Memorials are symbols of our collective memory and grievances, often in recognition of a difficult past.
Designing a memorial and in turn, making creative enquiries into the past often results in a dilemma for architects and designers — to forget and heal, or to confront and grieve. Should memorials confront the context of these events or should they offer compassionate healing? How much do we want to forget and how much do we recognise pasts that are really painful?
American architect Maya Lin’s response as designer of Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial was, ‘to create an opening or a wound in the earth to symbolise the gravity of the loss of the soldier that heals with time but leaves a memory, like a scar’. Walking through a park-like area, the memorial appears as a rift in the earth — a long, polished, black stone wall, emerging from and receding into the earth.
The names on the wall, seemingly infinite in number, convey the sense of overwhelming numbers, while unifying these individuals into a whole. It is up to each individual to confront or come to terms with this loss. For death is in the end a private matter, and the area contained within this memorial is meant for private reckoning.
This was an unconventional design for a war memorial. It did not act as a general message about a leader’s victory or accomplishments. However, the memorial has since become an important pilgrimage site for relatives and friends of the American military casualties in Vietnam, who leave personal tokens and mementos at the wall in their memory.
Nevertheless, as a designer of a memorial you have to be open enough to adapt to different ways people interpret history or events of the past, which keep changing over time. Memorials stand as very important teachers of history, and a means to revisit our moral inclinations, while also standing as an important cultural or historical message of a given time in history. They stimulate public debate and activate the public sphere. And it is for this reason a lot of controversy hovers over memorials.
What makes an effective memorial is how open and how accessible they are, how personal and private an experience they can offer. They often become shrines, especially for those who have suffered the loss of someone close — who may wish to touch, rub, leave offerings to the last fragments of memory of their dear ones. How much connection you are able to keep intact between the living and the gone is what decides the worth of the monument in the lives of the people.
Architect Michael Arad designed the 9/11 World Trade Center memorial. Located at the site of the former World Trade Center complex, it occupies approximately half of the 16-acre site, features two one-acre pools with the largest man-made waterfalls in the United States that comprise the footprints of the Twin Towers, symbolising the loss of life and the physical void left by the attacks. Its design conveys a spirit of hope and renewal, and creates a contemplative space separate from the usual sights and sounds of a bustling metropolis.
But you have to go through layers of security and stand in numerous queues since only so many can go in at once. In other words, it’s a highly controlled experience.
As architects and designers, we are preserving history through the built fabric of memorials, but at the same time we should not undermine our responsibility to transform these memorials into a means to deter any future social or political conflicts and wars.