News for the Polynational War Memorial

Introducing the war memorial Google Map

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 14:08:30 +0100

In the five years that this web site has been up I’ve been getting numerous questions about directions, opening hours, and event programming, for specific memorials and monuments. I’ve slowly come to realize that many of you, who visit these pages, use the information to plan trips and I have gradually included services that will make it a little bit easier to make those plans. One important feature that was added some months ago is geocode coordinates for some of the physical memorials and monuments in the database and the use of the Google Maps API to present their locations. I have now collected all those geocoded locations in one single map that can be explored on this website or directly on Google Maps, as a way to make it a bit easier for you to find the directions to the memorial you want to visit. This is really just the beginning, more geocoded locations will follow. And if you want to help by adding new locations to the Google map, I strongly encourage you to do so. The map is open for collaborations.

View the map at

This site
Google maps

Le Mémorial in Caen - Narratives of War and Peace

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:36:54 +0100

This is the first in a series of reports from a trip to the D-Day landing beaches in Normandy and its surroundings that was made by the author in August 2009.

When allied forces finally captured Caen on July 20, 1944, after a fierce battle, much of the city had been destroyed by their bombing campaign, over 1,000 civilians had lost their life and half of a population of 60,000 had been left homeless in a shattered city that it took two decades to reconstruct. Caen paid a high price for the liberation from German occupation.

The destruction of the city and the trauma suffered by its population is said to be one of the reasons that its Mayor, and the Senator, Jean-Marie Girault, took the initiative to create a memorial museum with the ambition to present a rather different perspective on the history of World War II. As the original name of this institution - Musée Mémorial de la Paix (the Memorial Museum for Peace) – reveals, it would be another type of institution compared to the common historical, military museum, an institution with the ambition to make visitors reflect upon peace and democracy in the light of the events of WWII and beyond. The museum was inaugurated by François Mitterrand in 1988, and according to information on its website, over 8 million people have visited since, which makes it one of the biggest tourist attractions in Normandy. It has become a natural starting point for those who want to visit the D-Day landing beaches and the museum offers a variety of guided tours to places of interest in regards to the invasion, of which some lasts two days.

Le Mémorial is located in a park on the outskirts of Caen a 45 minutes walk from the city centre. The first impression of the building is that of a huge, compact block of concrete, with a deep, vertical breach in the middle which is said to symbolise the breakthrough of the German ”Atlantic Wall.” This is the only opening in the façade and it ends in the main entrance. It´s a bit like entering a cave.

On a concrete plinth some fifty metres to the right of the entrance stands a copy of Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd´s famous bronze-cast sculpture Non-violence, of a pistol with its barrel in a knot, which communicates to the visitor that the intention of this site is to promote peace. Its position, however, can hardly be described as central and this is the first indication of what I believe is an ambiguity in the museum´s position in regards to the issues it presents.

The first detail that catch your eye on entering the lobby, which is really more of a huge hall, is a Hawker Typhoon fighter that hangs looming over the information and ticket desk. A lot of people are already here waiting in line for tickets or heading for one of the entrances to the exhibitions, which are divided between the history of World War II and the invasion of Normandy, in the original building, and the cold-war era and temporary exhibitions in a newer section. Two cinemas show hour-long films about the invasion several times a day.

The architecture has its spectacular moments, for example, the start of the World War II exhibition, where you are submerged in a spiralling movement down into the building´s basement trough a huge, spherical, dark room that symbolises the entry of a dark era; the war itself. This exhibition is indeed ambitious, and covers many significant aspects and events of the war, with a special focus on the invasion of Normandy. There are plenty of models, unique objects and multimedia presentations. The atmosphere is tense.

The cold-war era exhibition is a bit more ”modern” in style. It´s mostly at ground level, and has quite a different atmosphere in comparison. If the keyword for the fist exhibit was “dark” the keyword for this section must be “cold.” I must admit though that I did not have time enough to really take in all the information displayed in this exhibit, and that I had to skip the temporary exhibitions. To be able to see everything that Le Memorial has to offer, you really need more than the six hours I spent there.

That ambiguous feeling I had at the entrance keeps lingering on after seeing these two exhibits and one of the films. Le Mémorial is repeatedly referred to as an institution for peace in its visitor- and press information and this is also a phrase that is repeated in many news articles I´ve read about it. But is this stance really reflected in the museum”s program? It is not as the issue of peace is absent in the exhibitions, you will find it for example in the section about the lead up to World War II, and it is not that war is glorified in any way. But I find that the focus, with few exceptions, is very much on the military campaigns, and I can´t stop thinking that there could be another narrative to relay here, a narrative that is not that of a failing peace inevitably followed by global war, but an attempt to explain and map the peace efforts and peace movements of the 19th century, and weave that into the war exhibitions to create a different narrative.

The museum points to the Nobel Peace Prize Gallery as its main, permanent exhibition that deals exclusively with the issue of peace. The gallery, which opened in 1991, is located in an old bunker below the main building, at the foot of the cliff where the museum sits. It is basically a long, underground corridor in which all Nobel Peace Prize Laureates are presented. But, with its location underneath the main museum, it feels quite disconnected from the historical exhibitions.

My critique must of course be seen in the perspective of my limited time spent here and the fact that I may have missed some important information. When I now look at the program for 2010 I find, for example, a very interesting series of seminars about human rights coming up in the beginning of the year. As an historic exhibition, Le Mémorial is indeed worth a visit, and I can really recommend it as a starting point if you intend to visit the D-Day beaches. The exhibitions will give you a detailed background of the events and the bookshop offers plenty of maps and books that will help you to get the most out of your trip. If you only have a couple of hours at your disposal I recommend that you skip the films and go directly to the historical exhibitions. And don´t forget to visit the Nobel Peace Prize Gallery. Even though that exhibit, in my opinion, lacks an overview of the topic of peace and the movements focused on pursuing it, it is a stark remainder of the great efforts to create peace and defuse conflict that are made throughout the world every day.

MORE INFORMATION
Official website (most information in French)
Museums for Peace web site
Article by Benjamin C. Brower in History and Memory, Vol. 11, 1999

New Video: Full Interview with Peter Tonkin

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 01:00:00 +0100

This is the full interview with Peter Tonkin of TZG Architects in Sydney that was made in 2003. Peter Tonkin has designed several war memorials, sometimes in collaboration with artists, for example the Memorial to the Australian Forces in the Vietnam War, in Canberra, and the Memorial to the Australian Forces in WWI and WWII, in London. In this video he´s talking about those and other projects, about utopianism in architecture and war memorials in general. Camera: Karin Willén. Interviewer: Jon Brunberg.

Entering phase #2

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 01:00:00 +0100

These are indeed exiting times for the project, which is now moving into a period where phase #2 overlaps with phase #3. This means that the project will take one step further in terms of realization. To mark this new beginning we have made a lot of updates to the website. The most important updates are listed at the end of this editorial. Phase #3 is dedicated to research about large scale architectonic structures and how they affect, cities, countries and larger regions. The first research trip will go to Normandy in August followed by London and Berlin to look at how memorials affect tourism, economy and infrastructure. A series of reports from those trips will be published on the website during the fall along with other previously unpublished interviews. This first research trip is sponsored by Helge Ax:son Johnson Memorial Foundation.

Another event that deserves attention is that the Virtual War Memorial Collection now includes more than 300.000 names. It is still far from the 10 million names that will be required for the memorial but nevertheless an important step in that direction.

Important updates

• The site has been redesigned and the navigation restructured to better reflect the various sections.
• Many records in the memorial database have been updated. We´ve also added Youtube video and further details about the memorials.
• DIY map is a nifty flash map that was added to further enhance the memorial search tools
• Added RSS feed for news articles.

Excerpt from Part 3: the Interfaith Centre

Sun, 03 May 2009 01:00:00 +0100

EXCERPT FROM PART 3: THE INTERFAITH CENTRE

This is an excerpt from the video "Polynational War Memorial, Part 3: the Interfaith Centre". The Quicktime player is needed to view the video. The video explains the program of the Interfaith Centre that was designed by Testbedstudio. Soundtrack by Fred Saboonchi and voice by Lisette Merenciana.

Rapport från workshopen Dossin-Mechelen

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 01:00:00 +0100

English version

Det verkar som om det sedan några år tillbaka är högkonjunktur för omfattande Europeiska arkitekturprojekt till minnet av förintelsens offer. Om Daniel Libeskinds "Judiska Museum" i Berlin, som stod färdigt 1999, var det projekt som banade väg så skulle man kunna säga att Peter Eisenman med sitt "Monumentet för Europas mördade Judar" (2005) bekräftade att tiden var mogen. Och fler projekt är på väg att realiseras. De finska arkitekterna Lahdelma & Mahlamäki vann nyligen en tävling om "Museet för de Polska Judarnas historia" som kommer att byggas på samma plats i Warzava där det judiska gettot var beläget, och nu planerar också den Belgiska staden Mechelen att skapa en minnesplats i och omkring den byggnad som tjänade som koncentrationsläger 1942-1944 under Nazisternas ockupation av Belgien.

Hur kommer det sig att dessa projekt realiseras just nu, när över sextio år har gått sedan förintelsen? (Jämför t.ex. med USA där the US Holocaust Museum invigdes redan 1983) Jag antar att det i dag finns en utbredd oro för att kunskapen om det som hände under andra världskriget skall gå förlorad för kommande generationer när de som upplevde förintelsen gått bort, en oro som ytterligare förstärks av en framväxande främlingsfientlig extremism i Europa. Kanske är det också så att det är först nu som spänningarna mellan före detta förövare, befolkningen i stort, de som överlevde koncentrationslägren och de anhöriga, minskat så mycket att det lock, som trots allt legat över den skuldtyngda debatten, nu har kunnat lyftas av.

Den planerade minnesplatsen i Mechelen var hursomhelst den huvudsakliga anledningen till att arkitekturhögskolan W&K Sint Lucas i Bryssel arrangerade en internationell workshop på temat "föreställningar om framtidens symboliska platser". Workshopen lockade 140 magisterstudenter i arkitektur från hela Eurpa, cirka 40 lärare och gästprofessorer och en rad föreläsare till Mechelen den 13-18 mars. Jag fanns på plats för att föreläsa om mitt projekt "Det Polynationella Krigsminnesmonumentet" och för att handleda en av studentgrupperna.

Vad har då egentligen denna vackra och historiskt betydelsefulla stad egentligen med förintelsen att göra? Mechelen var den första stad i Europa som byggde en järnväg och staden kom snabbt att bli regionens viktigaste järnvägsknut, vilket gjorde staden till en strategiskt viktig plats för Nazisterna i deras diaboliska plan för att göra Europa "judenrein". Dessutom ligger Mechelen nästan mitt emellan storstäderna Antwerpen och Bryssel. Omkring 25.000 Holländska och Belgiska judar samlades upp av Nazisterna i Mechelen varifrån de sedan deporterades till arbets- eller förintelseläger i östra Europa. Få av de deporterade överlevde.

Den byggnad som tjänade som uppsamlingsplats står fortfarande kvar och kallas i dag för "Dossin-kasernern". Tre av de fyra huskroppar som omger innergården har i dag gjorts om till lyxbostäder, och det är bara den östra delen som fortfarande påminner om deportationerna. Utanför den östra ingången finns ett litet monument och en minnestavla och en av flyglarna innehåller ett förintelse- och motståndsmuseum. Även om det knappast är klarlagt exakt vad den framtida minnesplatsen kommer att omfatta (den första fasen i en arkitekttävling har visserligen redan inletts, men resultatet kan dröja flera år) så är det just den östra delen av byggnaden och den tomt som binder samman Dossin med ett intilliggande före detta fängelse och ett stängt och halvt övervuxet kloster, som kan användas för projektet.

Workshopen var i första hand ämnad att ge en kommande generation arkitekter kunskap om förintelsen, men man kan anta att den också syftade att ge input till det pågående planeringsarbetet med minnesplatsen. Det kom hursomhelst att bli ett intressant och mycket intensivt evenemang. Den mycket välorganiserade workshopen kickade igång med en serie föreläsare; förutom undertecknad också bland andra konstnären Ester Shalev Gerz and filosofen Dr Detlef Hoffmann, såväl som en serie representanter från Sint Lucas, den flamländske statsarkitekten, den Judiska samfälligheten och stadsförvaltningen.

Med dessa föreläsningar färskt i minne och efter en serie studiebesök, bland annat till det närliggande arbets- och koncentrationslägret i Breendonk, så hade studenterna knappt tre dagar på sig att genomföra ett projekt för den angivna tomten. De 16 studenter som jag handledde tillsammans med Kristina Kotov och Sophie Laenen hade valt "mixed media" som alternativ vid sin ansökan till workshopen. Som konstnär kan den termen förefalla aningen daterad till video- och installationskonstens framväxt i slutet på åttiotalet, men i Belgien finns mixed media på arkitektstudenternas schema, vilket vad jag förstått innebär användande av digital teknik i arkitekturprocesser och presentationer. I vilket fall som helst var det klart från början att vi skulle formera ett slags experimentell, eller "media-konst-influerad" grupp. Jag förväntade mig därför inte att vi skulle ha något att göra med den urvalsprocess med återkommande jurybedömningar som pågick under hela workshopen, men till min glädje vann en av studentgrupperna i mixed media-gruppen ett tredjepris för ett mycket väl tänkt, utfört och presenterat förslag som inkuderade en rad interaktiva audiovisuella installationer.

Det är inte helt enkelt att försöka summera lärdomarna av ett så komplext evenemang som detta, men min känsla efter att ha spenderat en hel del tid med studenterna är att det historiska arv som förintelsen, som specifik historisk händelse, lämnar efter sig, kommer att med tiden bli allt mer integrerat med kommande liknande händelser av kommande generationer. Det Rwandiska folkmordet visade att förintelsen inte var en isolerad händelse i samtidshistorien utan att sådana folkmord måste kunna hanteras och förhindras av samtidens samhällen. Det visade också att förintelsens arv är i högsta grad aktuellt och att en förståelse av dess historia är av yttersta vikt för att kunna förstå de samtida folkmordens mekanismer.

Resultatet av fem dagars hårt arbete och inspirerande input levererade kanske inte ett svar på den ambitiösa uppmaningen att "föreställa sig framtidens symboliska platser" men jag är övertygad om att workshopen satte igång en process hos många de studenter som deltog i den. Den gav också mig en hel del att tänka på.

Workshop Dossin-Mechelen Report

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 01:00:00 +0100

It appears that there is a currently an upswing in Europe for high-profile architechtural projects that commemorate the Holocaust. If Daniel Liebeskind's "Jewish Museum", which opened in Berlin in 1999, was the project that paved the way, Peter Eisenman's "Memorial to Europe's Murdered Jews" (Berlin 2005), confirmed that the time was just right. Other similar projects are currently in progress. The Finnish architects Lahdelma & Mahlamäki recently won the competition for a "Museum for the history of Polish Jews" that will be built in 2008 on the site of the former Warzaw ghetto, and the Belgian city of Mechelen is planning to turn the Nazi concentration camp that was located in the city between 1942 and 1944 into a memorial site.

Why are these projects being realized now, when over 60 years have passed since the events took place? (compare with the US where the US Holocaust Museum was dedicated in 1983) I assume that there is currently, among many, a profound concern that the knowledge about the atrocities committed by the Nazis will go lost for coming generations when those that experienced the Holocaust pass away, a concern which is further deepened by current gains by the extreme right in Europe. Perhaps has the time passed also eased the underlying tensions between perpetrators, the silent non-Jewish population, the survivors and relatives to the victims in many European nations, a tension that in many ways has put a lid on the debate about the Holocaust.

The project for a memorial site in Mechelen was the main reason that W&K Sint Lucas College of Architecture in Brussels arranged an international architectural workshop with the title "Dossin-Mechelen: Thinking the future of symbolic places", which brought together around 140 master students in Architecture from over 20 European universities (none from Scandinavia though), around 40 tutors and visiting professors, and a series of lecturers on March 13-18. I was there too, invited to speak at the workshop about the "Polynational War Memorial" and to tutor a group of architect students.

So, what does this beautiful, historic town has to do with the Holocaust? The city was the first in Europe to build a railway and became the most important railway knot in the region, which was of strategic importance in the Nazis' plan to make Europe "judenrein", and thus the city became the first station for the Jews that were rounded up in Holland and Belgium. Around 25.000 of them were gathered in a concentration camp in Mechelen and from there deported to the work- and extermination camps in the east between 1942 and 1944. Few of them survived.

The building that was made into a concentration camp is still standing and is known as the "Dossin-kazerne". It used to serve as barracks for the Belgian army before being taken over by the Nazis in 1942. Today, three wings of the building have been converted into luxury apartments while the fourth, eastern wing, hosts a museum to the Holocaust and the resistance. A small memorial sculpture and a plaque at the eastern entrance are the only visible exterior signs that remind of the deportations. The eastern wing, a former prison across the road and a plot that connects it with a closed monestery are included in the plans for a memorial site. A competition for the design has already been intitiated but it may take years before a result is presented.

The main aim with the workshop was apparently to teach a younger generation of architects about the Holocaust but also, I guess, to create some input to the ongoing planning process for the upcoming memorial. It would anyway be a highly inspiring and immensly intense event. The excellently organised workshop kicked off with a series of speakers. Among them were the artist Esther Shalev Gerz and Dr Detlef Hoffmann as well as representatives from Sint Lucas, the Flemish Government Architect, the Jewish community and the city of Mechelen. I presented the Polynational War Memorial project in one the morning plenary sessions.

With these lectures and presentations fresh in mind and after a series of visits, most notably to the nearby concentration camp in Breendonk, the students were given a couple of days to complete the complex task to design a proposal for the assigned plot. The 16 students I tutored together with Kristina Kotov and Sophie Laenen, had opted for "mixed media" in their applications to the workshop. As an artist the term "mixed media" feels a bit dated to the late eighties and beginning of the nineties, which saw the emergence of installation- and video art, but in Belgian universities the term is used, if I understood it correctly, as a part of the curriculum that teaches design- and presentation techniques that requires all forms of electronic media. We would in any case form a kind of "experimental" or "media-art-influenced" group, and having that "label" I never expected that we would have anything to do with the selection process that was going on during the workshop. To my joy one of the mixed media groups however won the third prize with a very well tought, executed and presented proposal that included interactive and participatory audiovisual installations.

It is not easy to sum up a complex event such as this one, but after spending a lot of time discussing with the students, I sense that the legacy of the specific historic event known as the Holocaust or the Shoa, is bound to become more integrated with subsequent and equally atrocious events by coming generations. The Rwandian genocide showed the world that the Holocaust was not an isolated historic phenomenon and that attempts to annihilate all members of an ethnic group on a massive scale is an issue that has to be firmly dealt with in contemporary society. The experience of the Holocaust is indeed of great importance for an understanding of the mechanisms behind such atrocities.

The result of the five days of hard work and inspiring input did perhaps not deliver an answer to the ambitious sub-title of the workshop that requested us all to "think the future of symbolic places", but I am convinced that it started a process among many of those who participated. It definitely gave me a lot to think about.

The desolate silence of minimalism

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 01:00:00 +0100

We live in an era of memorial inflation. In my hometown of London there seems to be a solemn dedication of some kind every other month, often for events and wars long past. Elsewhere, the huge and expensive memorial to the September 11th terrorist attacks is in the final stages of design, dwarfing in size and certainly cost any previous memorial, even those for world wars. In Berlin, a whole block near Potsdamer Platz in the centre of the city has been given over to a national memorial to the murdered Jews of the holocaust – the size of the gesture commensurate with the guilt that Germany feels. But it seems more than likely that even these will also be dwarfed by ever more public gestures of grief. The memorial park to the victims of the tsunami on Boxing Day 2004 is set to be one of the most lavish ever.

BILD1

The size and frequency of new memorials are increasing, even if the size and drama of the events they commemorate is no more acute than previous eras. But the public bickering over contemporary memorial design is also louder and more rancorous than it has ever been. From the rows about the cost and nature of the memorial at Ground Zero to children injuring themselves in the Diana Memorial Fountain, there seems to be something missing from the contemporary memorial designer’s armoury. Designers routinely fail to convince governments and public of the integrity of their proposals. The lack of consensus about how the dead should be honoured in cities poses the question: why don’t contemporary memorials mean anything to anyone?

Perhaps the controversy that originates the contemporary crisis was the row over the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington DC by Maya Lin in 1982. Her memorial was the first to adopt strategies from minimalist art. It consists of a right-angled cut in the ground with 140 Indian granite panels with the names of 58,175 dead inscribed in them. This was a stark and shocking gesture, completely shorn of representation. No columns, arches, laurel leaves or even regimental insignia, it was a bold and radical departure.

BILD2

The building (and its author - Lin was 22 years old, Chinese-American and a woman) was very controversial. The silence of the visual language was an affront to many, particularly those in the forces, finding it an insufficient expression of the honour due to servicemen killed in action. As a result, another memorial was built in more conventional form (a figurative sculpture of three GIs), making the Vietnam War the only war with two national memorials in the USA.

Lin’s design is tasteful and beautiful and has become the canonical contemporary memorial. Her own fame is as a direct result, and her membership of the jury for the World Trade Centre memorial is directly credited by some for the victory of Michael Arad’s minimal proposal.

The problem that many had of accepting the minimalism of the Vietnam memorial could be its ambiguity, the reticence of the minimal form in glorying in the achievements of the military in favour of commemorating loss. It is cited as a building of dignity and contemplation rather than bombast. But 20 years on, I am beginning to think that the problem was not its ambiguity, but its silence. In retrospect this minimalism looks like short-term thinking, relying on history to be recorded elsewhere or references made in text books, while the monument evokes a general sense of loss and absence.

If one accepts (as I’m not sure I fully do) that religious imagery is no longer a relevant aesthetic reference, I still fail to see how minimalism has become appropriate strategy for dealing with loss in wars. The expression of a single material buried in the ground was Lin’s one innovation (on the grounds that her strategy for listing names alphabetically is mirrored on world war 1 graveyards and monuments). It is the conspicuous dumbstruck-ness that prevails as an atmosphere, and this has set the benchmark for a whole generation of memorials that have come since. We have been told that art galleries are the new cathedrals, but can art administer the last rites as effectively?

Lin’s monument is an extraordinary achievement for many reasons, but it is time to say that her strategy opened a Pandora’s Box – no longer is eloquence required to memorialise death, but silence. Minimalism, while contemplative and seemingly universal, fails to provide the ambiguity necessary for a powerful monument for a particular culture.

In his column in June of this year, New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote about Ground Zero that “the site remains so politically and emotionally charged that every sane proposal has unravelled.” He lamented what he saw as the value engineering of Michael Arad’s scheme and said that it has been “stripped of its meaning” in favour of creating a vast subterranean museum displaying the “relics” of September 11th.

The article is an impassioned plea for reason, but Ouroussoff misses the failures of the original scheme in his zeal to defend the architect’s vision. The problem with memorials as abstract as Michael Arad’s design is that barely anyone but the architect can grasp what is immovably meaningful about the proposal. Ok, the footprints of the twin towers are sacrosanct, and there will still be two pits there with lists of names and some waterfalls. But other parts of his proposal have proven impossible to keep sacred because they don’t seem to communicate. The descending ramps are not saveable because they have no precedent, because they are meaningless. Even Lutyens’ Memorial to the Missing of the Somme in northern France was reduced in size to 140 feet high, partly in order not to be higher than the Arc de Triomphe. But the form was not changed one iota – this was left as a decision for the artist.

Ouroussoff gave as his contrasting example the ‘success’ of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin originally designed by Peter Eisenman and artist Richard Serra. But this field of concrete blocks was equally controversial in that city, and was 9 years in the gestation. One of the value engineering exercises undertaken on that project was the reduction in the size of the field from 4000 to 2700 stones, and the forced adjustment of the edges of the site to make them more visitor friendly by the planting of trees. This decision prompted Richard Serra to quit the project in protest. Eisenman continued, even ceding to demands for a buried interpretation centre at one corner of the site. It is a mighty impressive achievement, but to what degree is the meaning of the monument affected by its reduction in size? Is it possible to draw a line with this kind of memorial?

BILD3

It occurs to me that the need for an interpretation centre somehow brings into relief the profound silence of this non-representational visual language. Contrast this with the approach of Daniel Libeskind, the other architect whose work is most closely associated with having an effective memorial function.

Libeskind is the master of labelling and his gestures with a non-denominational jargon. His ability to pitch the jargon of memorial at just the right level contributed hugely to his victory in the competition to master plan Ground Zero. Although the memorial was always to be separate from his overall plan, he infused the early propositions with memorial elements. A student of mine did an inventory of the gestures in the original master plan for Ground Zero – the Ring of Remembrance, Lines of Heroes, the Wedge of Light as well as the gesture of the Freedom Tower. Many of these gestures have been lost as the project has progressed. One of the most significant losses was the idea to manage the light falling across the site in such a way that on September 11th each year a particular spot in the foundations of the Twin Towers would be illuminated. This was translated later into a “wedge of light” arrangement, which was much simpler to achieve.

Whatever one thinks of Libeskind’s work, there is a certain pagan grandeur to this gesture, allowing the urbanism to be defined by the need for a commemorative function. The problem, as with all of Libeskind’s work, is that you will need a handbook to know that.

Libeskind’s strategy seems to be to build in redundancy in terms if his symbolism – some pieces will survive and these will remain meaningful despite the loss of other elements. Word has it at the moment that his “heroes lines” will make it into the final project, but that the ring of remembrance (one of the defining distinguishing features of his competition entry) seems to have been quietly dropped. But it compromises the integrity of the project for gestures to be this disposable. With his Jewish Museum in Berlin, the client erected plaques to explain what “the architect Daniel Libeskind is trying to suggest”, with the bewildering array of references manifested in the slashes in the metal façade and the paths picked out on the ground. Just as with the Eisenman memorial, interpretation is needed for the memorial to be effective.

BILD4

These would seem to be the two contemporary approaches to memorials – the silent and the hyperactively talkative. But as well as these there is another, far more prevalent vision of how memorials should be, what I would loosely term the Royal Academician school of memorial building, It is certainly the most conventional and common in London, despite an increasing interest in contemporary architectonic gestures.

Typical of these is the National Firefighters’ Memorial, a bronze statue that stands outside St Paul’s Cathedral. It is the work of John Mills RA, a sculptor responsible for a number of memorials in his career. This memorial was first raised in 1990, but expanded, raised on a plinth and re-dedicated in 2003. It takes the form of an almost life-size bronze of three men engaged in fire fighting during the Blitz, a historical but somehow universal image of heroism, particularly relevant given its proximity to the cathedral – the quintessential symbol of London’s resilience under Luftwaffe attack. Mills’ most recent contribution to the public realm of London is the Memorial to the Women of World War Two. This is a much more suggestive piece, depicting (again in bronze) the uniforms of jobs that women undertook during the Second World War. It’s location could not be more prominent – on Whitehall next to the Cenotaph – and brings to mind not only the industry of women, but also their frustration and anger when, after the war, they were forced to give back much of the independence they had gained during it.

These Royal Academician sculptures are, predictably, much less tectonic statements than they are figurative and symbolic. They are things to look at rather than things to experience, and rarely do they have a spatial gesture.

Contrast this with perhaps a classic contemporary architect’s memorial, Norman Foster’s National Police memorial at Horseguards Parade. It is highly architectonic, with a space-making sensibility rather than a sculptural one. By means of a glass monolith, and another wall perpendicular to it displaying names of fallen officers, Foster created a rectangular sanctuary, defining a space to inhabit rather than an object to be venerated or looked at. The touchy-feely version of this in London is the Diana Memorial Fountain design by US architect Kathryn Gustafson, the controversial and expensive circular watercourse on the banks of the Serpentine, which has proven exceedingly popular, despite its cost overruns and technical problems. It seems that architects are uncomfortable with the creation of a communicative object, and would rather make spaces of sanctuary and repose.

This approach, much like Maya Lin’s, foregrounds the psychological powers of reflection of the visitor, rather than aspiring to teach them anything about the event itself. You sit there and look inside yourself, rather than interpreting a symbol provided by a sculptor.

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My original motivation for writing this essay is the erection of a war memorial near to my home in north London. The Islington Green War Memorial by John Maine RA, is a ring of stone, which replaces a cheap and supposedly temporary plaster obelisk that had stood on Islington Green since 1918. It is not the official war memorial of the borough, but it had stood so long that it was felt the Green should continue to have one within it. Maine’s imagery is new age hokum – the ring is square in section and twists, recalling a moebius strip – some kind of abstract circle of life imagery. That a monument to the millions killed two world wars should try to evoke rebirth and continuity so directly is a gesture of such banality and disrespect that it is difficult to believe that public money has been wasted on it.

Compare this approach to Edwin Lutyens’ work Cenotaph on Whitehall, the capital’s principal monument to the dead of the two world wars. The Cenotaph was also originally intended to be temporary, and was originally constructed in plaster in 1919. It was made permanent a year later an unprecedented public response saw 1 million visitors come to mourn there in its first year.

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The symbolism of the Cenotaph is not completely abstract – it is a catafalque, the stand for a coffin. A coffin sits on top of this stone pylon. It is universal in its emptiness and even modern in its expression, but of course recalls culturally specific rites of burial and commemoration.

Lutyens’ artistry is such that he makes any suggestion of rebirth deeply and in an almost hidden way. Gavin Stamp, in his brilliant book The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, describes how Lutyens’ was a committed secularist and was able to convince the Imperial War Graves Commission to commit to non-religious imagery for all of its graveyards and monuments after World War One. Most significant of Lutyens’ symbols was the Stone of Remembrance, large and unadorned stones that stand in all the major monuments and graveyards of English dead from the First World War, wherever they are in the world. The stones were controversial for their lack of religious imagery (despite the stone’s cosmetic resemblance to an altar) but deep in the design lies a reference to rebirth. The edges of the stones are not straight, but subject to entasis, a Greek term for the slight curve that forms a false perspective on apparently rectilinear objects. The curve is a radius of a hypothetical sphere 1,801 feet in diameter. Lutyens was only too aware of the symbolism of the circle in many cultures’ death rites, and he was a humanist, able to marshal both conventional civilian and non-religious imagery under severe pressure from the great and good of the established church in England.

The tomb of the unknown warrior in the Westminster Cathedral was in some sense the church’s retort to the Cenotaph, a plain stone tablet with centred text justifying the burial of an unidentified soldier “amongst the kings”. Lutyens criticised this famous memorial. He wrote: “Even an unknown soldier might not have been a Christian, the more unknown the less sure you could be.”

A good proportion of the memorialising work done in England between the wars and after the second world war took on classical forms – arches and obelisks as well as crosses and figurative bronzes, carried out by a mature generation of classicist architects of which Lutyens was the most important individual.

Maine’s stone circle on Islington Green replaces a plaster obelisk form, recognisable from so many village greens and ancient in its imagery. It is inconceivable that it will endure as an image in the way that Lutyens’ brilliant monuments have.

One of the striking aspects of contemporary memorials is how quickly they are erected. Nicolai Ouroussoff’s call (link) for more patience at Ground Zero is a pretty lone voice of reason. In Northern Ireland, monuments and memorials are erected so quickly and in such sensitive locations, that they have become the very territory of profound ideological differences. When I used to visit Dublin with my Irish mother, she would show me the bullet holes in the Post Office on O’Connell Street that serve as a visceral and effective reminder of the struggle for Irish independence.

But the fraught context of Northern Ireland has become a location where memorials are directly related to, and indeed part of, the events they mark. The erection of provocative memorials, often without planning permission, has been part of the ongoing troubles, even as violent attacks subsided. Examples abound, and the facts are often difficult to establish.

Violence on the memorials themselves replaced violence to individuals. One stone RUC memorial in Armagh was vandalised by having two wreaths taken away and returned with RUC insignia removed. Recently there have also been examples of memorials being removed as gestures of goodwill, mainly from republicans. A memorial to hunger strikers in Toome was removed in 2001, and a year later in Belleek, a simple marble and stone memorial to three IRA men was removed because it stood uncomfortably close to the spot where republican gunmen had murdered a local woman.

It is interesting to note that the officially sanctioned memorials in Northern Ireland are generally intended to commemorate the dead whichever side of the conflict they were on. But this vague and universal mode does not seem to find favour. A memorial to a horrific bomb attack in the town of Claudy (almost certainly planted by a republican group, although noone ever claimed responsibility), which killed Protestants and Catholics, was erected in 2000, and is a sculpture of a weeping woman, her hands covering her face in grief. The sculptor Elizabeth McLaughlin said at the memorial’s inauguration that it was an attempt to find an "expression of the grief of the individual". This simple sculpture was intended to talk generally about personal grief and loss – the sculptor’s own mother had died in the bomb attack.

However, in October this year the statue was vandalised, removed from its plinth and lain down. In the highly tuned symbolic realm of the Troubles, this could be meaningful or mindless, but the fact remains that the physical traces of events remain disputed in Northern Ireland. The question in Ireland is the degree to which remembrance perpetuates conflict.

Lists of names is a device that has always been used for memorials, and are part of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Ground Zero memorial as well as the war memorials of Lutyens and others. Names are perhaps seen as neutral, just a collection of humanity, basically innocent and equal in the eyes of whatever god they believed in. However, it is interesting to note that in The Bloomfield Report, the report that set out the agenda for memorialising the troubles in Northern Ireland, there is a call for a memorial that incorporates inscriptions, but that individual names should be avoided. This is because the thought of listing an RUC officer’s name next to the name of a member of the provisional IRA is still something intolerable for both sides.

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The question of names is one of the things that has hamstrung the Ground Zero memorial in New York, with bickering and infighting about whether to mark firefighters’ names separately and other concerns emanating from the powerful lobby of relatives of victims.

The most recent war memorial unveiled in London was for the soldiers from New Zealand who died in the World Wars, a ceremony attended by the queen, Tony Blair and around 2000 other grandees and veterans. That this dedication went largely unreported is no surprise. There was no big fanfare, no ringing endorsement in the press, no politicised speeches. The ceremony was good-natured, with smiling veterans and a prime minister relaxed and happy to be away from more pressing duties of state.

It is 61 years since the end of World War 2, and enmity is long past for most. This is amongst a number of memorials that are built in order we might not forget the contributions of those men, although the last of them will soon be dead. Memorials in more durable materials than human flesh will stand in for personal testimony.

In some sense this is the role of all memorials. It doesn’t much matter, traditionally, what kind of people they are, the important thing to represent is usually the cause for which they died, the banner under which they united even until death. But contemporary memorial design is unable to communicate this – multiculturalism has not been codified aesthetically in a way that allows them to make dignified expressions of mourning. Memorial design is in crisis, unable to decide on the imagery that can capture what binds together the 2,979 who died at the World Trade Centre, the millions dead in the holocaust or the thousands dead in Northern Ireland since the Troubles began.

I believe that the public is literate enough to demand more than the dumbness of contemporary memorials, and that artists must meet the yawning need for memorials of meaning. Perhaps Lutyens’ was the last generation to believe in universal imagery from the past. Gavin Stamp quotes the War Graves Commission when it wrote: “in death, all… of whatever race or creed, should receive equal honour under a memorial which should be the common symbol of their comradeship and the cause for which they died.” Either those causes no longer exist, or contemporary architects and designers are unable to create symbols with sufficient power to evoke them. The age of political correctness and multiculturalism has shorn architects and designers of their ability to make symbols that communicate, and the response has been the desolate silence of minimalism.

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This article was first published in the UK design and architecture magazine Icon

Kieran Long is a writer and critic in London. He has been deputy editor of three architecture magazines (most recently icon magazine) and has written for magazines and journals across the world. He also teaches history and theory of architecture at three universities in the UK. www.kieranlong.com

Freedom Park at Salvokop Hill, Pretoria, SA: OBRA Architects, New York

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 01:00:00 +0100

OBRA ARCHITECTS was founded by Pablo Castro and Jennifer Lee in New York in 2000. The firm has completed many projects including the San Jose Veterans Memorial. In 2003 they were elected one of three winners in the competition for the Freedom Park memorial and museum complex at Salvokop Hill in Pretoria, South Africa. This museum and memorial complex will become South Africa´s main post-colonial monument, which will function as a commemorative site for the struggle against apartheid and a symbol for the new South African nation. It will also be a site for gatherings and religious cleansing ceremonies for the country´s many ethnical groups. In this interview, which was made by e-mail in October 2005, Pablo Castro explains the concept behind OBRA´s proposal and their view on the emotional aspects and the complex issue of remembrance that are immanent in the process of designing memorials relating to conflict.

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What inspired you to take on the challenge of this particular competition to design the memorial complex on Salvokop Hill?

Besides the desire to involve our work in the worthy cause of honoring those who fought against oppression, we were most interested by the nature of the challenge at the heart of the project, namely that of turning memory into built form. Built memory of a kind that can introduce some friction into the process of forgetting, a most understandable process considering the horrific nature of events here being memorialized. We saw, in the intention of creating a memorial structure and recounting the past events in the spatial narrative of a museum, a basic optimistic attitude we felt compelled to endorse. Engaging in this kind of project means confining the events in question to a definitive past, one that has been overcome and is "remembered" from the vantage point of a new shared situation.

I find the buildings´ beehive-like forms to be quite unusual, from my limited horizon I should add. What was the idea behind the use of that formal element in the design?

There is a tradition belonging to some African communities of burying the remains of important deceased community members inside the trunk of old baobab trees found in the vicinity. Given their imposing presence in the landscape and vital significance (baobab trees provide for humans and animals in many different ways) and the fact that they live for thousands of years, the ritual provides the deceased with a form of "eternal" life. We felt this tradition provided a fitting and unique model for remembering the martyrs of Apartheid, and we designed the memorial to be a 30 meter hight brick hollowed-out tree trunk in the shape of a baobab. In its void the sun projects a circling parade of the ghostly likeness of the martyrs´ faces acid-etched on the glass windows inserted on the walls of the structure.

What material would be used for the facade of the buildings?

The exterior of all the structures in the project is to be finished in handmade brick. We envisioned the same red dirt of Salvokop Hill to be used as the raw material from which the bricks are to be baked, effecting a literal integration of site and building. This would of course require considerable amounts of labor, but given the relatively high rates of unemployment endemic in some neighboring communities and considering the scale of the project, we regarded this as an opportunity to initiate local residents in a new trade an foster an early emotional bond of interdependence between buildings and people.

What solution for the memorial did you propose?

The memorial stands separately at the end of the spiraling path that defines the ascent to the hill and approach to the structures. It is set at the top of the hill as a "lone tree" surrounded by the proposed "Garden of Remembrance" and facing the museum at the other side of the vast "Gathering Space". The museum in turn is configured as four tree trunks fused together, as if four trees growing in close proximity to each other had in time fused into one.

The proposed solution considers the basic quality of memory as a factor of lives spent, as a kind of detritus of the experience of passing time, the dimension of our human awareness. The memorial is built around two different concepts, the first one regarding space and mass, the mysterious aura of presence that characterizes all life and is most moving when conveyed through the expressions of the human face. Here we rely upon the mass of the brick "baobab" and the luminous portraits in constant motion through the space. The second one has to do with time, and relys on the "powering" of the memorial through sunlight and its movement, evoking a new connection to old rituals of cosmic rhythm and, of course, a "materialization" of the passing of time.

You also designed a war memorial in San Jose. What is in your opinion the challenge with designing memorials that relates to conflict?

The Freedom Park project occupies a special place in the body of our work, maybe not so much because of the inherent significance of its proposed content (which it has), but perhaps because it best aligns with the expression of a dimension that is basic to all of our work. This is the aspect that is hardest to capture in words, maybe even it has something to do with the impulse people have to build memorials or, if we can be allowed to go a little bit further, to commission Architecture and expect to get something that transcends simple construction. In the case of memorials or museums, a more secular interpretation of a program fulfilling similar functions, it is easier to find acceptance for the introduction into the project of considerations relating aspects of existence that are perhaps obscure and mysterious to most people in our times and therefore regarded as eccentric and dispensable when discussing most projects.

On the other hand, we do share an ambivalence about memorials, monuments and museums, to the extent that they can be seen as an effort to materialize and fix conditions of privilege and power. In that sense, we have tried to disassociate our work from traditional monumentalizing architectural strategies. Choosing instead to focus on fostering a relationship between the built work and found (natural) processes and presences, and also to define the forms as enmeshed in a process of spacial and temporal development in which we have to invest our bodies to comprehend. Curved interpenetrating forms which cannot be exhausted when perceived from stationary points of view and require constant repositioning in three dimensions. These forms are typically equipped with sweeping ramps that enlist visitors as part of the work itself and transcend perspectival experience stretching perception to incorporate changing sound, touch, and muscular exertion.

How do you, in the design process, deal with and take into consideration the strong emotional forces that I assume must inevitably be a part of these kind of projects?

We can perhaps consider that if well understood, all architectural projects should elicit the same kind of emotional forces you mention in relationship to the particular type of project we are discussing here. Architecture has the ability to convey the immanence of lived experience because it proposes as its subject matter the possibility of alternative modes of inhabiting a hollow object and also because its experience must by necessity unfold in time. It then becomes particularly suited to be considered as a metaphor for memory. It is perhaps difficult to say how to address the emotional component of a work that is supposed to touch peoples lives, and we rely on an intuitive process that unfolds in a dialectic of trial and error until we "know" that what we have is good.

In his work Marcel Proust made a clear distinction between memoire voluntaire and memoire involuntaire, the former responds to intellectual promptings and retains no real trace of the past experience, presenting the past as irreparably beyond the rescuing efforts of the intelligence. The latter discovers the past as "unmistakably present in some material object, though we have no idea which one it is".

Holocaust Memorial: Architect Peter Eisenman, Berlin 2005

Wed, 21 Sep 2005 01:00:00 +0100

One month before the much-debated Holocaust Memorial was due to open, the site was still in chaos. Berlin has a history of not finishing projects on time, and Eisenman’s Memorial looked like being yet another casualty. Workmen sat about looking exhausted while tourists peered curiously through the construction fence.

The building of the ‘Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe’ has been a protracted process. First proposed in the late 1980s, the project was not approved by politicians until the late 1990s, with American architect Peter Eisenman’s finalised design being presented to the public in 1999. Now, in 2005, here it was: an entire city block covered, seemingly haphazardly, in huge concrete blocks. Some of the ‘stelae’ lay low to the ground, while others stood upright, the tallest reaching a height of 4.7 metres.

The 2,711 pillars, planted close together in undulating waves, represent the 6 million murdered Jews. Both the subject matter (which has forced a taboo part of Germany’s past into public consciousness) and the site have raised controversy. The 19,000 square metre block of land, situated just south of the Brandenburg Gate, has a dark past. In 1937, it housed the office of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels; nearby was Hitler’s Chancellery and the infamous bunker where he ended his life.

From 1961 onwards, the site lay alongside the Berlin wall, forming part of the no-man’s land separating Communist East from democratic West. As part of the GDR ‘death strip’, it was patrolled by guards and dogs, and monitored by cameras and trip wires. The Holocaust memorial, in contrast, has minimum security. Open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, it is accessible from all four sides. One of Eisenman’s primary aims has been to make the memorial an integral part of the city.

Although Berlin is one of the most tag-ridden cities in the world, the inevitable prospect of graffiti doesn’t worry Eisenman. ‘That’s an expression of the people,’ he says, with a shrug. The stones, however, have been given a graffiti-proof coating; and this in itself raised spectres from the past. In a stranger-than-fiction twist, the firm supplying the proofing was Degussa – co-owner of the company that made the Zyklon B gas used in concentration camps. By way of atonement, the company donated their product for free.

To the south-west of the site rise the ambitious buildings of Potsdamer Platz: glossy high-rises built in the optimistic early 1990s, with a stellar cast of international architects including Renzo Piano, Helmut Jahn, and Richard Rogers. With his memorial, Eisenman has not even attempted to compete with his neighbours, in size or material. Even on bright sunny days, the stones look sober and drab.

Standing on an uneven piece of land, the stelae almost fall into the centre of the site, rising up again towards the edge, forming a myriad of uneven stone corridors. Walking down one of these passages is disorientating, and scary; you can’t see who is approaching you, nor who is behind. The tilting ground and lack of vision offers some small idea of the Jewish experience from WWII: your past snatched away, your future insecure, little hope of escape.

Why Eisenman?

Memorials are now playing an increasingly important role in national conscience and international politics. Because of this, their construction has become an extremely controversial area of architecture.

Most war memorials from the twentieth century have been simply designed, and are simple in the emotions they raise. In cities, towns, and rural areas all over the world you can find pillars or columns on which are listed the names of locals who have died in various (mostly World) wars. Another construction commonly used for this purpose is the ceremonial arch.

There are a number of such ‘straightforward’ war memorials in Berlin. In the Tiergarten, close to the site of Eisenman’s project, is a huge construction topped by a stone soldier and flanked by tanks; this commemorates the 300,000 Soviet soldiers killed during the liberation of Berlin. In the former West stands the nineteenth-century Kaiser Wilhelm Church; smashed to pieces by Allied bombs, its ruins have been kept as a reminder of war, even while a new church and glass tower have been constructed beside it.

But newer memorials, commissioned from international architects and involving large budgets, often raise heated debate, particularly in a newly bankrupt Berlin. Libeskind’s New Jewish Museum was one such minefield: burdened by the necessity of doing justice to an unbearably weighty past, it opened well behind schedule in 2001. In a strange coincidence, the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center occurred just hours before the official opening of the Jewish Museum; and subsequent reconstruction at Ground Zero has been stalled for similar reasons: conscience, guilt, and the complicated issues that surround all symbolic architecture.

With the Holocaust Memorial project Eisenman (like Libeskind) has gained a kind of credibility stemming from his Jewish background. Born in 1932 to non-practising Jewish parents, he has always asserted that his origins have little impact on his architecture. During work on the Memorial, however, he admitted to a personal investment. ‘[With this work] I came back to the heart of my identity,’ he says.

Protests against the Memorial – both its concept and design – have been numerous. In 1999, the German parliament voted 325 to 218 (8 members abstained) to dedicate the Berlin memorial only to the murdered Jews of Europe. In the eyes of many people this means a neglect of all other victims of the Nazi regime, such as homosexuals, conscientious objectors, and Gypsies. Jewish communities have queried the relevance of the plain design: no stars or other insignia have been included, nor any victims’ names.

After Eisenman’s designs were made public, several prominent Germans, including the writer Günter Grass, urged the government to reconsider, criticising the Memorial as oppressive and overly abstract. Partly as a response to this, an underground information centre has been built, which provides visitors with historical facts and a context otherwise lacking.

But Eisenman remains adamant that the memorial is both perfect in its symbolism, and a necessary aid to atonement. ‘It stands there, silent,’ he says: ‘the one who has to talk is you.’

Endings, and a new future

The opening was carefully timed to take place on 10 May, two days after the 60th anniversary of VE Day. It was a charged political setting in which to stage the event, and in the final days of construction the weather was equally unsettled. As the last cobblestones were laid, and a temporary media pavilion was erected on the southern edge of the site, hail flew. Water lay on the stones like broken glass. It seemed a fitting atmosphere for a project whose completion had taken seventeen stormy years.

Even at the ceremony, which was attended by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, Parliamentary President Wolfgang Thierse, Jewish delegates, and more than 500 international journalists, the project – which had now cost over 27.6 million Euro – raised controversy. Paul Spiegel, the head of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, pronounced that it remained ‘incomplete’, in its failure to force confrontation with the past.

Yet this was perhaps one of the best possible endorsements, for all along Eisenman has aimed to open up discussion rather than close it off: that is, to take the Memorial beyond its specific Holocaust context, and raise wider issues of anti-Semitism and social responsibility. In this, undoubtedly, his abstract design has worked.

‘I think people will eat their lunch on the pillars,’ he said. ‘I’m sure skateboarders will use it. People will dance on top of the pillars. All kinds of unexpected things are going to happen.’

© Sarah Quigley 2005

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