individuals who propose and lobby for a formal memorial act alone. Usually, however, they turn to an existing citizens’ group or establish one for that purpose to aid in the lengthy efforts required to realize the memorial. In some cases, following initial work and the passing of the necessary legislation, the government appoints a memorial commission specifically for that case. Government agencies such as the National Capital Planning Commission in Washington often require the formation of a memorial organization or commission and hold it responsible for raising funds, overseeing competitions, seeking the acceptance of the design by other agencies and overseeing construction and dedication. Jan Scruggs formed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund and still directs it. For the Korean War Veterans Memorial, legislation specified that the American Battle Monuments Commission would oversee the building of the memorial and required the establishment of an advisory board, to be composed entirely of veterans, to select the design and to raise funds (Hass 2013). In Berlin, where the state largely funds the construction of memorials, campaigns for memorials have included organized public discussions and conferences intended to raise public awareness and support and to gather information and insights from those with alternative, even conflicting perspectives. In 1998, a group of scholars, artists and leftist politicians founded an organization, The Campaign Group Making a Mark for Rosa Luxemburg, to advocate for a memorial to the Socialist revolutionary in the center of Berlin. They began a 230

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campaign to stimulate alternative perspectives in order to build public support across party lines. The group’s intention that the memorial should stimulate thinking and discussion was further realized through additional discussions, exhibitions and conferences during the period of a two-stage design competition between 2002 and 2005. The memorial design finally chosen, by artist Hans Hacke, consists of excerpts from Luxemburg’s letters and speeches, inserted into the surface of streets and sidewalks in Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, themselves a series of “marks” that further meet the promoters’ original intention to stimulate reflection (Bavaj 2010).

The Design Compared to many other kinds of public space, citizens can and do play a more significant role in the designing of memorials—both directly, in the case of informal ones, and more indirectly, with formal ones. Some informal memorials follow a basic design concept already developed elsewhere and adapted to a specific site and circumstances. For example, each Ghost Bike installation uses a white-painted bicycle to mark the site of a bicyclist’s death. First invented by a bicycle shop owner in 2003 in St Louis, this mode of memorializing and raising awareness has spread through the US, Europe and Australia (Dobler 2011). But generally at informal memorials set in everyday public space, people leaving tributes have complete freedom of choice regarding what they contribute and where. Each individual who contributes is one of many “designers.” Sometimes contributors follow an overall pattern of arrangement that is set early on (see Plate 5.1). The design of these works is cumulative and iterative; designing the memorial overlaps its realization, rather than preceding it as it does in formal memorials. For some long-term informal memorials, the parameters are clearly set for contributions—giving the memorial an overall framework and specifying the media to be used for contributions but giving contributors their choice of content. For the AIDS quilt, now consisting of more than 48,000 panels, each panel must be 3 feet by 6 feet and made of fabric (NAMES Project Foundation 2014). But beyond these parameters, the panels show tremendous variation in content and design. The physical parameters for contributions to the SIEV-X memorial in Canberra were also set: in the form of 353 white poles to honor the 353 refugees who died when the boat transporting them to Australia sank in the country’s waters in 2001. A design competition led to the selection of a scheme of poles developed by an 11-year-old. Subsequently, family members, school children and church and community groups painted the poles in whatever way they saw fit. In this case, the public’s participation in the design and painting of the memorial was also intended to educate Australian school children about the event (Ware 2013). The ground surface at the Paine Memorial in Paine, Chile, serves as the canvas for local contributions. On the pavement between the 1000 standing logs that honor those local residents who were taken or murdered by the Chilean government in the 1960s and 1970s, descendants have created their own colorful mosaics. The result of a sustained grassroots effort and the leadership of a grassroots organization, Association of Families of the Detained-Disappeared and Executed of Paine, the making of mosaics offers time and occasion for grandchildren to hear stories about their grandparents, whose occupations and habits are depicted in the mosaics (Hite 2012). 231

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Since it is professional architects and artists who design formal memorials, possibilities for public participation in design choices must come in other forms, if at all. One opportunity is early in the process: in the development of the mission statement for a memorial and its design program. From the very beginning, Jan Scruggs determined that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial should list the names of all Americans who died and that the memorial should make no political statement. These two requirements, included in the competition program, proved essential in shaping the winning design by Maya Lin, which make the chronology of names by date of death and the absence of any political position key features of the memorial. The directive that proved so significant to the design came from the ideas of a single person, a person who eventually played an official role in helping to formulate the program and to see the work through to its dedication and beyond. Members of the general public rarely participate in writing the mission statement and the program for a memorial. The process adopted in Oklahoma City is a notable exception. The city’s mayor decided that the process would be highly inclusive. Eventually ten operating committees, an advisory committee and a coordinating committee were established. One committee was formed just to determine the text of the mission statement for the memorial. Primary importance was placed on input from family members and survivors, but many other members of the community participated as well, both on committees and through attendance at seven open public meetings. An international survey elicited 5,000 responses expressing diverse ideas about what the memorial should convey (Linenthal 2001). The degree of public participation in developing the design of a formal memorial varies with the procurement process adopted. It is lowest when committees or commissions overseeing the development of a memorial choose a particular designer or hold an invited competition open only to a select group of designers. Then there is no opportunity for a wider public to participate beyond seeing and commenting on the designs once they have been chosen. A completely open design competition, with no constraints on age, citizenship or professional credentials, offers the most opportunity for public engagement. Such competitions can generate a great many submissions and, as importantly, a high level of interest in the memorial and the final outcome. Entrants to the competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial had to be US citizens over the age of 18; 1421 entries were received. To enter the competition for the National September 11 Memorial, the only requirement was to be over 18; 5201 submissions were received from 63 countries (Blais and Rasic 2011). Whatever kind of competition is held, a jury must select the winning design. Jury membership offers another opportunity for members of the public to contribute to design decisions. The committee or commission responsible for overseeing the development of a memorial or a legislative body chooses the type of competition to be held and the membership of its jury. Many jury members are chosen for their professional expertise in art, architecture or history, but other members of the public may also serve, particularly those with a personal connection to the memorial’s subject matter. Sometimes, however, such members are excluded for fear their personal feelings will exert too much influence over the judgments of those considered experts. For instance, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund decided that no veterans would sit on the jury since their presence could compromise expert evaluation of the quality of the design. This absence caused great consternation among veterans who objected to the design. As a result, congressional legislation for 232

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the Korean War Veterans Memorial required that only veterans select the design (Hass 2013). Given the inclusive nature of the process adopted in Oklahoma City and the attention it gave to the desires of family members and survivors, it followed that members of those groups became jury members for the design selection. One family member sat on the design jury for the National September 11 Memorial alongside architects, artists, historians and other professionals. The jury also held meetings with representatives from groups of family members to hear their concerns; yet another way to seek input from a wider public. The history of many public memorials in Washington and the development of the National September 11 Memorial in New York demonstrate that one major way the public participates in the design of formal memorials is through opposition. Establishing the final design of a memorial can be a remarkably contentious process with intensely expressed positions covered prominently in the media. Criticisms from various groups, particularly those with personal relationships to the subject of the memorial, can lead to significant design modifications before or after a memorial is built. Sometimes public opposition is great enough to prevent a memorial from being built following a design chosen by a jury and approved by official bodies. In the 1930s, John Russell Pope’s design for the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, based on the Roman Pantheon, drew sustained outrage from architects, educators and journalists for looking to the ancient past when modernism was offering new possibilities (Westfall 2013). In 1960, the eminently modern design for the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial with its seven, towering concrete shafts (see Figure 2.3) received a mixed reception from architects and critics but was largely derided in the popular press as being a “modern Stonehenge.” Despite the approval of the Commission of Fine Arts and the addition of a statue of Roosevelt, Congress never approved funding because of the public controversy over the design and the opposition of the Roosevelt family. Twenty-seven years after the first competition was held, a design by Lawrence Halprin was finally built. It too received criticism, this time for omitting a clear depiction of Roosevelt in a wheelchair. Congress subsequently required this to be rectified. The winning design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial generated harsh critiques, particularly from veterans, that also necessitated additions to the design in order to be built. Partly as a result of public critiques, the design for the World War II Memorial in Washington underwent three substantial revisions, including a reduction in size (Mills 2004). Families of victims and members of police, fire and emergency rescue departments contested numerous schemes for arranging the names of victims on the National September 11 Memorial in New York. Most recently, from 2010 through 2014, intense and sustained public critique of Frank Gehry’s design for a memorial to former President Eisenhower in Washington, including from the president’s grandchildren, has prevented Congress from approving the design or funding its construction, despite numerous revisions to the design. Public critiques of memorial designs also occur after they are built, sometimes leading to modifications of the built work. In a letter to the Washington Post, poet Maya Angelou vehemently criticized the edited version of one of Martin Luther King’s statements that appeared on the memorial to him. The resulting general outcry about this mangling of his words resulted in the National Park Service removing the passage completely. Organizations and officials with responsibility for the completion of a memorial tend to see controversy as a hindrance, interfering with a more orderly, 233

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controlled process and jeopardizing it. But the opportunity in democratic societies to voice opposition offers another way publics can participate in the civic arena, and the resulting debate can have a clear impact on a memorial’s design, both before its unveiling and after.

The Realization Informal memorials typically emerge quickly, often immediately after a death. They are unmediated responses by the public that may develop over time as days and weeks pass and people leave more tributes at a site. They take no deliberation and require no official review or sanction. Some informal memorials, such as sewing a panel for the AIDS quilt and painting and placing a Ghost Bike, take more time and planning but again no extended or elaborate process of designing and negotiating is required and no permission has to be, or is, sought. Sometimes groups of people take it upon themselves to fabricate and regularly install and remove temporary memorials, such as the Arlington West Crosses in Santa Monica (see Figure 2.10) and on other beaches in California. All kinds of public spaces, from roadsides to sidewalks, to train stations and parks, plazas and beaches, offer ample opportunities for informal commemoration. The design and general purpose of public space offer the freedom to commemorate, at least for short periods of time. Certainly, the process of installing a Stolperstein (Stumbling Block) in a sidewalk to mark the last residence of someone persecuted by the Nazis takes time. But its realization is also the direct result of citizen decisions and citizen contributions to the cost. To install one or more Stolpersteine, either residents of a building, relatives of those deported from that building, schools or civic organizations conduct the necessary research, obtain any necessary permissions and pay for the blocks to be produced by the artist Gunter Demnig. There is no need to deliberate over the design, since this is fixed. Demnig invented and installed the first blocks in 1996 in Berlin and Cologne. Thinking of them as art projects rather than permanent memorials, he did not seek permission for their installation. In 2000, he began to accept commissions for them (Imort 2010). In the US, the creation of many formal memorials, even large scale national ones, depends on monetary contributions from individuals, civic organizations and corporations. The funding typically must continue after the memorial’s dedication to cover costs already incurred and ongoing costs of operation and maintenance. Three million of the seven million dollars needed to build the Vietnam Veterans Memorial came as large contributions from corporations, foundations, veterans groups, unions and other organizations but the remaining four million was in small amounts from individuals and family members. Hagopian concludes, “The number of donors demonstrates the high level of public support that the memorial had won” (2011: 139). Much of the financial support for the Japanese-American Memorial to Patriotism in Washington came from veterans, church groups, Buddhist temples, youth organizations, families, private foundations and chapters of the Japanese American Citizens League. “The Memorial Campaign provided an important lesson about making democracy work with patience and commitment” (National Japanese-American Memorial Foundation 2001: 169). The foundation for the National September 11 Memorial expects that the total cost of building the memorial and the museum will be $700 million and that the annual operating cost just for the memorial will be $63 million. So far, no 234

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government funds for construction or operation have been provided though the foundation and local officials propose that the federal government pay one-third of this cost and that donations and sales of memorabilia should cover the remainder. Eight-figure donations have come from a private foundation and a bank, but as with other memorials, many individuals are contributing as well. While contributing money is clearly a means for public participation in the realization of memorials, it does not necessarily mean that the contributors can shape the design. While contributions from former slaves made the Freedman’s Memorial possible, their role was only to finance the work. Their desires and interests were not considered in the design, which portrays a subservient slave kneeling at Lincoln’s feet. Donors to more recent memorials have often attempted to influence, if not determine, their design. Millionaire and political figure Ross Perot donated $160,000 to cover the cost of the design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and was then a very vocal critic of the winning design, exerting considerable effort to have it changed. Other donors who disapproved of Maya Lin’s design or the additions to it wanted their donations returned (Hagopian 2011). One would-be donor volunteered to pay for the entire Oklahoma City memorial provided he could choose the design (Linenthal 2001). Getting a formal memorial built can be a long and arduous process even when there appears to be grassroots and official support for it. The World War II Memorial in Washington took 14 years, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, 20 years and the Memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 37 years. Since they are usually built on public land, memorials require the approval of legislative bodies and related agencies, usually at several distinct stages of the process. Difficulties may arise, sometimes repeatedly, regarding site selection, design and funding. Without individuals, organizations and public agencies that have the energy, determination and skills to promote a memorial, garner support, negotiate and maintain their resolve, they will not be built. Sometimes the person who proposes a memorial also develops and maintains a leading role in pursuing its realization, even up through its final design and construction. The combination of time, effort, skill and determination required of a single person who takes a leadership role in creating a memorial has led commentators to adopt the term “entrepreneur.” Robin Wagner-Pacifici and Barry Schwartz (1991) call veteran Jan Scruggs a “moral entrepreneur.” Scruggs remained a key actor throughout the many negotiations in realizing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and still directs the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. Scruggs now leads the campaign to build an underground education center at the memorial. Similarly Jennifer Jordan (2006) coined the term “memorial entrepreneur” to characterize the leadership efforts of activist Lea Rosh and sculptor Inge Hunzinger. Leah Rosh participated throughout the nearly 20-year process to build the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. After failed attempts through competitions to arrive at a design, she proposed that that the Bundestag (the German Parliament) make the final design selection (Carrier 2005). Based on her research, Jordan concludes that most of the memorials in Berlin that commemorate acts of annihilation and acts of courage from the Nazi era can be attributed to the work of memorial entrepreneurs. The same term could be applied to those who work to create informal memorials that extend over time or are installed regularly. Sometimes the process of arriving at a final design so the memorial can be built is so contested and so problematic that only a decision by a single official, 235

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agency or parliament will resolve the situation. After the Commission of Fine Arts rejected Pope’s design for the Jefferson Memorial, President Roosevelt approved it and Congress agreed to fund its construction (Westfall 2013). Difficulties regarding potential designs for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe were also significant enough to require two competitions, six public hearings with artists and architects who had submitted proposals to the competitions, parliamentary hearings by a cultural committee charged with responsibility for the memorial, and, finally, a vote in the German Parliament to accept the final design by Peter Eisenman (Carrier 2005). It was Mayor Bloomberg who decided, after much debate and controversy, that the names on the National September 11 Memorial in New York would be arranged in patterns of affiliation. Only then could further design and construction proceed.

WHAT KIND OF SPECIAL PLACE? Participants in recent cultural discourse in Germany have explored the idea that commemoration requires ongoing debate to “work through” difficult histories and that such discussion promotes active engagement with the past and its meanings (Young 1992; Spielmann 1995). Seeing play or mundane activities like reading the newspaper in a specially designed place where one expects solemnity brings this debate out of the Habermasian sphere of rational discourse and into the world of everyday bodily practices in the (literally) concrete public realm (Thrift 2008). People playing in a landscape intended to commemorate past suffering or past glory reminds us that society is made up of diverse interests and actions. Memorials may be intended to speak for everyone, but their appropriation for everyday uses, playing and political demonstrations illustrate the social freedoms and conflicts that memorials often seek to symbolize. In addition, how people engage with memorials over time shows that their design, use and meaning are not permanent even though the physical form of the memorial may well be. There is great variety in the public’s engagement with contemporary memorials, much broader than with traditional memorials. Which aspects of design and use make any memorial a special place can be matters of intense debate, and this makes them a rich topic for research. Memorials as Spaces of Engagement focuses on memorials as commemorative spaces after they are built. As we have suggested briefly here, they are also spaces of engagement before they are built because, in one way or another, members of the public participate in making them. Such participation is in itself a form of remembering and a way of informing those who do not remember or do not wish to do so. This is particularly true when plans for the memorial stimulate public debate. Determining whether and how to create an appropriate installation can generate intense public discussions not only about a memorial’s design but also about its subject and the larger context of that subject. Such discussions are particularly valuable when the subject of the memorial involves clear perpetrators and victims in events not yet sufficiently acknowledged. Plans for creating a memorial to “all the women murdered by men” in Vancouver encountered intense opposition both for using financial resources for a memorial rather than services for women and for the blame the inscription would place on men and for the exclusion of women who were victimized but not killed. Public 236

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opposition and support generated a public discourse in newspaper articles, letters to editors and letters to the organizing committee, not only about the memorial but also about violence against women (Burk 2010). The National Park Service’s decision to commemorate the site of President George Washington’s house in Philadelphia’s Independence National Historic Park generated intense debate after the surprising discovery in 2000 that Washington had kept nine slaves in slave quarters adjacent to his house (Aden 2014). Unlike other examples, the highly inclusive, school-based process for creating the SIEV-X Memorial in Canberra was intended from the start to educate and to generate a wider national discourse (Ware 2013). Some commentators go as far as to consider the process of arriving at a completed memorial to be more important than the finished work. Regarding the first, failed competition for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, James Young remarked, “The debate itself had produced a profound search for such memory … that it had actually begun to constitute the memorial they so desired” (2010: 11–12). From his analysis of the heated controversies surrounding the site and the design of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin and the public ceremonies held at the Monument to the Victims of the Deportation to the Velodrôme d’Hiver in Paris in Paris, Peter Carrier concludes that: “The real monument is not the stone object but the debate itself” (2005: 228). If the process of creating a memorial—from the first idea to its completion—is just as important for commemoration as the built outcome, that process should be treated with the same care as the completed memorial. That was the intention behind the participatory process for the Oklahoma City Memorial. The Chair of the memorial task force commented, “The process, if handled properly, would be more important than the final result” (Linenthal 2001: 117). It may be difficult for those responsible for delivering memorials to recognize and accept as valuable the lengthy, contentious public debates around their subject matter, design, or location, because such debates are generally viewed as problems that delay or threaten the completion of the memorial. Official agencies may attempt to make the process more efficient by exerting more control and reducing the degree of public participation, which they see as the source of controversy, delay and additional expense. But from another point of view, the lengthy, contested decision-making behind a memorial’s creation has significant value. It gives a wider audience a chance to participate. More importantly, the controversial process of making and remaking memorials over the course of their existence is itself a form of commemoration. The debates and shifting arguments keep memories alive, active and contested, and keep the public engaged.

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INDEX Note: page numbers in italics refer to figures. 1100 Architects 28 absence, expressing 43–6 abstract designs 12, 17–18, 38–43; engaging with 219–27; interpreting 144–5, 148, 152–5, 159, 161 acting behaviour 122–6 activities at memorials 110–38, 220–2; see also commemorative events additions to memorials 187, 189 Admonishing Millstone 59, 60 “affordances” 111, 134 agency 28–33 AIDS Memorial Quilt 3, 4, 20, 29, 58, 59, 228, 231 AIDS victims 3, 4, 20, 58, 228 aisles 114, 128 Akaumu, Nina 28 Alison Lapper Pregnant 53 Allward, Walter Seymour 14 American Battle Monuments Commission 230 Amsterdam: Homomonument 37; Never Again Auschwitz 46; Ravensbruck memorial 28 Anderson, Lawrence 17 Anderson, Marian 108 Anishinabe Scout 142 anti-memorials 22, 206–7 anti-monumentality 46, 48, 51, 54 Arad, Michael 23, 27, 27, 43, 79 archiving tributes 31 Arlington, Virginia: Marine Corps (Iwo Jima) War Memorial 52; National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial 18, 19, 31, 45, 55, 63–5, 64, 96, 115, 116, 117, 135, 137, 169; Veterans for Peace 30 “arsenal of guilt” 192 artifacts: incorporated in memorials 69–71; visitors leaving 71–2, 178–9, 226 Association of Families of the DetainedDisappeared and Executed of Paine (Chile) 231 audio recordings 28 auditory experiences 27–8, 130–1 auratic status of artworks 42 Australia: Anzac Day 31; Avenues of Honour 16; Explorers’ Monument, Fremantle 189–90; Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial,

254

Ballarat 83; Irish Famine Memorial, Sydney 66, 67; National White Wreath Day 228; see also Canberra; Melbourne Avenues of Honour 16 Backhouse, David 56 Bacon, Henry 2, 14, 73 Barry, Charles 12 Bartholdi, Frederic August 12 Barton, Cheryl 37, 83 Bauder, Christopher and Marc 109 BBPR 17 Beckman, Julie 18, 19, 45 Belopolsky, Yakov 15, 35 Bergman, Meredith Gang 36 Berg, Sven 45 Berlin 13, 192–3, 210–11, 214, 216; Bebelplatz 25, 43, 48, 206; Berlin Wall, cobblestones marking course of wall 45; Berlin Wall, Lichtgrenze (Border of Lights) 109; Berlin Wall Memorial 28, 45–6, 46, 47, 56; Bibliothek 25, 26, 43, 48, 49, 206; Brandenburg Gate 97; Frederick the Great statue 11, 18, 28; Grunewald railway station 78, 96, 143–4, 144; Herbert Baum Memorial Stone 185; Hermann Ehlers Platz 45; Königsplatz 195; Marx-Engels Memorial 20; Memorial to Freedom and Unity 126, 149–51; memorial to the deportation of Jewish residents 54; Memorial to the Deserted 45; Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime 37; Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe 1, 18, 23, 24, 25, 28, 28–9, 42, 43, 48, 55, 55, 62, 83, 96, 97, 101, 112, 114, 115, 117, 119, 120, 121, 121, 122, 122, 123, 124, 127, 127, 128, 128, 129, 130, 131, 131, 132, 133, 134, 136, 137, 138, 139, 145, 146, 148, 151, 152, 153, 154, 158–9, 172, 172–3, 173, 177, 184, 230, 235, 236, 237; Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe Murdered under the National Socialist Regime 37; Memorial to the Unknown Political Prisoner 40; memorial to the victims of the Nazis’ targeted killing of the mentally and physically disabled 37; Monument to the Victims of the Berlin Airlift 12, 39, 40, 57, 154; Mother with Her

INDEX

Dead Son 145–6, 147; National Monument to Freedom and Unity 207; Neue Wache 17; New Victory Avenue 210, 214; Places of Remembrance Memorial 56–7; Rosa Luxemburg Memorial 39, 74, 230–1; RosaLuxemburg-Platz 74, 231; Schloss Bellevue 216; Soviet War Memorial 35, 36, 39, 96, 105–6, 108, 111, 112, 113, 123, 124, 124, 133; Spiegelwand (Mirror Wall) 24, 25, 46, 79, 80, plate 2.1; Tiergarten 12, 13, 15, 195, 210; Track 17 Memorial 78, 96, 143–4, 144; Trains to Life, Trains to Death 65; Treptower Park 39, 96, 111, 112, 113, 123, 124; Unter den Linden 11, 210; Victory Avenue 12, 13, 210; Weltstadt Germania 210 Bibliothek 25, 26, 43, 48, 49 Biedermann, Karl 45 Bloomberg, Mayor, New York City 80, 236 Böhme, Ulrich 50 Boltanski, Christian 43 books of remembrance 78–9 boots/shoes 71, 109, 124 Boston 35, 36, 55, 71, 78, 90, 141, 187, 223, 224, 229; Armenian Heritage Park 223; Boston Women’s Memorial 36; Garden of Peace 223, 229–30; New England Holocaust Memorial 55; Shaw Memorial 35, 78, 187 Boston Marathon bombing 71 boundaries 22–3 Breuer, Marcel 17, 28, 41, 68 British Empire 207 brochures 173, 226 Buckley, Davis 23, 28, 37 Budapest 15, 204, 212–13; Liberation Monument 111; Memento (Statue) Park 13, 213, 213–14, 215 The Burghers of Calais 20, 25, 28, 35 Burkart, Hans-Norbert 79, 80, plate 2.1 Butler, Reg 40 Butzer Design Partnership 63 Butzer, Hans and Torrey 45 Campaign Group Making a Mark for Rosa Luxemburg 230 Canada: women whose lives were lost to male violence, Vancouver 83–4; see also Ottawa Canberra 194, 196, 205, 207, 209, 211; Anzac Parade 12, 196, 203, 211, 223; Australian Vietnam Forces National Memorial 75, 79, 187; Australian War Memorial 12, 15, 77, 77, 181, 182, 196, 203, 211; Centenary of

Women’s Suffrage Commemorative Fountain 36; Commemorative Guidelines (2002) 207; Kings Avenue 203; Lake Burley Griffin 202; Mt Ainslie 203; National Workers Memorial 37, 62; Nurses Memorial 176; Parliamentary Zone 201; Parliament–War Memorial axis 212; Prospect Parkway 203; Reconciliation Place 28, 201–2, 204–5, 208, 212, 213, 214; Royal Australian Air Force Memorial 159; Russell Offices 196; Sandakan Memorial 123; SIEV-X memorial 204, 231, 237; Vietnam War Memorial 68 Carey, Edward Pearce 35 Carmody Groarke Architects 18 Carson, Clayborne 74 Casey, Col. Thomas 82 ceremonies 96–7, 105–8, 181–3; see also commemorative events; wreath laying changes see additions to memorials; modifying memorials changing values 209–17 Chile, Paine Memorial 231 Chillida, Eduardo 51, 52 China, Sichuan monument to 2008 earthquakes 57–8 circulation of visitors 25, 28–9, 111–21 civil rights 36, 67, 73, 76, 108, 148, 189 close-placing 18–20, 25 commemorating 89–109, 220–1; see also note leaving; tributes commemorative events 31, 92–4, 181–3; see also ceremonies Commemorative Guidelines (Canberra 2002) 207 commemorative narratives 203–5 Commemorative Works Act (CWA) 194, 195 commercial activity 168 competitions see design competitions concentration camps 22, 24, 28, 37, 39, 65, 78, 95, 96, 140, 143 constraining visitors 167–9, 172–3 Constructivism 39 contested memorials 34, 38, 65, 67, 80, 186, 208, 212, 225, 233, 235–6, 236–7 Cooper-Lecky Architects 18, 68, plate 1.1 Cortissoz, Royal 73 counter-monuments 50–4 cross placing 4, 29, 30, 65, 108, 180 Crust, John 15 Cutler, James 81 Daan, Karin 37 Dahlberg, Jonas 27 decentralization 193

255

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defacing memorials 48, 176, 177, 221 Dellit, C. Bruce 15 Demnig, Gunther 22, 56 demonstrations 36, 89, 103, 108, 169, 172, 190, 221, 227 Denkmal 39, 50 Denkmal der Märzgefallenen 39, 39 descansos (resting places) 4 design 34–60, 231–4; see also abstract designs; spatial memorials design competitions 40, 40–1, 50, 79, 232–3, 236, 237 destination points 223 destruction of memorials 186, 212 Devitt, John 58, 59 dialogic memorials 50–4, 206–7 Dibble, Paul 68 Dignity Memorial Vietnam Wall 58, 59 disabled persons 22, 37, 53, 67, 132, 187 disaster victims see victim memorials (as genre) dispersed memorials 57–8, 137, 176, 194–5 donors 234; influence 235; recognising 81 Dragset, Ingar 37 Drake, James 67 dramaturgical performances 151 drawings, leaving 32, 69, 98, 99 Eisenman, Peter 1, 18, 23, 24, 48, 55 Elmgreen, Michael 37 engagement see sensory engagement; visitor engagement Englehardt, Ludwig 20 ensembles of monuments 12–13 “entrepreneurs” 235 Erinnerungsarbeit 49 exedra 14 “expanded field” of artistic practice 41, 42 explanation 73, 82–5; see also information provision; interpreting memorials expressive action 98–104 Families for Safe Streets (NY) 92, 229 family members see relatives of victims Fellows, William 76 females see women fences: enclosing 11, 12, 18, 20, 23, 111, 112, 151, 165, 171, 176, 201; leaving items on 30, 71, 89, 91–2, 168, 177, 216, plate 5.4 Ferrandino, Joseph 76 figurative sculpture 12, 18, 35, 50, 53, 56, 65–8, 82, 141, 148–9, 155–7, 159

256

financial support see funding Flag Day 183 flagpoles 56 flags 31, 73, 112 flowers 3–4, 31, 90, 178, 179, 226 “folk assemblages” 91 forms of encounter 222–6, 236 France, Memorial to the Victims of Deportation, Paris 16, 40 Frankfurt: Berlin Airlift Memorial 57; A House for Goethe 51, 52; Neuer Börneplatz Memorial 95, 95 freedom of engagement 226–7 French, Daniel Chester 14 funding 176, 204, 207, 230, 234, 234–5 Gaetna-Springall Arquitectos 32, 33 Gamble, Jennifer 147 Gaudens, Augustus Saint 14, 35 gay, lesbian and bisexual people 12, 37, 146, 147 Gaylord, Frank 20, 66, 68, plate 1.1 Gegendenkmäler 39, 50 Gehry, Frank 67, 69 gender imbalance 204 German Parliament 193, 211, 235, 236 Germany: Aschrott Fountain, Kassel 48, 50, 206; Berlin Airlift Memorial, Celle 57; Märzgefallenen memorial, Weimar 39, 39; Memorial against Fascism, War, Violence, Harburg 48–9, 101; memorial to civilians bombed during World War II, Würzburg 37; Monument to the Battle of Nations, Leipzig 14; Monument to the Fallen of First Hanseatic Infantry Regiment No. 76, Hamburg 50; Place of the Invisible Memorial, Saarbrücken 48–9, 217; Trail of Remembrance, Cologne 176; Wilhelm I Monument 14; see also Berlin; Frankfurt Gerz, Jochen 48–9, 101, 217 Ghost Bikes 29, 180, 229, 231, 234 Goodacre, Glenna 141, 143 Gorschel, Wolfgang 79, 80 graffiti 48, 101, 176, 177, 216 Graham, Robert 188 grass 105, 115, 123, 126, 168, 175 grassroots memorials 83, 204, 216, 217, 228, 231 The Great Petition 124 Greenough, Horatio 65 Grieving Mother Homeland 36 Gropius, Walter 39, 39 ground level placement 18–20 guarding memorials 167–9, 172–3 Gustafson, Kathryn 1, 2, 18, 23

INDEX

Haacke, Hans 74 Hallman, Heinz 37 Halprin, Lawrence 18, 20, 67, 74, 82 Harder, Julius 2, 14 Hardwicke-Smith, John 68 Harford, Tonkin Zulaikha 68, 75 Harman, Jack 45, 45 Hart, Frederick 20, 53, 53, 65 Heibel, Johannes 59, 60 Heuler, Fried 37 historical consciousness 209–16 Hitch, Frederick Brook 31 Hoberman, Norman 41 Hoheisel, Horst 48, 50, 206 HOK Asia 58 Holland see Amsterdam holocaust memorials (as genre) 22, 24, 37, 43, 48, 55, 66, 95, 96–7, 146 hosting 173 A House for Goethe 51, 52, 54 Hrdlicka, Alfred 159, 160 Hudson, Philip 2, 14, 15 Hungary see Budapest iconoclasm 212 Illegal Art (artists’ collective) 22, 109 indigenous people 37, 155, 189–90, 204, 205, 212 In Flanders Fields 31, 181 “inflation of memory” 192 informal memorials 4–5, 6, 22–3, 216–17; artifacts left at 71–2; commemorating 90–1, 98–100; design 231; ground level placing 20; maintenance 178–80; making 29–30, 228–9; markers 65; note leaving 75; political roles 221; realization 234 information centers 184, 226 information provision 82–5, 183–4, 185; see also names on memorials; signage/signs; text on memorials “inhabited sculpture” 224 inscriptions 73–5, 184; see also names on memorials; text on memorials interim memorials 91–2, 100, 102, 103 internal spaces 224 interpreting memorials 34–5, 139–61; see also explanation; meanings inversions 43–9 invisible memorials 38, 48–9 irrelevant memorials 186 Israel: The Road as Shrine, Jerusalem 16; Victims of Acts of Terror Memorial 37; Yad Vashem Memorial to the Holocaust, Jerusalem 16; Yitzhak Rabin Memorial, Tel Aviv 101

Italy: Como War Memorial 39; Fosse Ardeatine, Rome 17; Monument for the Victims of Concentration Camps at the Cimitero Monumentale, Milan 39; Monument to Roberto Sarfatti, Asiago 17 Japanese American Citizens League 234 Jewish Council (Munich) 24 Kahn, Louis 17, 55, 62 Karavan, Dani 37 Kaseman, Keith 18, 19, 45 Kennedy, Robert 77 Kent State 77 Kienholz, Ed 52 King, Inge 159 King, Martin Luther 73, 108 Koehler, Horst 96 Koening, Fritz 70 Kohl, Helmut 106 Kolhoff and Kolhoff 45 Koliusis, Nikolaus 37 Kollwitz, Käthe 145–6, 147, 156 Kringas Architects 28 Kristallnacht 96, 109 Kuöhl, Richard 50 labor unions 39, 92, 158 Lammert, Will and Mark 54 The Last Post 181 Laurence, Janet 77, 77 legislation 194, 195 Lennon, John 4, 90 Lichtgrenze (Border of Lights) 109 lighting 25, 43, 62, 108, 109, 172, 181 light projection 43, 58 Lin, Maya 2, 6, 17–18, 23, 25, 26, 29, 36, 41, 53, 73, 76, 79, plate 3.1, plate 8.1 Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks 52 Lithuania, Park of the Arts 214 “living memorials” 16, 227 London 12, 193, 194, 198–9; Air Chief Marshall Keith Park statue, Waterloo Place 17; Animals in War Memorial 56; Australian War Memorial 77, 77–8; Bali Memorial 111; Canada Memorial, Hyde Park 111, 123, 133, 166, 169, 176; Cenotaph 38, 72, 73, 84, 106–7, 193, plate 5.5; Diana Memorial Fountain 1, 2, 18, 23, 25–6, 27–8, 28–9, 110, 111, 114–15, 116, 117, 118, 120–1, 123, 124, 126–7, 127–8, 130, 130–1, 131, 132, 132–3, 133, 134, 135–6, 137, 138, 146, 149, 154, 171, 173, 175, 176, 200, plate 6.1, plate 6.2; Hyde Park 1, 18, 23, 58, 153, 166, 194, 200;

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Hyde Park Corner 198, 202, 210, 218; July 7, 2005 bombings 90 (informal memorials 58, 90, plate 5.1; July 7 Bombing Memorial 18, 62, 153, 194, 208) Memorial to the Children of the Deportation 111, 135; National Submarine War Memorial 31; New Zealand Memorial 68–9; Parliament Square 111, 195; Prince Albert Memorial 12; Russell Square 90, 91; St James’s Park 90, 111, 194; Trafalgar Square 12, 53, 193, 195, 210; Waterloo Place 12, 210; Wellington Arch 198; Westminster City Council 193, 194; Whitehall Plate 5.5, 72, 107, 193, 194, 198, 210; Women of World War II Memorial 72, 83 loose space 222, 226, 227 Los Angeles, Pershing Square 211 loss, expressing 43–6 Lower Manhattan Development Council 80 Leuchtenburg, William 74 Ludvig, Eduard 40 Lutyens, Edwin 78, 79 Mac Adams 44 Mackennal, Edgar Bertram 14 MacMonnies, Frederick 141, 157 Mahnender Mühlstein 59, 60 maintenance 175–80; costs 175–6; responsibility 176 making memorials 227–36, 237 management 165–91; keeping the memorial relevant 181–4; maintenance 175–80; managing meaning 186–91; managing use 167–73 marginalised groups 37, 83, 189, 205; see also under headings for specific groups markers 29, 62–5, 95, 96 McCrae, John 31 McMillan Plan (Washington 1901) 195 meanings 34–5, 225; active performances of 146–52; changing 189–91; extending and enriching 186–9; interpreting 139–61; managing 186–91; open and closed 152–61 “mediated reference” 145 Meisler, Frank 65 Melbourne 14–15, 92; Another View Walking Trail 208; Anti-Memorial to Heroin Overdose Victims 22; Bali Memorial 124, 125, 137, 151; Burke and Wills Monument 199; City Square 198; The Great Petition 124; Monument to Edward II 14; Shrine of Remembrance 2, 14–15, 15, 73, 78–9, 95–6, 105, 123, 166, 172, 173, 181, 182,

258

184, 186; Swanton Street memorial plate 5.2; Victorian State Library 228 memorial commissions 230, 232 memorial complexes 14–16 memorial entrepreneurs 235 Memorials and Museums Master Plan (Washington 2006) Plate 9.1, 195 Memorial Wall 60, 69, 73, 95, 95 memories 206–9 messages see note leaving Metropolitan Police (London UK) 193 Mexico: Chapultepec Park, Mexico City 32, 33; Memorial to Victims of Violence, Mexico City 32, 33, 101 Michalski, Serguisz 7 Mies van der Rohe 39 military themes 140–1, 203–4; see also war memorials (as genre) minimalism 41–2 Mirror Wall 24, 25, 46, 79, 80, plate 2.1 The Missing House 43 mission statements 232 “mnemonics of the body” 146 mobile memorials 58–60, 69 modifying memorials 186 moral entrepreneurs 235 Moscow 216; Park of the Arts 214 Mother with Her Dead Son 145–6, 147, 156 movement of visitors 25, 28–9, 111–21 moving memorials see relocating memorials Moving Wall 58, 59, 60 multiple elements 54–7, 176, 223 multiple sites 57–8 Mumford, Lewis 16 Murase, Robert 21 museums paired with memorials 184 name changes 186–7 Nameless Library 159, 160 names on memorials 65, 78–81, 84, 143, 145, 225–6, 232; commemorating 95–6, 101; directories 30; making a rubbing 97; reading of 25, 26–7, 107–8; touching 26, 27 NAMES Project Foundation 58 NAMES Project Memorial Quilt 3, 4, 20, 29, 58, 59, 228, 231 Nash, John 12 National Capital Authority (Australia) 81, 176, 201, 205, 209 National Civic Art Society 67 National Memorial Project Foundation 74 National Organization on Disability 187 National Research Council, Spain 179 Never Again Auschwitz 46

INDEX

New York City: Admiral Farragut Memorial 2, 3, 14, 20, 169; Angels’ Circle (Staten Island) 72, 178, 198, 216, plate 4.2; Battery Park 30, 70, 193, 195, 198, 200, 200, 218; Bryant Park 109; Central Park 14, 90, 195, 198; Church Street 24, 89, 92, 100, 101, 177, 219; Dignity Memorial Vietnam Wall 58, 59; Federal Plaza 42; General Slocum memorial 36; Irish Hunger Memorial 28, 200; Korean War Veterans Memorial 43, 44, 189, 230, 233; Madison Square Park 14, 169; Parks and Recreation Department 175; Richard Morris Hunt Memorial 14; September 11 69–70, 71 (informal memorials 6, 29–30, 98, 99; interim memorial on Church Street 30, 91, 92, 100, 101, 102, 103, plate 4.1; Memorial Museum 70; National September 11 Memorial 23–4, 28, 30, 43, 69, 79–81, 96, 104, 107, 171, 172, 175, 177, 178, 178–9, 233, 234–5; Staten Island September 11 Memorial 31, 32, 72, 107–8, plate 4.2, plate 5.6); Statue of Liberty 12; Steve Jobs memorial 23; Tilted Arc 42; Titanic Memorial Lighthouse 35, 84; Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, 1911 36, 92, 93; Trinity Church, Wall Street 30; Union Square 6, 89, 90, 91, 98, 100, 178, 198; World Financial Center 3, 4, 60; World Trade Centre 69, 70, 89, 92, 109 New York Historical Society 178 Niehaus, Charles 2, 14 Norway, Utoya memorial 27 note leaving 3, 75–6, 98–100 occupying memorials 13–16, 110–38; acting behaviour 122–6; circulation of visitors 25, 28–9, 111–21; sensory engagement 25–6, 130–4; visitors interacting 101, 104, 126–9; see also visitor behaviour offerings see tributes Oklahoma City bombings: informal memorial 90–1, 98, 100; Memory Fence 71, 91, 216; Oklahoma City National Memorial 43, 45, 63, 69, 71, 71–2, 96, 151, 172, 175, 177, 232, 233, 235, 237 Oldenburg, Claes 52 ON architektur 28, 45 operational costs 175–6 opposition to memorials see contested memorials Oring, Sheryl 109 Oslo, Norway, Utoya Island 27 Ottawa 194, 197, 201, 204; BaldwinLaFontaine Monument 14; Confederation

Boulevard 197, 198, 201; National Aboriginal Veterans Monument 37; Parliament Hill 194, 197, 204; Peacekeeping Monument 45, 45, 133; Samuel de Champlain Monument 142; Women are Persons! 20, 36, 45, 149, 150 Pan Am Flight 103 37 Parents of Murdered Children 229 Paris 16, 40, 237 Paterson. Barbara 36 pathways 23–4, 101, 114–15, 133 pavement memorials see roadside memorials pedagogy 82 Pedersen, William 17, 17, 41, 62, 82 pedestals 2, 11, 12, 18, 25 pedestrian routes see movement; pathways Peres, Shimon 96 perpetrators, recognition of 65 Perspective Berlin 230 Philadelphia 211; Independence National Historic Park 237 photographs: incorporated in memorials 56, 68; visitors leaving 31, 62, 69, 92; visitors taking 96, 97, 101, 117, 119, 120, 126, 127, 130 pilgrimages 92, 94, 95, 96–7, 229 Pinay, Noel Lloyd 37 Pingusson, Georges-Henri 16, 40 place names on memorials 77–8 planning 192–218; for changing values 209–17; differing commemorative narratives 203–9; sites 192–202 playful uses 116, 122–4, 136–8, 222 Police Dog Attack 67 polished surfaces 46, 53, 68, 123, 225 political activities 103, 108, 221 Pope, John Russell 15 poppies 31, 172 Portable War Memorial 52 Port Authority of New York and New Jersey 219 Porter, Neil 1, 2, 18 Portland, Oregon: Japanese American Historical Plaza 21; Oregon Holocaust memorial 66; Vietnam Veterans Memorial 76 Postcards 32 Powerless Structures 53 practical uses of memorials 221–2 Prepare NY 29 Price, Bruce 14 prisoners 40, 83, 140, 177 public opposition see contested memorials

259

MEMORIALS AS SPACES OF ENGAGEMENT

public participation in making memorials 227–36, 237; see also informal memorials public space, relation to 22–4, 197–202 quotations on memorials 32, 73–5 Rabin, Itzhak 90, 91, 98, 100 Rauch, Christian Daniel 11 realization of memorials 234–6 Reconciliation 45 recorded sounds 28 reflected images 24, 46, 68, 225 Reflecting Absence 43 reflecting pools 14, 56, 63, 105, 108, 175–6 regulations: planning 194, 208–9; visitors 166, 167–9, 172–3 relatives of victims 3, 75, 80–1, 91, 92, 96, 172, 183 relocating memorials 142, 190, 198, 204, 210, 211–12, 216, 221; see also mobile memorials remembrance gardens 16 remnants of disasters 69–70 removing memorials see moving memorials renovation 176 replacement 140, 158, 203, 210 replicas 57, 58, 214 restricting activity 167–9, 172–3 Richmond, Virginia, Monument Avenue 12 Right of Way (NY) 92, 229 Riley, Cate 36 roadside memorials 4, 22, 29 Robeson, Paul 108 Rodin, Auguste 18, 20, 25, 28, 35 Rodrigo, Russell 147 Roma Design Group 74 “rooms” 25, 27, 45, 61, 114 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 74 Rosenberg, Joachim von 79, 80, plate 2.1 rules see regulations Russia se Moscow Ryan-Tenison, A. H. 31 Saarinen, Eero 40 safety 107, 133, 168, 172 Saint-Gaudens, Augustus 1, 2, 3 Saitowitz, Stanley 55 San Francisco: National AIDS Memorial Grove 81, 94, 94–5; USS San Francisco Memorial 69 Santen, Joost Van 28 Sarajevo Roses 22, 176 SARS memorials 36 Savage, Kirk 1–2, 7, 14

260

Savinar, Tad 66 Schartzenberg, Susan 83 Schmitz, Bruno 14 Schneider, Wulf 50 Schwartzenberg, Susan 37 Scott, George Gilbert 12 sculpture see abstract designs; figurative sculpture seating 2, 3, 14, 63, 65, 104, 105, 106, 115, 127, 128, 181, 200 security 167–9, 172–3 sensory engagement 25–8, 130–4; see also auditory experiences; touching memorials; visual engagement Separation 155, 156, 212, 214 Serra, Richard 42 shafts 62 Shalev-Gerz, Esther 48, 101 Shears, Norris 58 shoes/boots 71, 109, 124 Shrady, Henry Merwin 35 signage see information provision signage/signs: information 1, 18, 56–7, 83, 92, 101, 165, 167, 171, 177, 178, 184; warning 123, 168, 169, 170, 171 Sinai, Mola Winkelmuller Architekten 28, 45, 47 site management see management sites for memorials 192–202 sitting 120, 127, 135; see also seating skateboarding 124, 125 slavery 37, 141, 230, 235, 237 Smith, Andrew 36 Smith, Maggie 81 Smithsonian 178 social interaction 101, 104, 126–9 Sodersten, Emil 15 Soff, Frans 37 Sono, Masayuki 32 South Africa: Monument for Victims of Terrorism, Pretoria 37; National Women’s Monument, Bloemfontein 37 Southern Poverty Law Center 76 Spain, Monument to the Overseas Combatants, Lisbon 130 spatial memorials 2, 12–18; see also abstract designs special places 236–7 “spectacular” distance 154 The Sphere 70 Spiegelwand (Mirror Wall) 24, 25, 46, 79, 80, plate 2.1 sponsors see donors spontaneous memorials 4, 29, 89, 90–1; see also informal memorials

INDEX

staff behaviour 172–3 stairs 12, 14, 15, 16, 20, 70, 96, 105, 108, 112, 206; see also steps “statue mania” 11 statue monuments 12; see also figurative sculpture stelae 55, 62 stencilled images 229 steps 12, 13, 105, 122, 138, 165, 169; see also stairs St Florian, Friedrich 14 Stolpersteine (Stumbling Blocks) 22, 24, 56, 206, 217, 234 Stoppard, Tom 54 Stuart, Mary 36 subject matter 34–8; see also under headings for specific genres suffragette memorials 20, 36, 45, 149, 150, 204 sunken memorials 18, 23, 48, 135, 145 supplementing the memorial 183–4 Sutinen, Paul 66 Sydney: ANZAC Memorial 15, 169, 171; Gay and Lesbian Holocaust Memorial 146, 147; Irish Famine Memorial 78 “symbolic accretions” 186 tactile experiences 21, 27, 120, 126, 131–4, 224 “target hardening” 135 Tatlin, Vladimir 39 Tel Aviv 4, 216; Malchei Israel Square 90 temporary memorials see informal memorials; interim memorials terraces 2, 12, 13, 14, 16, 20, 69, 105, 112, 133 Terragni, Guiseppe 17, 39 terrain vague 46 terrorist acts 37, 58, 90–1, 96, 151, 184 Tessenow, Heinrich 17 text on memorials 72–81, 143–4, 190–1, 224; about events and places 76–80; about people 78–81; see also information provision; inscriptions; names on memorials “theatricality” 42 Thiepval memorial 78, 79 Three Servicemen 20, 53, 53, 65, 148, 187 Tilney, Bradford 17, 17, 41, 62, 82 Tilted Arc 42 Titanic memorials 35, 84 Tolle, Brain 28 Tonkin Zulaikha Greer Architects 77, 77 touching memorials 21, 27, 120, 126, 131–2, 133–4

trade unions 39, 92, 158 Trains to Life, Trains to Death 65, 66 trees 16, 94, 105, 111, 132, 135, 181 tributes 31–2, 90–7, 153, 171, 177–80, 183, plate 1.1; archiving 31; imagery 69; informal memorials 4; provision for 31 Triumph of Civic Virtue 141, 156, 157 two-dimensional images 68–9 Ullman, Micha 26 underground memorials 25, 48 United Kingdom: Department for Culture, Media and Sport 198; National Memorial Arboretum, Staffordshire 57; Titanic Memorial, Southampton 35; see also London United States: Abraham Lincoln Monument, Chicago 14; Arlington West Crosses, Santa Monica 234; Astronauts Memorial, Cape Canaveral 110, 145; Bainbridge Island Japanese Exclusion Memorial 31; Civil Rights Memorial, Montgomery, Alabama 25, 36, 73, 76, 148; Columbine High School 65, 72, 75, 91; Empty Shoe Memorial, Ocean Grove, New Jersey 109; Jefferson Memorial Arch, St. Louis 40; Kelly Ingram Park, Birmingham, Alabama 36, 67; Littleton High School, Colorado 91, 100; Monument Avenue, Richmond, Virginia 12; National Museum of the US Air Force, Dayton, Ohio 57; Rosie the Riveter Memorial, Richmond, California 37, 83; Salem Witch Trials Memorial 81; September 11, memorials 57, 69–70, 72 (New Jersey 24, 24, 62, 63, 68, 69–70, 70, 75, 81, 114; see also under New York City); Soldiers Monument, Santa Fe, New Mexico 190; Virginia Tech shootings 65; Zachary’s Corner, Berkeley, California 92, plate 5.3; see also Arlington, Virginia; Boston; New York City; Oklahoma City bombings; Portland, Oregon; San Francisco; Washington DC unofficial memorials see informal memorials Unsworth, Ken 68, 75 US Commission of Fine Arts 18, 187, 233, 236 US Congress 67, 187, 189, 190, 232, 233, 236 US Department of Agriculture Forest Service 16 US National Park Service 31, 74, 169, 173, 174, 177, 189, 190, 233, 237 US Park Police 169, 172 US Supreme Court 208

261

MEMORIALS AS SPACES OF ENGAGEMENT

Valamanesh, Hossein and Angela 66–7 Veterans for Peace 30 victim memorials (as genre) 36–8, 193, 207, 211 Vienna: Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial 43; Memorial against War and Fascism 159, 160; Nameless Library 159, 160; Schwarzenbergplatz 15 vigils 100 visitor behaviour: acting 122–6; circulating 25, 28–9, 111–21; constraining 167–9, 172–3; playing 116, 122–4, 136–8, 222; using memorials 134–6, 221–2 visitor engagement: encouraging and managing 171–2, 220–1; freedom of engagement 226–7; sensual 25–8, 130–4; see also commemorating visitor perception see interpreting memorials; sensory engagement visitors interacting 101, 104, 126–9 visual engagement 25–6, 130 visual imagery 62–72; see also artifacts; figurative sculpture; markers; twodimensional images void memorials 43–6 Vuchetich, Yevgeny 15, 35, 36 Walker Macy Landscape Architects 76 Walker, Peter 23, 27, 79 A Walk for Dads 24, 24 walls, as elements of memorials 18, 24, 43, 45–6, 53, 58, 59, 66, 104; images on 68, 68; text on 27, 46, 61, 63, 75, 78, 79, 95, 95, 189; for visitors to write on 101 Wall that Heals 58 Wardrop, James 14, 15 Ware, SueAnne 22 war memorials (as genre) 12–13, 15, 35, 72, 77–8, 140–1, 144, 158 Washington DC 194, 195, 204; District of Columbia War Memorial 187; Eisenhower Memorial 67, 69; Emancipation Monument 141, 230; “Embassy Row” (Massachusetts Avenue) 194; Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial 11, 17, 17, 20, 27, 28, 41, 61, 67, 68, 74, 82, 114, 123, 123, 131–2, 133, 145, 148, 149, 154, 187, 188, 233, 235; Freedman’s Memorial 141, 230, 235; George Washington statue 91; Japanese-American Memorial to Patriotism 234; Jefferson Memorial 15, 109, 169, 170, 172; Korean War Veterans Memorial 18, 20, 35, 56, 65–6, 68, 68, 77, plate 1.1; Lincoln Memorial 2, 14, 53, 73–4, 74, 108, 145, 176, 189; Martin

262

Luther King, Jr. Memorial 18, 67, 74, 174; Memorials and Museums Master Plan (2006) Plate 9.1, 195; Memorial to Japanese-American Patriotism in World War II 28, 37, 75, 76, 78, 84, 234; Monument to the Revolutionary War 53; National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial 23, 30, 104, 104; National Mall 3, 12, 12–13, 20, 58, 195, 211, 217, 223; National September 11 Memorial 26–7, 27, 45, 131, plate 8.2; National World War II Memorial 177–8; Navy Memorial 200; Pennsylvania Avenue 200; Pentagon Memorial 123, 124, 127; Samuel Hahnemann Memorial 2, 14; September 11, memorials plate 5.4; Thomas Jefferson Memorial 233; Titanic Memorial 84; Ulysses S. Grant Memorial 35; Vietnam Veterans Memorial 2, 3, 17–18, 20, 23, 25, 26, 29, 30, 31, 35, 41, 43, 46, 48, 53, 53, 54, 56, 58, 65, 73, 76, 76–7, 79, 81, 82, 96, 97, 101, 107, 114, 131, 133, 139, 143, 144, 145, 148, 152, 153, 154–5, 172, 173, 175, 177, 183, 230, 232, 233, 234, 235, plate 3.1, plate 8.1; Vietnam Women’s Memorial 141, 143, 157; Washington Monument 54, 82; World War II Memorial 14, 74, 83, 101, 103, 104, 106, 106, 233, 235 water features 2, 27, 73, 116, 175–6, 199 Weltstadt Germania 210 Westminster City Council 193, 194 white crosses 29, 30 Whiteread, Rachael 43, 159 white ribbons 30 White, Stanford 1, 3, 14 Wilms, Ursula 37 Wittwer-Laird, Gail 28 Wolkers, Jan 46 women: commemorating 36–7, 83, 141, 149; depicting 36, 141, 143, 150, 156 Women are Persons! 20, 36, 45, 149, 150 “Word in Stone” 139 workers’ rights 37, 62, 92, 214 Wormser, Peter 76 Wouw, Anton van 37 wreath laying 31, 226 writing 31, 32, 33, 98–100, 101; see also note leaving “written in stone” 209 Yeltsin, Boris 106 Yixin, Lei 67 Young, James 50–1, 54

Plate 1.1 Korean War Veterans Memorial, Washington, sculptor Frank Gaylord and Cooper-Lecky Architects, 1992. Memorial Day tributes left by visitors Source: Karen A. Franck, 2014.

Plate 2.1 Spiegelwand, Berlin, Wolfgang Gorschel, Joachim von Rosenberg and Hans-Norbert Burkart, 1995 Source: Karen A. Franck, 2010.

MEMORIALS AS SPACES OF ENGAGEMENT

Plate 3.1 Original competition drawing of proposal for Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, Maya Lin, 1981 Source: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund Collection, LC-USZC4-4915.

Plate 4.1 Original art work at World Trade Center interim memorial on September 11 anniversary, New York Source: Karen A. Franck, 2006.

Plate 4.2 Angels’ Circle, September 11 Memorial, Staten Island, New York Source: Quentin Stevens, 2011.

Plate 5.1 Circle of bouquets after July 2005 bombing, Russell Square, London Source: Quentin Stevens, 2005.

MEMORIALS AS SPACES OF ENGAGEMENT

Plate 5.2 Informal memorial at site of wall collapse, Swanston Street, Melbourne Source: Quentin Stevens, 2013.

Plate 5.3 Informal memorial at site of 2009 death of young boy, Berkeley, California Source: Karen A. Franck, Christmas 2011.

Plate 5.4 Canvas hanging on construction fence at informal September 11 memorial, Washington Square Park, New York Source: Karen A. Franck, 2001.

Plate 5.5 Members of Parliament lay wreaths at the Cenotaph, Whitehall, London, during Remembrance Sunday service on 14 November 2010 Source: Sgt Dan Harmer RLC. Image courtesy UK Ministry of Defence, Open Government Licence.

MEMORIALS AS SPACES OF ENGAGEMENT

Plate 5.6 Ceremony on September 11 anniversary, September 11 Memorial, Staten Island Source: Karen A. Franck, 2014.

Plate 6.1 Goths’ birthday party, Diana Memorial Fountain, London Source: Quentin Stevens, 2006.

Plate 6.2 Visitors lie sunbathing, Diana Memorial Fountain, London Source: Quentin Stevens, 2006.

Plate 8.1 Drawing of proposed Vietnam Veterans Memorial based on Maya Lin’s winning design, Paul Stevenson Oles, 1981 Source: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund Collection, ppmsca-05608.

MEMORIALS AS SPACES OF ENGAGEMENT

Plate 8.2 Tributes at National September 11 Memorial, New York, on September 11 anniversary Source: Karen A. Franck, 2014.

Plate 9.1 Framework Diagram from 2001 Memorials and Museums Master Plan, showing 20 best sites reserved for major future commemorations in Washington Source: Courtesy National Capital Planning Commission, USA.