issue 2:FALL 2005

BERKELEY ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN

JENNIFER BROOKE

RAVEEVARN CHOKSOMBATCHAI

BONNIE FISHER

JULIE KIM

LEOR LOVINGER

ANDREW SHANKEN

PETER WALKER

memorials

A PUBLICATION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY COLLEGE OF ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN

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Dear CED Alum and Friend,

In 1996, while attending an ACSA annual meeting in Boston, Steven Holl, Thom Mayne, and Ivisited the city’s Holocaust Memorial, designed by CED Architecture Professor StanleySaitowitz (photos below and opposite). Each of us had seen images of the abstract glass pil-lars, but we were unprepared for the experience. It was a cold, crisp winter day with brightsunlight. As we walked the simple succession of paired pillars, we entered an unexpectedemotional world. The steam emanating from the metal grates below created a warm, moistshroud, isolating us from the urban context. Sunlight reflected off of etchings on the pillars,projecting the ghost of concentration camp numbers on our bodies through the steam. I wasspeechless as I raised my hand to see a random set of numbers staring back.

When it was suggested that the second issue of FRAMEWORKS focus on memorials, Ithought immediately of the many important projects covered in this issue—but it was myBoston experience that convinced me there was more to it than just the spate of projects dur-ing the last eight years and most recently those associated with 9/11. On reflection, theBoston experience defined an important design direction that is giving new meaning to andcreating a rich domain of exploration for modern architecture. The pairing of abstractionwith a visceral, sensory experience has given a specific emotional content to some of themost interesting current work, in contrast to the “universalism” of early modernism. Theeffect is a kind of double whammy: The abstraction belies anything specific, yet the sensoryexperience evokes a very particular personal and emotional response, making it even morepowerful. I find this strategy played out in different ways in projects as diverse as Herzog &de Meuron’s Dominus winery, Jim Jennings’s Visiting Artists House, and Peter Eisenman’snew Berlin Holocaust Memorial. It seems that memorials, by the nature of their emotionalprograms, are the sites of both artistic and architectural explorations that have led to notabledesign innovations and have larger implications for our design imaginations. Hopefully thisissue of FRAMEWORKS will introduce and stimulate further explorations.

Warm regards,

Harrison Fraker, Jr., FAIA

William W. Wurster Professor and Dean

Berkeley Environmental DesignFRAMEWORKSis a publication of:

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEYCOLLEGE OF ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN230 Wurster Hall #1820Berkeley, CA 94720-1820510/642-0831

Harrison S. Fraker, Jr.Dean

Nezar AlSayyadAssociate Dean for International Programs

Frederick C. CollignonAssociate Dean for Undergraduate Programs

Peter C. BosselmannChair, Department of Landscape andEnvironmental Planning

Robert CerveroChair, Department of City and Regional Planning

W. Mike MartinChair, Department of Architecture

Edward ArensDirector, Center for Environmental Design Research

Elizabeth Douthitt ByrneHead, Environmental Design Library

Waverly LowellDirector, Environmental Design Archives

Nicole AvrilDirector, External Relations

Berkeley Environmental DesignFrameworks is published twice a year by the Office of the Dean

Creative Director/Design: Dung NgoCopy editor: Peter OrsiPrinting: UC Printing Services

Cover photo: Andrew Shanken

Copyright 2005 by The Regents of the University of CaliforniaFall 2005

Volume 1 / Issue 2

MEMORIALS

MEMENTO MORE

MLK MEMORIAL

INTERVIEW: PETER WALKER

FLIGHT 93 MEMORIAL

THE MOVING WALL

PORTFOLIO: THREE MEMORIALS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Andrew M. Shanken

Bonnie Fisher / ROMA Design Group

Jennifer Brooke

Leor Lovinger

Julie Kim

Raveevarn Choksombatchai

COLLEGE NEWS

FACULTY NEWS

ALUMNI NEWS

CALENDAR OF EVENTS

MEMENTO MORE

I. MEMORIAL MANIA SINCE MAYA LIN

The United States is in the throes of a

memorial mania that manifests itself in

two ways. First, memorials culminate

every conflict, act, notable death, or his-

torical moment. They have become the

morbid cigarette we consume after

tragedy, as if every loss remains some-

how incomplete without its permanent

place in the public sphere, in spite of the

fact that the nature of the public

becomes increasingly ambiguous.

Second, memorials have succumbed to

the forces of multiculturalism and politi-

cal correctness, and like the pluralistic—

some would say balkanized—society they

represent, they have become cauliflow-

ers, each one reflecting the messy aggre-

gation of interests of democracy traffick-

ing in official remembrance. Recent

events, moreover, have strained memorial

traditions in new ways, from the

AIDS/HIV epidemic to the bombing of the

Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the

events of September 11, 2001, and the

succession of anniversaries of 20th-cen-

tury events, including the Holocaust and

World War II. In short, American attempts

to memorialize are encountering new

kinds of issues in a rapidly changing

political atmosphere, amid shifting con-

ventions of art and architecture.

This was not always the case. Until

World War I, the dominance of the clas-

sical tradition in architecture and the

figure in sculpture provided a set of

conventions for memorials and their

spaces with almost limitless possibilities

for composition within a limited frame-

work of commemoration. Days of

remembrance necessitated a place to

gather. The memorial provided a focus

for attention for official ceremonies, as

well as a site for the laying of wreaths

or flowers, the inscription of names, and

an allegorical representation of the

event, such as peace, victory, or noble

death in the case of a war memorial

(fig. 3). Since the American and French

revolutions, these sorts of memorials

have proliferated in step with the geo-

metric population growth of the modern

world, in part because modernity ruth-

lessly mechanized the means of

destruction. To put this in Malthusian

terms, memorials quickly exceeded the

growth of means of subsistence: our

ability to nurture memory and care for

MEMORIALS 3

memorials lags behind our ability to pro-

duce them. And yet, in a mass society,

in which almost all aspects of culture

from birth to death have been farmed

out to impersonal institutions, memorials

are conspicuous for remaining individ-

ual and personal. As cultural behavior,

they continue to resist capitulation to

the machine, and this is because each

one represents what has been called

“memorial work,” the collective process

of mourning that a community engages

in after a traumatic event.

Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial

in Washington, D.C. (1982) is a touch-

stone for many of these issues (fig. 1).

The story is well known. Lin won a

national competition for the memorial as

a student at Yale University. Her mini-

malist black granite wall, cut into a

grassy swell on the Washington Mall,

used the simplest means—reflection

and the silent rhythm of names cata-

logued by date of death—as an abstract

means to create a sacred yet incom-

plete narrative of the Vietnam War.

Although walls of names and granite

are longstanding memorial strategies,

Lin’s spare memorial departed radically

by Andrew M. Shanken

Figures 1 & 2 (left): Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, D.C., 1983. Top, Maya Lin; bottom, Frederick Hart.Figure 3 (right): Krieger-Denkmal, Hamburg, Germany, 19th century.

Photo: Stephen Tobriner/ courtesy AVRL

Putting the New Wave of Memorials Into Context

Photo: Raymond Lifchez/ courtesy AVRL

from memorial conventions and set a

pattern for later efforts. While Lin

single-handedly brought memorials up

to date with developments in art, her

memorial instantly incited controversy.

Shortly after the memorial was complet-

ed, disgruntled Veterans and others

pushed for a more figurative memorial,

in part because they saw Lin’s design as

a negative commentary on the war.

In response, Frederick Hart was

commissioned to design a more tradi-

tional memorial, which was completed

in 1993 (fig. 2). Three soldiers, each pre-

dictably of a different ethnic group, gaze

wistfully at the wall—three bronze

ghosts mourning, and also instructing

visitors how to mourn. As controlled and

open-ended as Lin’s design is, Hart’s fig-

urative group borders on the maudlin

and sentimental. The soldiers recall

19th-century memorial practices,

returning gently to what Philippe Ariés

has called the “ostentatious” mourning

of that century. By contrast, the 20th

century has treated death as a taboo,

and memorials as public markers of

death have become increasingly

restrained, leading to the most under-

stated means of memorialization: the

additive plaque. As 20th-century wars

piled up, many towns simply added new

lists of names to pre-existing memorials.

It is in the context of the additive memo-

rial that Lin’s memorial gains even

greater meaning, since the way it

amasses names and its exquisite

restraint echo this important yet over-

looked tradition in memorialization.

II. MEMORIAL TRADITIONS

Hart’s figures, by turn, interject a com-

mentary on the abstraction and restraint

of Lin’s memorial, a critique with roots in

the beginnings of modern memorializa-

tion. In art-historical terms, they also

may be seen as a sign of the passing of

an era of universally legible, unequivo-

cal artistic traditions. Lin’s memorial

supplanted the purported universality of

classicism, of figural narration or allego-

ry in art, offering up the new universality

of abstraction. Light, reflection, space,

movement, and the rows of names that

threaten to become infinite, these are

the raw triggers of pathos—operating

above history, above culture, or so pro-

ponents of abstraction would believe.

They now compete with war-torn men in

fatigues, whose realism is as much a

problem as Horatio Greenough’s bare-

chested George Washington as an

enthroned Roman emperor (1833-36) on

display nearby in the Museum of

American History. Since World War I,

critics of figurative memorials have

understood the dilemma of representing

modern warfare. “What will they do?”

one writer asked, “Make statues of

guys in jeeps?”1

In fact, this is exactly what some

artists attempted after World War I.

While the Great War spawned its share

of classical victory columns and allegor-

ical figures, it also generated two other

streams that continue with us today:

abstraction and realism. The expression-

istic twisting of Walter Gropius’s

Monument to the March Dead of 1921

(destroyed by the Nazis and restored

after World War II) shows the first

impulse at work, while two more con-

ventional memorials at Hyde Park

Corner, London, show the quandary over

realism in memorials (figs. 4, 5). The

Machine Gun Corps Memorial (Derwent

Wood, 1925), also known as the Boy

David Memorial, and the Royal Artillery

Memorial (Charles Sargeant Jagger,

1921-25) both memorialize soldiers who

died in World War I, but they do so in

remarkably different ways. The under-

size David, a classical allegorical figure

drawn from Michelangelo, offers an

abstraction of society’s sacrifice of its

youth to war, and a biblical reference to

an act of heroism that likens David’s

sling to the new technology of the

machine gun—the new weapon must

have seemed like an unlikely image for

a memorial. The Royal Artillery

Memorial is much more self-conscious-

ly modern. Not only does it nod to traffic

with its scale and directionality, it also

depicts modern war realistically.

Bronzes of men in the uniforms of the

day stand guard over the “tomb” and its

life-size Howitzer gun. While our eyes

may find the Royal Artillery Memorial

powerful, it was much criticized in its

day for its realism. Americans wrestled

with similar issues after both World War

I and World War II.

The Iwo Jima Memorial (officially

called the Marine Corps War Memorial,

by Felix DeWeldon, 1954) is arguably the

only figurative memorial to achieve icon-

ic status in the United States between

World War I and Lin’s memorial (fig. 6).

This memorial, based on a photograph

taken on Mt. Suribachi on the island of

Iwo Jima, where American soldiers

raised a flag upon taking the mountain,

represented the war directly. The Iwo

Jima Memorial overcomes the problems

of the Royal Artillery Memorial precisely

by being “real,” by presenting itself as

veristic, an act of war bronzed.2 What its

photographic origins insinuated, public

relations reinforced. Giant plaster mod-

els of the memorial went on tour during

the war as part of a bond drive, making

cameos in Times Square and on Wall

Street in New York, and in Cleveland,

Detroit, and Indianapolis.3 This memorial

circus, based in photojournalism, under-

mined the idealizations and allegorical

potential of the traditional memorial. All

memorials are forms of media and

modes of propaganda, but Iwo Jima may

be the first to be a thoroughgoing media

creation, one powerful enough to resist

the trends in art and society away from

figurative memorials. After World War II,

with the advent of television, the iconic

memorial was trapped in a mimetic rela-

tionship with the media, each reciprocal-

ly reinforcing or undermining the truth

claims of the other.

The decline of figurative art and

the rise of abstraction—what we now

can see as an out-of-body experience

that lasted a few decades after World

War II—was played out through memo-

rials as well. After World War II, so-

called living memorials carried the day.

These “useful” memorials—community

centers, gymnasiums, parks, and the

memorial highways on which we all

drive—displaced the tradition of arches,

4 FRAMEWORKS MEMORIALS 5

Figure 4 (opposite, left): The Machine Gun CorpsMemorial, London, England. Derwent Wood, 1925.Figure 5 (opposite, right): Royal Artillery Memorial,London, England. Charles Sargeant Jagger, 1921-25.

Figure 6 (left): Iwo Jima Memorial, Washington, D.C.Felix DeWeldon, 1954.

obelisks, and columns surrounded with

soldiers or topped with idealized figures

like Victory or Liberty. Few memorials in

the decades after World War II relied on

the conventions of high art. Think of

what a Jackson Pollock or Andy Warhol

memorial might look like, and you see

the problem. It is no coincidence that

the Vietnam War spurred the first

Minimalist memorial. While Minimalism

already had a pedigree by the early

1980s, Lin was the first to apply it willful-

ly to memorials, and it was a stunning

act completely in tune with the tenor of

the moment.

III. MULTICULTURALISM, MULTIPLICITY,

AND MEMORY

The Vietnam War, which the United

States memorialized before the earlier

World War II or Korean War, was per-

haps the most contentious issue of its

day, a war fought amid social unrest

and protest: part of the same set of

forces that liberalized American society

and led to multiculturalism, but also part

of the Cold War. Minimalism arose in the

same years and gave a wide berth to

these multiple viewpoints. It is an art

that is assertive with space, not mean-

ing; it sets a stage, but leaves it empty

for the spectator, who becomes an

Memorial, its Korean pendant (1995),

which quite literally mirrors Lin’s granite

wall, came prepackaged as an aggre-

gate affair, a compilation of wall, figura-

tive elements, a fountain, and a vertical

accent. In addition to names, garish,

poorly scaled faces are bitten into the

stone, the embarrassingly bad likeness-

es appearing like shrunken heads next

to the reflections of the visitors. The

simple and direct sense of movement in

Lin’s masterpiece is lost amid the bric-

a-brac. One of the criticisms of tradi-

tional memorials in the 1940s was that

they were cluttered and random. So

vehement were the opponents to “use-

less” memorials, that calls went out for

their destruction. The living memorial

was intended, in part, to circumvent the

problem. All of these problems have

returned with the Korean Memorial.

Even the haunting, over-scaled soldiers

who walk tensely in a “field” by the

wall—even they lose their gravitas, as

signage tells us not to walk with them

(to keep off the grass), which is the

very thing we ought to be doing (fig. 9).

As a whole, it is a one-man band of a

memorial, playing almost every memori-

al convention loudly, but playing none

of them well.

The retreat of the singular, iconic

memorial is not complete, but it has

declined in step with the growth of

memorial ghettoes. Every small town

gathers its herd of memorials on a public

square or park, near a courthourse, or

on a remaindered piece of grass at an

interchange now dominated by traffic

(fig. 10). Even in the nation’s densest

urban environment, New York City,

Battery Park has been given over to a

growing collection of memorials,

anchored by the old fort, which casts its

historical aura over the entire park. Here

a number of unrelated memorials have

been asked to talk to one another, the

only unifying theme being that they are

memorials and that commemorative

practices have made it a matter of utility

to build new memorials in the same

space. Behind this utility, however, we

might see the long tradition of the

American cemetery, like Brooklyn’s

Green-Wood Cemetery, which urban

dwellers in the 19th century used as a

picturesque retreat from Manhattan.

Leisure and cultural memory have often

been intertwined in the American land-

scape. In this respect Battery Park is

typical of many towns and cities. Here

sit memorials to the American Merchant

Marines, Wireless Operators (1915),

World War II, Korea (1991), and New

York City Police (1997), as well as a tem-

porary memorial and eternal flame for

September 11th and the Irish Hunger

Memorial, all within the historical pall of

the battery itself. It is New York’s

mementopolis (fig. 11). These conditions

implicate the single memorial in a com-

plicated landscape of history, memory,

leisure, and tourism, whether the space

is designed to be complex, like the

Korean War Memorial in D.C., or

becomes complex through aggregation,

like Battery Park.

IV. MEMORIAL LANDSCAPES

This multiplicity, however, can create a

striking environment when applied at

the right scale with a firm, consistent

hand. Lawrence Halprin’s Franklin

Delano Roosevelt Memorial in D.C. plays

at this game, but within a compelling

and coherent landscape (fig. 12).

Monumental walls of cyclopean boul-

ders shelter a combination of waterfalls,

freestanding sculptures (including one

of FDR in a wheelchair and another of

him with his dog, Fala), famous quota-

tions, and fields of more abstract sculp-

tural elements, all within a linear frame-

work of outdoor “rooms” that chrono-

logically traces his four terms as presi-

dent. The effect is so grand that one

MEMORIALS 7

actor. Its impatience with Abstract

Expressionism transcended a distrust of

the artistic, the fussy, and the inner life

of the artist, to disengage with the rigid

encounter between the work of art on a

wall and the adoring or bored viewer in

a museum. Lin used minimalism to

restore some of the possibility of the

cairn or burial mound, that most ancient

memorial tradition that likens the

unfathomable forces and eons behind

the appearance of an erratic boulder in

a landscape to a life and its loss. The

inconclusiveness of the Vietnam War

and the upheaval associated with it

demanded such a memorial vocabulary.

The multiculturalism born of the same

social forces would demand still a dif-

ferent one.

By the time Lin’s memorial was fin-

ished, multiculturalism was spreading

from the rarefied academy to the vitiat-

ed air of popular culture—and figuration

had returned in art. Hart’s group is prob-

ably the first evidence of multicultural-

ism, that well-intentioned but ultimately

bloated bundle of moralistic restrictions,

making its way into a memorial. The eth-

nic variety of his soldiers was assumed,

an insipid attempt to bronze multicultur-

alism, a matter that demands a deeper

rethinking of the memorial tradition as

well as cultural difference. After all, by

the 1980s even advertising had taken to

what we can now identify as the United

Colors of Benetton strategy (begun in

1982), the marketing of racial or ethnic

variety. There were precedents: The Iwo

Jima Memorial also represented multi-

ple ethnicities, but this reflected the

actual soldiers who staked the flag atop

Mount Suribachi. Frederick Hart’s

memorial, by contrast, is a fiction driven

by a political agenda, albeit an agenda

we might very well agree with—while

ruing the trespass on Lin’s memorial.

The problem is that figuration returned

in the 1980s in the form of a postmodern

critique, a suitable mode for comment-

ing on the Vietnam War, while Hart’s

sculpture is anything but ironic. This

nudges it towards kitsch. His soldiers

also overlook Lin’s memorial from the

best perch for photographs, stitching

the piece into rituals of tourism and the

heritage industry.

Washington thus had two Vietnam

memorials, the first a major advance in

solving the dilemma of figuration in

memorials, achieving something iconic

without using icons; and the second, a

knee-jerk retrenchment and an exercise

in conventionality. This face-off of con-

flicting artistic traditions and of cultural

viewpoints is again typical of the era

that nurtured both liberal political cor-

rectness and conservative family val-

ues. What becomes apparent in hind-

sight is the shaping of a memorial

precinct within the grand necropolis of

D.C., a memorial “room” for Vietnam

within the American temenos. And

democracy was not done serving up the

memorial will of the people, for the sec-

ond memorial was of three men mourn-

ing the loss of mostly male combatants.

Women, too, had played an important

role in the war. Some 11,500 of them

served overseas. They, too, needed rep-

resentation on the Mall. As H. L.

Mencken remarked, in a democracy, the

people get what they want, and they get

it good and hard. So it is with the

Vietnam Women’s Memorial (1993), a

sentimental handmaiden’s tale of a

memorial whose peripheral site

expresses a marginal role for women in

Vietnam (fig. 7). It is so clearly addenda,

a perverse disservice to the very point

of multicultural sensitivity. One wonders

why their names couldn’t be added to

the wall, regardless of gender or race.

Yet the story continues, not with

Vietnam, but with the effort to memorial-

ize the Korean War (fig. 8). As if to fore-

stall the conflicts of the Vietnam War

6 FRAMEWORKS

Figure 7 (left): Vietnam Women’s Memorial Project,Washington, D.C. Olenna Goodacre, 1993.

Figures 8-9 (right, top): Korean War VeteransMemorial, Washington, D.C., 1995.

Figure 10 (right, lower middle): Civil War Memorial,Mystic Seaport, Conn.

Figure 11 (right, bottom): Korean War VeteransMemorial, New York, New York, 1991.

practices have asserted themselves.

The question we need to ask is about

the shape of memorials in the post-Cold

War world, when changes in American

society and globalization are deforming

memorial practices.

V. MEMORIALS AFTER SEPTEMBER 11TH

All of this, naturally, anticipates the

debates over the World Trade Center

Memorial, which inherits these experi-

ments and expectations. It is burdened

by the spatial complications of the trend

toward aggregative memorials and by

the latest fashions in art, including

installations and the advance of digital

and high tech art. Moreover, the multi-

cultural dilemma in memorialization still

has not been solved theoretically, pro-

grammatically or formally.

Multiculturalism may in fact never be

solved with art, and perhaps it should

not be. From the beginning, the

impromptu memorials set up around the

World Trade Center site revealed the

splintering commemorative agenda,

with memorials to policemen, fire fight-

ers, office workers, and a host of other

groups and individuals (fig. 13). These

factions would play an important role in

directing the process and ultimately the

final shape of the memorial, including

the insistence on retaining the footprints

of the old buildings. This alone consti-

tutes a stunning influence of public sen-

timent over the design process, even if

a design competition determined the

ultimate form.

Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s

winning design, “Reflecting Absence,”

takes its cue from the voids left by the

destruction of the towers (see pp. 16-

21). In fact, these are not voids in the lit-

eral sense, since the entire site was a

smoldering pit for months; rather, the

voids correspond with our “mental

map” of the lost buildings. Arad and

Walker imaginatively shaped a memorial

space, turning the voids into recessed

pools, with cascades of water defining

the edges of the former buildings. A

grove of deciduous trees intensifies the

towers’ absence, and their transforma-

tion throughout the year as leaves fall

and buds emerge plays with traditional

memorial ideas of birth and death. The

architects explained these pools as a

sensual, unfolding experience. As visi-

tors descend on the ramps that lead into

the memorial spaces, they are

“removed from the sights and sounds of

the city and immersed in a cool dark-

ness. As they proceed, the sound of

water falling grows louder, and more

daylight filters in to below. At the bottom

of their descent, they find themselves

behind a thin curtain of water, staring

out at an enormous pool.” The chamber

again acts conventionally, bearing the

names of the dead on its walls. Here

convention is not a failure of nerve, but

an attempt to communicate pathos

through well-worn memorial strategies.

In Arad and Walker’s words: “Standing

there at the water’s edge, looking at a

pool of water that is flowing away into

an abyss, a visitor to the site can sense

that what is beyond this curtain of water

and ribbon of names is inaccessible.”

The two chambers are linked under-

ground by a passageway and a small

space where visitors can light memorial

candles or gather in small groups.

Additionally, the designers have

exposed the slurry wall, the massive

foundations of the original buildings.

Some of the artifacts and wreckage

from the disaster will be placed in an

interpretive center, making these palpa-

ble parts of the memorial experience. In

contrast to this public place, a large

stone vessel in a separate room will

contain the remains of unidentified vic-

tims. As a whole, the memorial deli-

cately balances an immensely compli-

cated set of demands, including a vari-

ety of factions with different ideas, a

national tragedy with a strong local

component, the need to mediate

between consumerist and memorial

environments, and the need for a monu-

mental space amidst skyscrapers that

can allow for intimate and personal

encounters with objects. The design

manages to massage all of these ele-

ments together without overdetermin-

ing the experience. This leaves open

the possibility, as with Lin’s Vietnam

War Memorial, of a critical response to

the site and the event. It does not, how-

ever, explicitly accommodate the vari-

ous groups who have demanded repre-

MEMORIALS 9

wonders if even Roosevelt can sustain

this scale. Moreover, the collision of the

monumental spaces with the less con-

vincing smaller sculptures leads unsur-

prisingly to a feeling of bathos. The

strategy might work better with a major

national event, even if we take FDR as

the personification of the American

experience in depression and war. Yet

Halprin, as landscape architect, had the

sensitivity to massage all of these ele-

ments into a single, lucid experience.

Unlike the Korean Memorial, which is

less than the sum of its pieces, the FDR

Memorial is expansive and whole.

A similar idea lies behind ROMA

Design Group’s Martin Luther King, Jr.

Memorial (see pp. 12-15), planned for

D.C. and conceived as “an engaging

landscape experience tied to other land-

scapes and monuments, not as a single

object or memorial dominating the site.”

The idea reacts against the monumental,

iconic memorial tradition, not through

restraint, as Maya Lin had done, but

rather through complexity and immer-

sion in a landscape. It is also quite dif-

ferent from the anti-memorials popular-

ized in Germany in recent decades,

although it does operate as a critique of

traditional memorials. Eschewing a “sin-

gle message,” ROMA Design Group has

woven a composition of landscape ele-

ments (stone, water, and trees) along a

forceful, curving berm faced in stone

and engraved with famous quotes from

King. Atop the berm runs a tree-lined

path marked with intimate niches that

serve as “wellsprings” recounting the

contribution of “martyrs” to the Civil

Rights Movement. Elsewhere monoliths

frame views of the Jefferson and Lincoln

Memorials, linking MLK with an axis of

“larger democratic ideals that form the

context for King’s words and deeds.”

Another monolith carved with a likeness

of King serves as a monumental coun-

terpoint to the Jefferson Memorial, a

much-needed anchor for the space.

Time will tell if this strategy leads to

effective and moving commemoration.

The larger trend expressed in

Halprin’s FDR Memorial and ROMA

Design Group’s MLK Memorial might

give us pause: These are environments

whose massive scale and complexity

are new developments. Naturally the

problem begins with the program, not

with the architects. Nonetheless, as

memorial landscapes, they immodestly

annex landscape in general, threatening

to make all public space memorial

space. In other words, does the memori-

al fetish noted at the opening of this

essay reverse the problem that modern

designers have with the singular, iconic

memorial—namely that its gravitational

pull leaves little room for a diversity of

experience or commemorative prac-

tice? Does the new sprawling memorial

landscape resist potent commemoration

because it fails to define memory and

place in terms of commemorative prac-

tice? If we disperse memorial spaces,

then how do we distinguish between

the sacred and the profane, between

landscapes of play and landscapes of

memory? And is this slippage signifi-

cant? We might aim instead to shape

our memorials in terms of commemora-

tive practices rather than through land-

scape and artistic practices. The stiff

old Civil War memorials or the dough-

boys erected after World War I may

have asserted a single master narrative.

They might even be said to glorify war

uncritically. But at least they provided

an uncomplicated anchor in public

space where a community could meet

to perform its annual rituals on

Memorial Day and Veterans Day. These

rites may now contend with barbecues

and sporting events, offering a conven-

ient day off from work rather than true

days of commemoration, but they have

not waned entirely, and other memorial

8 FRAMEWORKS

Figure 12 (left): Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial,Washington, D.C. Office of Lawrence Halprin, 1997.Photo: Lawrence Halprin.

Figure 13 (left): Impromptu memorial at Ground Zeroafter September 11th, 2001. Photo by AndrewShanken.

that took place in the cabin of an air-

plane into a contemplative experience of

verdant farmland. A generation ago, the

urge would have been to monumentalize

the site of the crash with a ruined air-

plane, a plaque, or a sculptural element

that marked the spot. But here the

memorial landscape makes sense; it

uses the land to explain the event, and it

does so in the service of a memorial

experience. The form of the memorial, in

other words, derives from its commemo-

rative function. In some sense, the

Lovingers’s design is traditional, a wall

inscribed with names and a narrative,

but its scale and site plan elaborate inci-

sively on this tradition.

One wonders what future generations

will think of this memorial mania. Will it

be seen as a return to the 19th-century

obsession with forging permanent mem-

ories in the face of unprecedented

change and the violent upheavals of the

Industrial Revolution? Is the current

memorial binge also an attempt to find

temporal anchors in a world undergoing

rapid changes driven by digital technol-

ogy, virtualization, and biotechnology,

including cloning and genetic engineer-

ing? What we do know is that memori-

als, like their creators, come and go.

The intense scrutiny of the present will

fade with the years. Time will render

meaningless even the most contentious

memorials: Imagine a future moment

when a child asks a parent to explain a

wall of names on granite and the parent

does not know it is the Vietnam

Memorial. Rome memorialized with

such vigor that precincts became over-

crowded with memorials, forcing the

city to periodically sweep them away,

making room for the next round. We’ve

all seen memorials to Lenin or Stalin

toppled and, more recently, statues of

Saddam Hussein lassoed down.

The ancients might also give us

pause in other ways. After the Persians

sacked Athens, Athenians observed a

50-year period of waiting before they

built on the temple mount, an immensely

patient, solemn, and wise response to

destruction—one we might learn from in

New York. Such maturity, however, is

unthinkable in America’s First City, espe-

cially in its financial center, where land

values demand instant gratification—

although we might note that the

Acropolis is hardly a low-rent property.

In our eagerness to do something at

Ground Zero, we forget that memorial-

ization and the profit motive are forever

at odds, which is why memorials end up

orphaned on odd patches of public land.

The cynical response to all of this is to

conclude that no matter what design we

choose in our memorials, they reflect

currents in art and architecture, and, as

forms of social commentary, they

become outdated within a generation or

two. In effect, most memorials are built

not for posterity or for longevity but as

part of the mourning process. They con-

stitute an essential part of people in the

present working through loss. Their

obsolescence is tied to their efficacy, a

sign of the end of grieving, and memori-

als that live on suggest a cultural snag, a

lack of resolution. Still, the architectural

historian in me wishes that all of these

memorials outlive their usefulness.

1. Edith M. Stern, “Legacy to the Living,”

Coronet 17 (Feb. 1945): 12.

2. For the Iwo Jima Memorial, see Karal Ann

Marling and John Wetenhall, Iwo Jima:

Monuments, Memories, and the American Hero

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

1991).

3. Ibid., 14, 31.

Andrew M. Shanken is an assistant pro-

fessor of architecture at the College of

Environmental Design.

MEMORIALS 11

sentation at the site, and as a national

memorial to the event, it should not be

so encumbered. These groups will find

their memorial places.

VI. EMERGING FORMS

In 2004, the Board of Directors of the

National AIDS Memorial Grove held a

competition for the design of a National

AIDS Memorial. The brief challenged

competitors to think in terms of the

whole seven-acre site nestled in a dell

in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

The open-ended invitation to use the

dell, which already sustains a variety

found in memorial markers to AIDS,

suggested the sort of memorial land-

scape of the FDR and MLK memorials.

But the subject of the memorial, the

AIDS epidemic, offered a range of new

issues. Not only would the project

memorialize those lost to the disease,

but also, the board hoped, the design

would stimulate thinking about AIDS and

memory, promote hope for those

touched by the disease, increase aware-

ness of AIDS as a global tragedy, edu-

cate the public, raise awareness about

the Grove, enhance its beauty, and

“secure, through design acclaim, the

care of the Grove in the future.” A tall

order. Unlike the destruction of the

World Trade Center, which was geo-

graphically focused and visually iconic,

AIDS is a dispersed, misunderstood,

constantly shifting, and ongoing tragedy.

It is virtually impossible to encompass.

To grasp the numbers of victims alone

goes beyond the ken of most Americans,

and to understand the social and cultur-

al impact reaches still further.

Not surprisingly, given the program and

current trends in architecture, the vast

majority of entries envisioned “fields” of

architectural or sculptural intervention

rather than single objects. In part, this

could be a response to highly publicized

memorials like Peter Eisenman’s

Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, a seem-

ingly infinite field of stone megaliths in a

plaza whose scale and maze-like quali-

ties suggest the ineffable while obstruct-

ing, occluding, and resisting the visitor’s

view. In the AIDS Memorial competion,

the winning design, chosen from more

than 200 entries, added heavy symbolism

to the idea of a field. Janette Kim and

Chloe Town, who incorrectly appropriat-

ed the term “Living Memorial” for their

title, proposed an area blackened as if

by ritual burn—“as if” because an actual

fire in arid, windy, fire-wary San

Francisco would be out of the question.

The symbolism, at first dark and frighten-

ing, is meant to evoke hope, since out of

the charred remains of a simulated for-

est fire new life would emerge. Were the

design attached to real ritual burning,

one could imagine an immensely evoca-

tive memorial, one tied to annual com-

memorations and to the natural cycle of

death and rebirth. This would match the

unresolved nature of the AIDS epidemic,

and it would do so viscerally. But since

the idea must be reduced to a static,

sculptural suggestion of this process,

much of the dynamism and interactive

possibilities are lost.

Professor Raveevarn Choksam-

batchai of the College of Environmental

Design, working with Department of

Architecture graduates Jacob Atherton

and Michael Eggers, and the author of

this article as consultant, were also

finalists in the competition. The team’s

project included a field of dense, red,

resinous rods that would glow with

phosphorescence at night and an audio

component in which voices eerily count

nonconsecutive numbers (fig. 14; also

see pp. 38-39). Humming-birds would

create a canopy as they hover over the

sugar-water-filled rods. Choksambatchi,

who has already designed the Woman

Suffrage Memorial in St. Paul (2000) and

an unbuilt Vietnam Veterans Memorial in

Minneapolis, renounced prescriptive

symbolism for a more direct, emotive

appeal through a landscape installation

that operates actively through multisen-

sorial engagement. She likened the

experience of the memorial to the sen-

sation of turbulence in an airplane,

when an otherwise smooth flight hits an

air pocket and suddenly jolts us back

into the reality that we’re perilously

hurtling through the air at 500 miles per

hour, 30,000 feet above the ground. With

time people have been lulled into apathy

about AIDS. This project aimed to

reawaken the fact of its immanent

threat. Its resistance to specific mean-

ing, however, elaborated on the trend

toward open-ended narratives in memo-

rials, and it did so with political inten-

tions. Memorials tend to name and num-

ber; their quantitative certainty bounds

them. Choksambatchai’s memorial, by

contrast, rejected the act of quantifica-

tion as inadequate to the memorial work

demanded by the AIDS epidemic.

Instead she proposed a rich environ-

ment demanding that visitors question

their reality and their relationship to the

disease and its ramifications, while pre-

senting hope for the future.

Along similar lines, Leor Lovinger,

MLA ‘03, and Gilat Lovinger’s design for

the Flight 93 National Memorial, titled

“Disturbed Harmony,” a finalist from

more than 1,000 entries in the competi-

tion, manipulates an immense landscape

to bring out the strange collision of the

terrorist hijacking and the vernacular

landscape of rural Pennsylvania (see pp.

22-25). A 2.5-mile granite wall (called the

Bravery Wall) meanders through the

gentle undulations of the land. It is both

a memorial wall and a timeline of the

event, so that the last moments of this

harrowing flight slowly unfold as one

walks along the wall. The surreal juxta-

position is both spatial and temporal,

drawing out seconds of frenetic tragedy

10 FRAMEWORKS

FW

Figure 14 (right): National AIDS Memorial Grovecompetition. Raveevarn Choksombatchai, JacobAtherton, Michael Eggers, Andrew Shanken, 2005.

water, stone, and trees—to heighten the

experience of place and to evoke the

kind of emotional response that Dr. King

conveyed in his poetic use of language.

It contributes to the larger Olmstedian

landscape of the National Mall and is

located on a four-acre site that will be

created by the relocation of the existing

West Basin Drive. The site strengthens

the axial relationship between the King,

Jefferson, and Lincoln memorials and

expresses the evolving message of

democracy through the continuum of

time, from the Declaration of

Independence to the Gettysburg

Address to the Civil Rights speech Dr.

King delivered on the steps of the

Lincoln Memorial in 1963.

This memorial is not designed to

be experienced in a single way, with a

single message, but rather to have a

broad accessibility that appeals to all of

the senses, with diverse, repetitive ,and

overlapping themes. The introduction of

an arcing berm into the dominant hori-

zontality of the site creates a complexity

of spaces suitable for moving, viewing,

sitting, meeting, speaking, and congre-

gating in large and small groups. The cir-

cular geometry of the memorial juxta-

posed with the triangular configuration

of the site engages the tidal basin and

frames views to the water, creating a

space that is peaceful and expansive

and that, in its form, nurtures inclusivity

and a sense of community. Within the

space, the words of Dr. King are incised

on a curving wall of water, heightening

visitors’ sensory experiences and adding

to the understanding of his message of

freedom, justice, and peace. The memo-

rial engages the visitor by revealing the

struggle of the movement and the prom-

ise of democracy, with the “Mountain of

Despair” (the twin portals of stone flank-

ing the entry) opening onto the “Stone of

Hope” (a solitary monolith hewn from

the two entry pieces). The image of Dr.

King emerges from the “Stone of Hope,”

standing vigil and awaiting delivery of

the promise “that all men, yes, black

men as well as white men, would be

guaranteed the unalienable rights of life,

liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

This is a memorial that celebrates

Dr. King’s hope and optimistic spirit, as

well as the value he placed on active

citizenship rather than complacency and

submission. It is not intended to be a

eulogy, nor to focus on death or

enshrinement. As Dr. King said, “Death

is a comma, not a period.” When the

cherry trees blossom in the springtime

marking the season of his death, they

will celebrate Dr. King’s life and achieve-

ment. The memorial is intended to be

personally transformative for visitors,

building a sense of commitment to the

promise of positive social change and

higher levels of achievement related to

human rights and civil liberties.

For more info on the MLK

Memorial, visit www.buildthedream.org

or call 888-4-THE-DREAM.

In 2000, ROMA Design Group won the

international design competition for the

Martin Luther King National Memorial in

Washington, D.C. There were more than

1,000 competition entries, and members

of the design jury included Ricardo

Legoretta, Charles Correia, the designer

of the Gandhi Memorial, and Randy

Hester, professor of Landscape

Architecture at UC Berkeley, amongst

others. After winning the competition,

ROMA formed a Joint Venture with the

Devrouax & Purnell in Washington, D.C.

for the implementation of the design.

Construction is expected to begin by

November 2006 and be completed in 2008.

Graduates of UC Berkeley that have con-

tributed to the project as part of ROMA

Design Group include Bonnie Fisher, MLA

’80, Joel Tomei MArch ’67, Dipti Garg

MUD ’03 and Carl Baker BA Arch ’99.

The Martin Luther King Jr. National

Memorial is designed to increase our

awareness of Dr. King’s message

regarding human rights and civil liberties

and to help build an understanding of his

role as a leader in the Civil Rights

Movement and his legacy in shaping the

meaning of democracy in America. The

project is conceived within the environ-

mental tradition that characterizes more

recent memorials such as the Vietnam

War and the FDR memorials, rather than

the single monument or commemorative

building of previous eras. The King

Memorial utilizes landscape elements—

12 FRAMEWORKS MEMORIALS 13

MARTIN LUTHER KING MEMORIALBonnie Fisher MLA ‘80 / ROMA Design Group

Project Team:The Joint Venture project team is led by Paul Devrouax, Managing Principal; Boris Dramov, Design Principal;and Bonnie Fisher, Landscape Principal (M.L.A. ’80).

Key staff of ROMA Design Group’s current effort include Mimi Ahn, Craig McGlynn, Jim Leritz, Joel Tomei(B.Arch., and M.Arch., ‘67), Dipti Garg (M.U.D., ’03), and Robert Holloway.

Key members of the design team for the competition include Boris Dramov, Design Team Leader, Bonnie Fisher(M.L.A. ‘80), Burton Miller, Robert Holloway and Carl Baker (BA in Arch., ’99). In addition to ROMA, other keymembers contributing to the design competition include Christopher Grubbs (illustrator) and Dr. ClayborneCarson (historical consultant).

All images courtesy ROMA Design Group. Renderings by Christopher Grubbs Illustrator

14 FRAMEWORKS MEMORIALS 15

Photo: Gerald Ratto

Mansion, and the focus was on the

park––we had worked like you do at

school—producing thumbnail sketches.

Fortunately the jury could deal with it.

So that was a good meeting, though

very short—30 minutes.

I came back to Berkeley, and on

Tuesday we got a telephone call

regarding questions about some things

the jury was still worried about, and

whether we would be willing to resolve

these things. When you are a petition-

er, what are you going to do, say no?

So we said yes. They said, Fine, we will

send you a letter of understanding. Will

you sign it? I was a little apprehensive,

because we really weren’t very keen

about some of the things that they

wanted us to look at. So they faxed it, I

signed it and faxed it back. Michael did

the same. They called back an hour

later and said, You have it.

We had more meetings in

Berkeley and in New York with

Libeskind and the agency. The public

presentation with the governor, the

mayor, and press from everywhere was

on Wednesday morning. So we negoti-

ated through that weekend with Daniel

and finally found a place for the cultur-

al buildings, and I think about 3:00 p.m.

Sunday afternoon, not on paper but in

sketches, we had our scheme. Michael

did not have an office, not even a sec-

retary. He was working out of his bed-

room, and I was there without anybody

from our office. If I had been smart

about it, I would have taken someone.

Late Sunday we got the model pretty

well finished in terms of where the cul-

tural buildings would go. All that after-

noon and night I was working on the

landscape plan at the scale of the

model using yellow trace and rulers.

The following morning they took my

tracing, put it on the model, and drilled

holes through the trace to show where

the trees were. He destroyed the draw-

ing while he was making the model. It

was OK. It worked! It looked pretty

good. Wednesday was the television

day. We had our first TV show at about

7:30 AM and in between the jury, the

governor, the mayor, and doing the

presentation, we were wiped out.

JB: Why do you think the jury chose

this particular entry? What about it do

you think pushed them over the edge in

your favor?

PW: I like to think they liked Michael’s

idea because it is quite somber and

tomblike. Many of the others were very

theatrical and required tremendous

amounts of maintenance. Not that this

one doesn’t. But they were very com-

plex. One of the problems in doing the

park was to not lose the ground plane,

which is the key to the voids. If the

voids were going down through shrub-

bery, it would not work.

The last thing that I think

appealed to the jury was this idea of

moving from somber darkness to light,

which is really talking about death,

mostly, but extending the dimension of

the scheme to something that was also

living. When you come up, you should

feel that life can go on. You should have

this sense of life. Through the use of

plant materials we are going to do

things to dramatize seasonal change

like we did at Saitama, Japan, and make

that cycle of the seasons apparent.

MEMORIALS 17

It has been more than a year and a half

since exactly 5,201 entries for the

design of a World Trade Center

Memorial in the heart of New York City’s

financial district were reviewed by a

diverse 13-member panel comprising

professional architects, landscape

architects, and victims’ family members.

The widely publicized project was

awarded in early 2004 to Michael Arad,

an architect at the New York City

Housing Authority, and Peter Walker, a

Berkeley landscape architect and for-

mer chair of the CED Landscape

Architecture and Environmental

Planning Department.

In February 2004, a mere month

after the competition ended, I first spoke

with Peter Walker at his office in

Berkeley about the details of what could

be considered the commission of a life-

time for most practitioners. The honey-

moon glow of the design process was

burning bright, and expectations for both

the site plan and the memorial were rid-

ing high on a wave of media attention,

public interest, and political clout.

Not all good things go exactly

according to plan, however. While

progress is indeed being made, it is

largely invisible to those outside the cir-

cle of the Lower Manhattan

Development Corporation. Today, with

the exception of the rebuilt PATH train

station, Ground Zero remains largely

unchanged since the cleanup ended in

May 2003, with political interests, secu-

rity concerns, design changes, and a

less than robust market for new office

space plaguing the project and testing

the faith of even the most optimistic

onlookers that the project will achieve

the aspirations it laid out in 2001.

Current estimates place the final build-

out for the site planned by Daniel

Libeskind at about 2012 and include not

just Arad and Walker’s memorial but a

skyscraper dubbed the Freedom Tower,

being designed by David Childs of

Skidmore Owings and Merrill, a transit

center by Santiago Calatrava, a cultural

center by Norwegian firm Snohetta, and

a theater by Frank Gehry.

Recently, after 18 eighteen

months of design work for the memorial

had been completed, and with likely

enough negotiation skills to write a

how-to book, I had the opportunity to

speak to Walker again by phone (he

currently spends at least half of his time

in New York City) and revisit his

thoughts on the project, the players, the

politics, and the media coverage sur-

rounding one of the best-known design

projects in the world.

What follows are two interviews

that present an interesting juxtaposition

of viewpoints not just on a complicated,

high-profile project upon which the

expectations of a nation are hanging,

but on the evolution of the design

process itself. Here is Walker’s version

of the ubiquitous roller-coaster ride that

most designers are all too familiar with:

the brief thrill of the conceptual design

and its intoxicating potency, followed by

the infinite endurance required to sur-

vive the critics, design changes, budget

negotiations, and political roadblocks

and to bring the project to fruition.

FEBRUARY 2004

Jennifer Brooke: Could you explain

how you came to be on this competition

team and what it has been like to work

with Michael Arad, a relatively young

designer?

Peter Walker: One of the questions

Michael was initially asked about was

the plaza, which originally he had left

completely open. The jury also insisted

that he put in some cultural buildings.

The other area they asked him about

was the park, and they said, Why don’t

you talk it over with some landscape

architect. When I got the call from

Michael, I did not really know which

scheme he represented. I had seen the

competition schemes in the paper, but

none of the names looked familiar. Once

we found out which one was Michael’s,

I told him we would be interested. We

started to live by the fax machine and

telephone, and we were feeding infor-

mation back to the jury by answering

questions verbally about our intentions,

accompanied by a few [faxed] sketches.

Shortly after that the jury wanted

to have a meeting with the two of us. I

flew back to New York on Saturday and

called him up and asked, How are

things going? He said that the jury want-

ed a meeting on Sunday at 9:00 a.m. So I

said, Fine, let’s meet at 7:00. You and I

need to know what each other looks

like. So we had breakfast and he

brought his boards, and there we were

in the hotel and we were down on the

floor with his drawings. So we gathered

them all up and we went up to Gracie

16 FRAMEWORKS

THE WORLD TRADE CENTER MEMORIAL: Two interviews with Peter Walker

by Jennifer Brooke

All images courtesy the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.

JB: If a person could visit the memorial

and walk away with one thing, what

would you like that to be?

PW: I think it is like any memorial. You

hope they retain some composite but

distinctive image that will stay with

them. You want to compete with the

great monuments. You also want to

have something that fits on a postcard

so that you instantly know what it is.

Something iconographic. I think that’s

the strength of Michael’s initial scheme.

I’m sure that’s what attracted the jury.

JB: Due to the significant role land-

scape plays in this memorial, do you

think this will change the way the gen-

eral public perceives landscape archi-

tecture as a profession. Do you think

this project has the potential to do that?

PW: I think that there is a fair amount of

lip service given to landscape architec-

ture. People who live in cities really like

their parks, but they are not seen as

designed, even though they are. They

are seen as historical expressions, like

Bryant Park, or they are seen as expres-

sions of nature, like Central Park. I think

the artifice gets lost, and I think the

proof of that is, when they cease to be

maintained or cared for, no one com-

plains. I don’t think they are seen in the

sort of crystalline way architecture is

seen, and I don’t think this is going to

change much. It probably will change

things for us as designers, because

clients will show a willingness to do

things that they would not have other-

wise thought about. I can’t tell you how

many times in this thing I have used

Battery Park or Bryant Park as an exam-

ple of what I was talking about and

found that most people don’t think of

them as specific artifacts. So I think this

may add to the vocabulary. A vocabu-

lary is obviously already there, but it’s

not a vocabulary people are using to

make policy.

JB: Given all the players involved and

all the constituencies that have a vest-

ed interest in the project, how difficult

is it going to be to get this built the way

that you and Michael have sat down

and talked about it?

PW: I think it is going to be difficult, but

we have some power in the situation

because the vision has been more or

less accepted by everybody and if it is

not realized, someone will object. I

don’t believe there is anybody who

really wants to get rid of the design

idea. We have not heard of many who

oppose the scheme. As I said, every-

body has been really supportive. Even

the people who have objections seem

to understand the scheme.

AUGUST 2005

JB: At the start you knew that this

would be a difficult project to realize

as it was conceived by Michael Arad

and yourself. Has it been more difficult

than you expected?

PW: What has been more difficult than I

imagined was the amount of time it

takes to deal with the composite prob-

lem the memorial has posed. We had

always assumed that it would be a big

design effort, construction effort, and a

technical research effort, as every proj-

ect is. But we’re doing it all under

intense public scrutiny, and because of

the public scrutiny, there is a tremen-

dous amount of political direction which

we never could have imagined.

Put all these things together and

it has consumed the office, every waking

moment. We now travel a full four days a

month, taking these chunks of time away

from the office. We originally assumed

that we’d be traveling east every two

weeks through schematic design, and

then perhaps every three weeks, but we

didn’t expect a conference call every

day. It has put the office in the position of

having to turn away work. We’ve had to

increase our staff more than we’d like,

and it’s taking our upper-level manage-

ment away from the office. The time

requirements and their continuation are

more than we expected. We always

knew of the highly public nature of the

project but didn’t think we’d be trying to

design while under investigation. It’s like

having two jobs. You have your daily job

with the project, and then you have this

other job dealing with the larger political

and media issues.

JB: Where are you now in the design

process for the memorial? Is there an

end in sight?

PW: We’re moving forward. The last

year has not been unproductive. This is

probably the most demanding design

project I’ve ever had. We are just now

finishing design development on the

project. We’ve got more than a typical

DD package done; we also have our

trees tagged, the pool plumbing worked

MEMORIALS 19

JB: So what role is landscape playing

in the overall concept of the memorial?

PW: In the original scheme, Michael

had used a few pines to make it seem

sort of bereft of life, to make it seem

very, very still. But I think the mood was

not quite right because they all looked

the same. Michael got that. In the

Eastern climate, you might use

sycamore trees, and add some locust or

flowering trees in order to get a little

variety in throughout the seasons.

At Saitama [a Peter Walker &

Partners project in Japan] we used just

one species of tree and it is remarkable.

But we needed something more com-

plex here. We are going to use several

different ground covers: some mosses,

and 80 percent grass because it is going

to take a beating. The parapets are

stone, and we are using stone paving in

very long, narrow pieces because we

have different geometries moving across

the site. If you enter one way, you see a

natural form of planting that contrasts

with the form of the memorial, and if you

enter from the other way, you see an

organization of tree-trunk colonnades

playing against the voids. So there are

two different effects depending on

which way you turn. We are trying to get

a lot out of a little. There is a grassed

glade for the families, who meet twice a

year, in the spring and on Sept. 11.

JB: In the minds of many design profes-

sionals, the World Trade Center is not

just the commission of the decade but

perhaps the commission of the century.

How difficult has it been thus far work-

ing under the intense media glare—the

eyes of the world?

PW: From our standpoint the numbers of

different people who are involved and

the media essentially make it a very

open process. It’s like everyone is in the

room all the time. All the information is

gathered by these agencies, and it

comes out through them. It’s a complete-

ly different way of working. It’s more like

being a politician, where you are con-

stantly making public presentations in

one form or the other. We are only a

month into this. It’s got to calm down.

The difficulty with all the media

attention is that when I’m in Berkeley, I

sometimes spend half a day on inter-

views. The World Trade Center

Memorial is nice in that everyone wish-

es you well. The New York Times did a

series of articles that are just terrific,

posing questions about how the water

features in the project can actually be

managed. They have asked questions

about safety (not security in the terrorist

sense). Currently there is a big issue

about whether these memorial spaces

are precisely over the tower footprints.

What has happened is that the infra-

structure has moved into the footprints,

which makes it difficult not to slip over

on either side. The question of the foot-

print is a real issue to a certain number

of people and by getting it out, it’s like a

public meeting—you may take the heat

out of that particular issue. In other

words, it raises the question early

enough so that you don’t get blindsided

later on. The media is very sophisticat-

ed, very knowledgeable about politics.

We have an awful lot of masters

on the project, plus two of the largest

agencies in the United States, plus HUD

at some point, in addition to the gover-

nor’s office and mayor’s office, which

are gigantic. The families are a tremen-

dously diverse group, with many differ-

ent points of view. The thing that holds

them together is their grief, which is

very immediate when you are in the

midst of it.

JB: The Vietnam Memorial changed the

way people think about memorials. Do

you think this memorial has the same

potential to do that, or do you think it is

at such a different scale that it is com-

pletely different?

PW: I don’t know. The Vietnam

Memorial contrasts a sort of

Olmstedian landscape against a mini-

mal element. This memorial is really

playing at a larger scale against a very

urban landscape. So in this way they

are very unlike each other. The WTC

memorial spaces have a below-ground

spiritual dimension that the Vietnam

Memorial does not have. This memori-

al is entered by going down from light

into darkness and out to the light

again. It has a theatrical dimension. I

think that lack of theatricality in the

Vietnam Memorial is what is so great

about it. The idea in the WTC Memorial

is not like that. People are going to

compare them, but they really are

completely different.

18 FRAMEWORKS

have met people that have been

extraordinarily helpful in cutting through

the red tape, championing causes,

addressing the more cruel questions

that are constantly put to us. Some of

these people will be friends for the rest

of my life. These are people that are on

the board, they are family members,

they are agency members, and even

one or two members of the press that

have been very careful to tell the whole

story and avoid looking for the most

contentious bytes of information. The

mayor and the governor of New York

have also shown incredible support and

dedicated interest in the project and

that has been great.

JB: This isn’t really the kind of project

you build, take photos of, and revisit a

few years later. How does this project

fit into the trajectory of your career?

PW: It might kill me! [Laughs] This proj-

ect is different than most others I’ve

worked on, because it is open to the

public but is run by a foundation. It is

also unlike many other projects I’ve

worked on in that it is endowed. Unlike

a project like a public college campus,

where you finish and it gets turned

over to the students and administra-

tion, a private group is running this.

This will be a continuous operation,

and I’m sure that we will continue to be

involved. Our office will be on call in

the horticultural sense but also with

the people management. I’m sure there

will be some revisiting of elements, and

they won’t stay exactly the same.

When you are dealing with landscape,

plants deteriorate and need mainte-

nance, and we will of course need to

respond to things that happen that no

one could anticipate.

I’ve never had a client like this,

one that was both knowledgeable and

eternal. I think about Le Notre and

Olmsted and the skills they had in

dealing with large institutions similar

to this, and I just wish I had more

years to work in this part of my

career. I should have had clients like

these years ago! Some landscape

architects reach this point earlier in

their life. Most landscape architects

have to slog through the smaller and

less interesting projects that it takes

to get to something like this. Now,

MEMORIALS 21

out, and coordination with Calatrava and

Snohetta underway. Much of the coordi-

nation is coming to a head. Many of the

consultants started after us but have

had an easier time. We’re in the position

of having to do coordination like this

while we’re in design development. It

would have been a lot easier to coordi-

nate if we had been able to do it earlier.

JB: Significant design elements for the

memorial, particularly the ceremonial

procession from above ground to below

ground have undergone significant

changes. How is the design team deal-

ing with decisions to alter such an

important aspect of the original design?

PW: When we first started with the con-

ceptual plans as they were laid out in

the competition scheme, we did not

have a solution to all the problems.

Many of these decisions have improved

the project. We expected to do design

alternatives. Our task was to produce a

memorial that worked according to the

conceptual direction of Michael’s plan,

but also produce a public open space

that didn’t destroy the memorial. Michael

has really kept his eye on the memorial

part of the project, while I’ve kept an eye

on the public open space. The plaza

must be respectful of the memorial and

not destroy the mood. The mood is what

needs to be balanced with all the sug-

gestions for things such as concerts in

the plaza. The mood is very important.

Like we’ve done on other program-sen-

sitive projects like the Nasher Sculpture

Center, we’ve had to take some things

that we don’t want to see, but that are

still necessary to the functioning of the

project, and make them invisible. The

design process is the same as other

projects in that there are ideas and you

have to fight for some and let others go,

but in this case we’ve had to take on all

comers from all directions.

There will be 5 million people a

year visiting this site, but they don’t all

come at once! Even so, it should be

possible to maintain the solemnity of the

place despite its public nature by con-

trolling the number of people in any

space at one time and carefully consid-

ering the devices to control their behav-

ior. Things like signage, buying tickets,

the numbers of people moving from one

space to another are all being specifi-

cally considered. Too many people in

one room or location could take away

from the mood of the place, so it is

important to control movement with

careful manipulations in the landscape

materials. For example, movements of

people going to and from work can be

handled with pavement choices and

barriers. We considered putting a wall

around the site at the beginning—a low

parapet, or even a hedge with one or

two access points—but we wanted to

be more subtle than that. It is different

than the Vietnam Memorial, which sits

in the park and works in relationship to

it. In our case there is no park. We are

the park. Parks are prized in a city such

as New York. Park space in the city is at

a premium, and the parks are beloved.

The difficulty here is that there will be

use restrictions, and we have to design

for them. This park will not be able to be

used the way people are accustomed to

using other parks, for Frisbee, dogs, and

shortcuts for commuters.

JB: Have there been any pleasant sur-

prises since you have begun? Things

you didn’t expect?

PW: We’ve been able to accomplish

things in the bureaucracies that we

never expected. And the people! We

20 FRAMEWORKS

because of this project, we have more

projects of this caliber in the office,

not memorials necessarily but proj-

ects that I just wish that I had 20 more

years to work on.

Jennifer Brooke is an assistant profes-

sor of landscape architecture and envi-

ronmental planning at the College of

Environmental Design.

FW

22 FRAMEWORKS MEMORIALS 23

In January 2005, Disturbed Harmony, by

Leor Lovinger MLA ’03, was chosen as

one of five finalists out of more than

1,000 entries for the Flight 93 National

Memorial. The winning scheme will be

announced in early September 2005.

On Sept. 11, 2001, our cities, our land-

scapes, and our lives were under

attack. Their rhythms and harmony were

disturbed. That day, the 40 passengers

and crew of Flight 93 acted as the coun-

try’s first line of defense.

Our concept for a Bravery Wall,

with its inscriptions crossing the

rolling rural landscape, was inspired

by the stories of the telephone calls

between the heroes of Flight 93 and

their loved ones, through which we all

learned about their collective acts of

sacrifice and courage. As the wall

moves north to south toward the

Sacred Ground, ending at the Circle of

Heroism, it symbolizes how 40 individu-

als, bound by fate, confronted evil and

chose to act. Because of their actions,

Flight 93 will be remembered forever—

not in infamy but for their unconquer-

able human spirit and messages of

hope and love.

The scale of the proposed Flight

93 Memorial Park and the rural setting

provide the opportunity to create a

unique experience. The dragline tells

the story of a land in the process of

reclamation. Learning about the site’s

mining history and witnessing its recla-

mation resonates with visitors to the

memorial, as they acknowledge the past

while looking ahead and anticipating the

healing of our wounds.

The Bravery Wall, the memorial’s

spine, has a strong presence in the

2,200-acre site, yet it will complement

the landscape rather than overpower-

ing it. The Bravery Wall unfolds before

the visitors as they move through the

park, providing many levels of intimacy

and opportunities for remembrance and

contemplation. Wind, sunlight, sky pat-

terns, and snow transform visitors’

experiences of the wall, making every

visit unique.

The full length of the Bravery

Wall, crossing the Field of Honor, con-

veys the magnitude of loss of human life

on Sept. 11, as one imagines 3,021 peo-

ple standing hand-in-hand, stretching

the wall’s entire 11,000-foot length

across the landscape. An anniversary

walk will transform this line in the land-

scape into a ribbon of life, as partici-

pants remember those lost and learn

about Flight 93 and the heroes, acknowl-

edge their sacrifice and heroism in the

face of infamy, and gain a better under-

standing of the enduring human spirit.

The hard rock qualities of the

granite used in the Bravery Wall blocks

are a fitting testimonial to the strength

exhibited by those aboard Flight 93. We

propose an earth-toned granite, similar

in color to the local fieldstone, that will

blend with the environment and with-

stand the harsh site conditions for cen-

turies to come.

As heroism is the outcome of

bravery, the Bravery Wall ends at the

Circle of Heroism. The Circle of Heroism

symbolizes the 40 individuals coming

DISTURBED HARMONYFlight 93 National Memorial Leor Lovinger MLA ‘03

together in an act of collective courage

that would change history. Forty stone

columns have been carefully located

within a setting of stepped terraces,

with views across the meadow to the

Sacred Ground. Annual events in the

space will encourage us to reflect upon

the heroes’ connectedness and cele-

brate our own, while acknowledging

them and ourselves as individuals.

We envision a memorial that

engages visitors beyond the park

boundary, including nearby towns and

neighbors. Commemorative benches,

donated by local youth, provide resting

spots along the Bravery Wall, and con-

venient locations have been planned

where local “ambassadors” can contin-

ue to enrich visitors’ experiences. Both

serve to link visitors to local communi-

ties. Views of the dragline, and out to

the surrounding countryside and Laurel

Ridge, connect visitors to the region.

The Circle of Heroism includes an area

where visitors from across the nation

and beyond can weave a tapestry of

tribute to the fallen heroes through

words, symbols, or cherished posses-

sions left behind.

As visitors watch others experi-

ence the memorial, commune with the

wall, and hear the echoes of the heroes’

voices, they may be drawn to reflect on

the values by which they live their lives.

Though we are creating a national

memorial, which will be a place of inspi-

ration and hope for all who see it, the

site will forever remain the setting for

the Sacred Ground, the final resting

place of 40 very uncommon souls.

Project Team:Leor Lovinger MLA ‘03, Gilat Lovinger, and Office ofLawrence Halprin.

24 FRAMEWORKS MEMORIALS 25

and designers, the Vietnam Veterans

Memorial has set what some might call

an inescapable precedent for the design

of commemorative memorials. It is one

of the most widely discussed memorials

among historians, art and architecture

critics, and cultural theorists, as well as

an internationally circulated icon of

America as a whole.6

Although the length of the design

and construction process measured

less than two years, it was defined by

both internal and external controversies

from the start. The Vietnam Veterans

Memorial Fund, whose principal finan-

ciers included Texas billionaire Ross

Perot, raised more than $8 million to

fund the memorial.7 When veteran Jan

Scruggs founded the VVMF in 1979, one

of the motivations behind the construc-

tion of a memorial was that it would

help to quell the discord among veter-

ans. But internal divisions were only

deepened by Scruggs’s decision to

effectively exclude the input of his fel-

low veterans, or the community for

whom the VVMF supposedly stood. In

November 1980, the VVMF—eager to

push the plan through “Washington’s

notoriously difficult architectural gate-

keepers”8—appointed Paul Spreiregen,

a prominent Washington architect, to

oversee the competition and selection

of jury members. The result was a panel

that included a compilation of eight

artists and design professionals—but

no veterans, family members of dead

soldiers, or, for that matter, women or

minorities.9

On May 6, 1981, the VVMF had to

subdue its own surprise in declaring

Maya Lin, a 21-year-old senior at Yale,

the winner of the competition. (One of

the more memorable moments in Freida

Lee Mock’s 1995 documentary A Strong,

Clear Vision is Scruggs’s account of the

awkwardness associated with first meet-

ing with Lin in her college dormitory.)

Nonetheless, the committee stood

behind Lin—the author of what one juror

described as “a simple and meditative

design”10—as she was dragged into the

national spotlight and forced to conduct

a highly public defense of her proposal.

The perceived emotional cool-

ness of her minimalist design, not to

mention the unconventionality of its

designer, had only intensified the furor

harbored by a group of veterans who

were already livid over their exclusion

from the selection process. On Oct. 24,

1981, in a New York Times op-ed col-

umn, Tom Carhart—a veteran and

Purple Heart recipient—characterized

Lin’s proposal as “a black gash of

shame and sorrow, hacked into the

national visage that is the Mall.” At pub-

lic hearings in the Capitol, Lin defended

the simplicity of her design with an

uncanny, unwavering resolve and, in

line with a statement previously pub-

lished in the Washington Post, rejected

suggestions to change it in any way: “I

don’t think anything should be done to

the design that adds or detracts from its

power. I’ll be stubborn about that, I

guess.”11 In November 1982, the memo-

rial—constructed exactly as Lin had

envisioned it—was unveiled, in situ, on

the Washington Mall (fig.1). In 1984,

however, a bronze statue of three ser-

vicemen and an American flagpole were

added to the memorial site to appease

some veterans’ objections to the origi-

nal design.12

JOHN DEVITT GOES TO WASHINGTON

No sooner than the official VVM was

unveiled had a plan for veterans to

reclaim the memorial started to take

shape. John Devitt, a former First

Cavalry door gunner for the U.S. Army,

sat among an audience of 6,000 at the

VVM’s dedication ceremony on Nov. 13

(two days after Veterans’ Day) in 1982.

Because he was unemployed at the

time, Devitt’s trip to Washington had

been sponsored by donations from

members of his local community in San

Jose, Calif. Devitt was aware of the

controversy leading up to the memori-

al’s opening and shared some of the

skepticism and resentment that had

been publicly expressed by his fellow

veterans—but he attended the ceremo-

MEMORIALS 27

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial stands

as a symbol of America’s honor and

recognition of the men and women who

served and sacrificed their lives in the

Vietnam War. By separating the issue of

individuals serving in the military during

the Vietnam era and U.S. policy carried

out there, the Memorial Fund hoped to

begin a process of national reconciliation.

Description of the Vietnam Veterans

Memorial in Washington, D.C.1

Each wall is 126.2 ft. in length for a total

length of 252.4 ft.—or slightly less than

the length of a football field.

Description of the Moving Wall2

On May 1, 1981, a jury of architects,

landscape architects, and artists

plucked submission no. 1,026—a set of

moody pictures drawn in blue and green

pastels—from a pool of more than 1,400

proposals for the design of the Vietnam

Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.

The drawings were accompanied by an

evocative essay, handwritten on a sin-

gle sheet of paper, that described the

memorial’s proposed immensity: two

walls, each more than 200 feet long and

made of polished black granite, con-

verge at a point, forming an expansive

V. The names of more than 58,000

American soldiers, either killed during

the war or declared missing in action,

are carved in chronological order into

the surfaces of the walls. “Seemingly

infinite in number,” the essay stated,

“[the names] convey the sense of over-

whelming numbers, while unifying these

individuals into a whole.… We, the liv-

ing, are brought to a concrete realiza-

tion of these deaths.”3 The jury’s

announcement of the winning proposal,

designed by Maya Lin, ignited a public

controversy that would last for the next

several years.

Meanwhile Jean Baudrillard, the

French social theorist, published the

first edition of Simulacra and Simulation

in fall 1981. In this pivotal work of post-

modern theory, Baudrillard posited that

our conception of the world is no longer

“real” or “unreal”—but, instead,

“hyperreal.” One’s sense of hyperreality,

Baudrillard suggested, is constructed

through the process of simulation, or the

mass production of objects based on a

“generative core.”4

One of Baudrillard’s primary

claims was that the production of simu-

lacra has supplanted a society’s efforts

to produce copies, counterfeits, or repli-

cas of idealized forms. Instead, repro-

ductions exist through independent—

and sometimes irreverent—relation-

ships to an original model. “There is no

more counterfeiting of an original,”

Baudrillard wrote, “… only models from

which all forms proceed according to

modulated differences.”5 Therein lies

the internal paradox of simulation—

while the production of objects may be

inspired by a desire to replicate the

model, the importance of the model falls

away as reproduction occurs.

Discrepancies between an experience

of the original and one’s understanding

of its reproductions are explained by

Baudrillard’s notion of the generative

core—the experience of the original

model (as opposed to the thing itself)—

that serves as the model for replication.

Variations are the inevitable result,

because the model itself is not a finite

or known quantity.

Simulacra and Simulation can be

described as a grand, sophisticated

claim toward the power of subjectivi-

ty—or the notion that individual realities

are constructed through signs of the

real, or through the process of codifica-

tion, rather than through an objective

representation of the real itself.

Baudrillard’s term for these newly con-

structed realities is “simulacra.”

A STRONG, CLEAR ORIGIN

The publication of Baudrillard’s theories

on simulacra and simulation paralleled a

spectacular effort to produce an object

that would become the preeminent

model for “proper” memorialization, not

to mention one of America’s most rec-

ognized “originals.” Among architects

26 FRAMEWORKS

THE MOVING WALLTraveling “Replicas” of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

by Julie Kim

Figure 1 (opposite, left): Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, D.C., 1983. Photo by Sergio Amunategui.Courtesy AVRL.Figure 2 (opposite, right): The Moving Wall in Flemington, NJ, September 30-October 5, 2000. Local veteransorganized daily ceremonies to honor the town’s nine fallen soldiers.

for his vision of the Moving Wall’s

appearance in his hometown. “We had

the perfect setting for the Moving Wall

in Bridgeport,” he said. “I’ve seen it

installed in other places, in city parks or

on brown dirt. But we had it against the

hills, and near an orchard. With the sub-

dued lighting, the fog, and the trees, it

was very much like the setting in

Washington.”18

Krugel aided Schmidt, superin-

tendent of the local school district, in

assembling a team of 300 volunteers to

help with the logistics of the Moving

Wall’s setup and display. Since 1999,

when Krugel and Schmidt began plan-

ning for the Moving Wall’s arrival, they

had envisioned the school’s athletic

fields as the perfect site for the installa-

tion—not only because it was both a

picturesque setting and on level ground

but because of the field’s location adja-

cent to the Bridgeport Cemetery, the

burial ground for the five local soldiers

who were killed in Vietnam. The volun-

teers erected an aisle of flags and sev-

eral tents to display memorabilia—the

flags, plaques, photos, and identification

tags left at the Moving Wall, which are

adopted as part of the traveling exhibi-

tion. They also monitored the computer

terminals, where visitors looked up the

location of specific names. Schmidt

organized opening and closing cere-

monies, a performance of “Taps” every

day at dusk, and an oration of the 58,202

names inscribed on the wall that lasted

four days. “People had their tissues out

before they even got here,” Schmidt

recalled. “And no one ran. It was appar-

ent that this was a memorial, a com-

memorative scene. People stayed quiet

and walked slowly.”19

FROM (MOBILE) TO MOVING

When Devitt first conceived of the

Moving Wall in 1982, his primary goal

was to evoke an emotionally powerful

experience, not to replicate the exact

physical features of the original memori-

al. He modeled its physical form as a car-

rier for the 58,202 names that are carved

into the original. For Devitt, the names

“were what counted, the primary con-

cern”20—the names, rather than an alle-

giance to the original memorial, were his

main consideration in devising the travel-

ing memorial. The names on the Moving

Wall are arranged chronologically—as

they are on the original—employing a

design strategy devised by Lin to express

a spatial connection between the number

of U.S. casualties and the progression of

the war. While the listing of names allows

for the recognition of each individual sol-

dier, the body of names, as a whole, com-

municates a wider political message

about the immense scale of lives sacri-

ficed to sustain U.S. involvement in the

drawn-out war.

Devitt first attempted to repro-

duce the names photographically, but

he found the polished granite surface of

the original to be so reflective of its sur-

roundings that the individual names

became illegible in photographs. As a

result, Devitt decided to silkscreen the

names onto five Plexiglas panels, and

the first moving memorial, the VVM

(Mobile), was completed in time for

Veterans’ Day 1984. Devitt recalled its

immediate impact at its unveiling in

Tyler, Texas: “We hadn’t even put up the

fifth panel when a Gold Star Mother

placed a beautifully decorated candle at

the base of the panel where her son’s

name was displayed.”21

In devising a system to “carry” the

names, Devitt’s main challenges were

durability and portability (figs. 4, 5). The

MEMORIALS 29

ny nonetheless, grateful to his family

and friends for their fundraising effort.

Devitt’s trip to Washington turned

out to be life-altering. He returned to

California deeply moved by his visit to

“the Wall,” as veterans have nicknamed

it, which he described as both healing

and cathartic. “I walked up to ‘The Wall’

and felt this intense pride,” Devitt said

in an interview with Jim Belshaw, a

writer for Veteran magazine, in

December 2000. “I hadn’t felt that since

the day I left Vietnam. It was one thing

nobody had mentioned in the twelve

years I’d been home. Everybody talked

about guilt. I had tried guilt and it didn’t

work. I was very proud of the guys I

was with and especially the ones who

were killed. You can’t give more than

that. I was so glad to see their names

out there in the public.”13

In addition to a heightened sense

of personal pride, Devitt felt charged

with a mission to move the experience

of the Wall beyond the arena of the

Washington Mall. “When you think

about it,” Devitt wrote, “two or three

million people visit the Wall every year.

There are ten or twenty times that many

people who, for whatever reason, will

never be able to make the trip to

Washington.… I wanted them to be able

to see and feel what I had.”14 In other

words, Devitt was not so much inclined

to crystallize the power of his experi-

ence at the Wall as he was compelled

to reproduce it.

THE ORIGINAL COPY

Devitt devoted the next 11 years to the

development of a traveling half-scale

version of the Vietnam Veterans

Memorial, an object commonly referred

to as a “replica” of the original.

Although there are at least nine known

copies, Devitt’s was the first. The travel-

ing memorial, first titled the Vietnam

Veterans Memorial (Mobile) in 1984—

but now, in its third iteration, known as

the Moving Wall—has visited nearly

1,000 communities in the U.S. during the

past 20 years. Although most of the

sponsoring communities can be classi-

fied as blue-collar or working-class, the

Moving Wall has made several appear-

ances in metropolitan areas such as Los

Angeles and Atlanta. The Moving Wall

has also traveled overseas: In July 1993,

the Moving Wall was installed on sites

in Guam and the Mariana Islands,

where the United States maintained

strategic military stations during the

Vietnam War.15

The success of the Moving Wall

has spawned the design of subsequent

replicas—or copies of Devitt’s copy—

further expanding the spiral of individual

meanings. The VVMF developed a trav-

eling replica, the Wall that Heals, in

1996. Coors Brewing and Service

Corporation International (SCI) have

also developed traveling VVM’s.

Members of Vietnam Combat Veterans,

an organization formed by Devitt in 1986,

have referred to these replicas as “rip-

offs,”16 implicitly because Devitt has not

been given due credit by these corpora-

tions as the inventor of the original

copy. It seems that VCV looks more

favorably upon the founders of a virtual

replica, called the Virtual Wall, which

can be visited at www.virtualwall.org or

via a link on the Moving Wall’s website.

A WALL MOVES TO BRIDGEPORT, WASH.

The Moving Wall was displayed on the

soccer field behind Bridgeport

Elementary School October 25-31, 2003

(fig. 3). The installation was orchestrat-

ed by local residents Gene Schmidt and

Ken Krugel, both of whom had visited

the original VVM in Washington before

the Moving Wall’s appearance in

Bridgeport. Krugel, a Vietnam veteran,

first visited the VVM in 1984, nearly two

years after it opened on the Mall. He

was hesitant to visit the memorial—as

he claims many veterans were—and

expected to encounter “a second-hand

memorial.”17 Like Devitt, Krugel was

unexpectedly moved by his visit to the

VVM. He recalled spending an entire

day—and night—at the memorial, an

experience that served as a template

28 FRAMEWORKS

Figure 4 (left): Installation of the Moving Wall in Bridgeport, Wash. Volunteers built a platform out of 2x4’s to create a level surface for the Moving Wall.Figure 5 (right): Installation of the Moving Wall in Zanesville, Ohio, June 9-15, 2000. Local carpenters built a special platform to create a tapering effect. At its apex, thebase of the wall is 3 feet above grade, but at its respective ends, the aluminum panels sit directly on the ground.

Figure 3: The Moving Wall in Bridgeport, Wash., October 25-31, 2003. Since 2000, Superintendent Gene Schmidthad imagined the hills behind Bridgeport Elementary School as the perfect backdrop for the Moving Wall.

cific to the Bridgeport community, gen-

erating a level of significance and

meaning well before the replica had

even arrived. Schmidt and Krugel asked

Sen. Maria Cantwell to write letters to

John Devitt on the community’s behalf,

and the pair procured the help of the

Columbia Quilters, a group of Bridgeport

residents who raffled off a quilt and

donated the proceeds to the Moving

Wall fund.

Schmidt also obtained financial

support from Bridgeport’s veteran com-

munity. According to Krugel, the older

World War II and Korean War veterans

felt that the time had come to recognize

the younger generation of vets who had

served during Vietnam, many of whom

were treated with hostility after return-

ing from active duty. Krugel had experi-

enced such disdain firsthand stepping

off of a Greyhound bus in Los Angeles in

1969: “I wasn’t in uniform, but I had a

military haircut. And someone spat on

me three times. Obviously that is some-

thing I’ll never forget. There were sto-

ries of drug abuse, massacring children,

and rape, all of which certainly hap-

pened. But not all vets took part in

this—I certainly did not. To say the

least, it was not a popular war.”28

REPLICAS—OR SIMULACRA?

On the Moving Wall’s website, Devitt

has posted the following statement to

eliminate confusion between the origi-

nal, not-for-profit version and other “so-

called replicas” that have been sprout-

ing up around the United States: “The

Moving Wall is not just a generic name

for any of the traveling replicas that

copied The Moving Wall—it is a name

that was given specifically to the

nation’s first traveling Vietnam Veterans

Memorial during its fourth display back

in February of 1985. The first visitors to

the nation’s first memorial designed and

built to be brought to the people were

moved beyond words. Many expressed

their thankfulness that absolutely noth-

ing was expected of them—there was

nothing for sale, no solicitations for

money and no advertising. They found

only the names on the wall and the

memories that visitors brought with

them. The Moving Wall is the only trav-

eling Vietnam Veterans Memorial that

was actually designed and physically

built by Vietnam Veterans with public

donations.”29

But is the copy of the original

Vietnam Veterans Memorial best char-

acterized as such? Is “replica” or

“copy” an accurate designation for the

Moving Wall, which, at approximately

half the size of the original, packs neatly

into four large bins and travels the

United States on a trailer (fig. 8)?

Baudrillard and his postmodern bedfel-

lows have overthrown the concept of

the “true” copy, or the notion that exact

reproduction is even possible; in

Baudrillard’s view, there is no more

interpretive distance between the “real”

and the “imaginary.” As it follows, there

are no more copies—just simulacra.

Baudrillard’s view of social progress, a

scenario in which “every order sub-

sumes the previous order,” renders the

idea of the replica, and any belief in the

existence of a “true” copy, mere nostal-

gia. The first order of the simulacrum is

embedded in the second order, which is

then absorbed by the third, making a

total regression back to the era of the

counterfeit impossible.

Even if the Moving Wall is widely

referred to as a “replica,” it functions

more like Baudrillard’s definition of a

simulacrum, with each installation exist-

ing independently of the original VVM

and making up one part of a spiraling

network of individual experiences. In

August 2005, Krugel described the

Moving Wall less as a copy and more as

a simulation of an effect—similar to

Baudrillard’s notion of a “generative

[experiential] core”: “It’s not granite,

and it’s not down in the ground. It

arrives on a truck and [is] put together

with screws and bolts. But it’s not just

about the visual experience—it’s about

the emotions. When I think of other

monuments, they’re just there. This just

happens to be one that moves.”30

MEMORIALS 31

VVM (Mobile) was retired after the 1986

tour because the Plexiglas panels had

weathered so poorly; initially it was

replaced by a kit of masonite panels lami-

nated by a formica display surface for the

names, with steel-tube framing for sup-

port. In 1988 the VVMF provided Devitt

with photographic negatives of the

names, a template Devitt used to have all

of the names laser-engraved onto the sur-

face. In 1990, Devitt constructed yet

another moving memorial, this time out of

140 aluminum panels coated with a black

polyurethane finish and supported by a kit

of adjustable steel poles; it was also at

this time that Devitt changed the name of

the traveling memorial from the VVM

(Mobile) to the Moving Wall.

The Moving Wall is recognizable

as an attempted duplicate of the original

VVM, but in most senses its form repre-

sents a vast departure from that of its

model. Because it is not sunken down

into the ground and has little width or

depth, the Moving Wall acts primarily as

a two-dimensional display surface for

the names and thus looks like a flattened

version of the original. In addition, the

Moving Wall’s aluminum panels are flim-

sy compared with the gravity and perma-

nence imparted by Lin’s use of granite to

construct the original. These differences,

however, are what define the Moving

Wall as a simulacrum. They point to the

give-and-take relationship between

Devitt’s desire to evoke his experience of

the original and his determination to

make the replica portable. And it is

through these discrepancies that the

Moving Wall becomes a memorial on its

own—or, in Baudrillard’s words, an

“emancipated sign, in which any and

every class will be able to participate.”22

A COMMUNITY MOBILIZES

It took Gene Schmidt four years—and

the help of a local senator—to success-

fully schedule an appearance of the

Moving Wall in Bridgeport. Schmidt sub-

mitted Bridgeport’s first application in

1999 and was initially discouraged when

the school district received no response

from the Moving Wall’s headquarters in

Michigan. But when he read about the

Moving Wall’s appearance in Nespelem,

Wa.—a rural town of only 200 people—

Schmidt thought, “Well if they can do it,

gosh, so can we.”23

Schmidt enlisted Krugel, the local

postmaster, to help with logistics. The

pair began fundraising well before the

Moving Wall’s appearance in Bridgeport

was even confirmed. “We got on the

waiting list,” Krugel said. “But I didn’t

know if we’d ever really get it.”

Schmidt’s outlook was more optimistic:

“I knew it would be just a matter of time

before we’d get it. And in any case, we

needed to start planning and fundraising

as soon as possible. For a small town

like ours, it was a major undertaking.”24

Relative to the tiny town of

Nespelem, the city of Bridgeport may

seem larger than it actually is—with a

population of 2,000 residents, Bridgeport

might be aptly characterized as a big

small town. In a city where people

struggle to make ends meet—half

Bridgeport’s residents live with a medi-

an household income of $28,000 or

less—Schmidt knew he could not rely

on the community to make unsolicited

donations to fund the Moving Wall dis-

play.25 It costs about $4,000 to display

the Moving Wall for one week—plus

nine days’ worth of food and hotel

rooms for the traveling stewards. All

display fees are used by Devitt’s organi-

zation, Vietnam Combat Veterans, to

cover the Moving Wall’s travel and

maintenance costs. “This is not [an

effort] to make the Memorial Fund of

VCV, Ltd. rich,” the group’s guidelines

state. “It is to ensure that The Moving

Wall is not used or abused.”26 In addi-

tion, local communities assume the

costs of extras—everything from flags

and marching bands to toilets and com-

pensation for 24-hour-a-day guards

(figs. 6, 7, 8).27

Schmidt and Krugel collaborated

with local individuals and groups to

raise the necessary funds. Through this

process, which involved hundreds of

residents, the Moving Wall became spe-

30 FRAMEWORKS

A Wall Moves to Bridgeport, Wash.:Figure 6 (opposite, left): A volunteer polishes theMoving Wall’s reflective surface. Similar to the orig-inal Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C,the Moving Wall displays the names of over 58,000dead and missing soldiers.Figure 7 (opposite, right): Opening ceremonies wereheld on October 25, 2003 in the field behindBridgeport Elementary School. Five soldiers whodied in Vietnam are buried in a cemetery adjacentto the school’s athletic fieldsFigure 8 (left): Since 1984, two stewards have trans-ported the memorial to over 1,000 communitiesthroughout the U.S. The Moving Wall’s 148 alu-minum panels package into a set of storage con-tainers for easy transport.

1. Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, “The

Memorial”

[/www.vvmf.org/index.cfm?SectionID=4], n.d.

2. Vietnam Combat Veterans, Ltd. “Physical

Statistics of The Moving Wall™” [www.themov-

ingwall.org/docs/physical.htm], n.d.

3. Maya Ying Lin, Boundaries (New York: Simon

and Schuster, 2000), 4:05. Maya Lin was

declared winner of the nationwide competition

on May 6, 1981.

4. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation,

trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University

of Michigan Press, 1994), 56. Originally pub-

lished in 1981. For commentary on Baudrillard’s

reputation as a postmodernist, see Douglas

Kellner,“Baudrillard en route to Postmodernity,”

Graduate School of Education, University of

California, Los Angeles

[www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/pomo/ch4.h

tml], and Kellner, “Jean Baudrillard,” Stanford

Encyclopedia of Philosophy [http://plato.stan-

ford.edu/entries/baudrillard/], 2005.

5. Ibid.

6. The extent to which the VVM has influenced

the design of future memorials was evident

among proposals to the recent Ground Zero

(2003-04), Flight 93 (2004-05) and National AIDS

Memorial (2004-05) design competitions. For an

example of how the VVM is exported interna-

tionally as an icon of America, see

http://travel.discovery.com/convergence/ameri-

canicon/vietnamvets/vietnamvets.html.

7. Edward J. Gallagher, “The Vietnam Wall

Controversy,” Lehigh University Department of

English [www.lehigh.edu/~ejg1/vietnam/con-

tent/round1.htm] and

[www.lehigh.edu/~ejg1/vietnam/content/round2.

htm], n.d.

8. Kristin Ann Hass, “Making a Memory of War:

Building the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.” From

Carried to the Wall (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1998), 12.

9. Paul Richard, “Design Competition for

Vietnam Memorial,” Washington Post, Nov. 11,

1980, B7. For archival footage of Lin’s testimony

at public hearings in the Capitol , see Freida Lee

Mock and Terry Sanders’ documentary film A

Strong, Clear Vision (New York: New Video

Group, 1995).

10. Wolf Von Eckardt, “Of Heart and Mind: The

Serene Grace of the Vietnam Memorial,”

Washington Post, May 16, 1981, B1.

11. Ibid.

12. Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, “The

Three Servicemen Statue”

[www.vvmf.org/index.cfm?SectionID=103], n.d.

13. Jim Belshaw, “John Devitt: Travels With The

Wall,” Veteran

[www.vva.org/TheVeteran/2001_01/thewall.htm],

December 2000/January 2001.

14. Gerry Stegmaier, “The Moving Wall,” Among

Friends

[www.themovingwall.org/docs/stegmair.htm],

n.d.

15. See “History of The Moving Wall™

Displays,” Vietnam Combat Veterans, Ltd.

[www.themovingwall.org/], n.d.

16. Veterans Combat Veterans, Ltd. Replicas of

the Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Suspected

Misinformation/Disinformation

[http://home.earthlink.net/~vcvltdvetnet/wall0602

.htm], May 25, 1997.

17. Ken Krugel in a telephone interview with the

author, Aug. 17, 2005.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid.

20. Belshaw,

www.vva.org/TheVeteran/2001_01/thewall.htm.

21. Stegmaier,

www.themovingwall.org/docs/stegmair.htm.

22. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and

Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London,

Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi: Sage

Publications, 1993), 51. Originally published 1976.

23. Gene Schmidt in a telephone interview with

the author, Aug. 16, 2005.

24. Ibid.

25. U.S. Census Bureau, “Summary of Census

Data for Bridgeport, Washington”

[www.ofm.wa.gov/census2000/dp58/pl/07870.pdf],

2000.

26. Vietnam Veterans Combat, Ltd., “Moving Wall

Sponsorship Requirements” [http://www.themov-

ingwall.org/docs/sponsreq.htm], n.d.

27. Schmidt, Aug. 16, 2005.

28. Krugel, Aug. 17, 2005.

29. Vietnam Combat Veterans, Ltd. “Scheduling

the Moving Wall™”

[www.themovingwall.org/docs/skedling.htm],

n.d.

30. Krugel, Aug. 17, 2005.

31. Schmidt, Aug. 16, 2005.

32. Krugel, Aug. 17, 2005.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid.

35. Carol Ann Alaimo, “Are they too much of a

good thing?” Arizona Daily Star, April 16, 2005.

MEMORIALS 33

AS “REAL” AS IT GETS

In Schmidt and Krugel’s estimation,

approximately 8,000 people visited the

Moving Wall in Bridgeport, some travel-

ing from as far as 200 miles away—but

only 2 percent of them had ever visited

the original in Washington. “Even if they

can afford the trip, many people don’t

want to go. They feel nervous about

confronting those emotions—especially

in public. For those 20 and under,

Vietnam is a lesson in history. But for

those 40 and above, those are very real

and oftentimes painful moments to

remember.”31

The nearly 4,000 school children

who visited the Moving Wall did so at a

safe remove; for kids, the experience is

mostly educational. But for some visi-

tors, the experience proved to be

painfully personal. While the Moving

Wall was in Bridgeport, Krugel and his

wife paid several visits to the parents of

one of the five soldiers from Bridgeport

killed in the war. “We sat in their living

room for an hour until we could even

tell them why we were there. And then,

we talked to this couple for four hours.

The mother started to bring out pic-

tures, newspaper clippings, and memo-

rabilia from the soldier’s high school

days that she had never shown to any-

one. They were so resentful that they

were unable to talk to anyone for 30

years about the death of their son.

Bridgeport is close to Canada, where

many people fled to avoid being draft-

ed—the majority of people from here

didn’t volunteer. That says a bit about

how this couple and a lot of Bridgeport

viewed the war.”32

A few days later, Krugel accom-

panied the parents of the slain soldier to

the Moving Wall, where they grieved

and displayed their son’s honorary

medals. “That memory alone,” Krugel

recalled, “makes the whole operation

worthwhile.”33

Krugel also viewed the effort to

bring the Moving Wall to Bridgeport as

an opportunity to symbolize the unifica-

tion of the local veterans community

which, like most organizations with

members of different generations, has

suffered from internal divisiveness over

the years. “There’s a saying among

vets,” Krugel said, “that goes, ‘Never

again.’ As in never again will vets of one

war not support vets of another.”34

“SO MANY” MEMORIALS, SO MANY

MEANINGS

Last April, in reference to the nine sepa-

rate visits of traveling VVM memorials—

including the Moving Wall—to southern

Arizona (fig. 9), the Arizona Daily Star

published an article, titled “Are They

Too Much of a Good Thing?” In the fea-

ture, several local residents are quoted

as agreeing that while traveling replicas

like the Moving Wall were “a good

idea,” there was the possibility that they

could lose their meaning if the walls are

displayed too frequently. Mike Brewer, a

veteran living in Tucson, took a more

equivocal stance, citing high public

demand as the likely reason for the pro-

liferation of the memorials. “If you look

at the math,” Brewer told the Daily Star,

“the war was 13 years long, 2.5 million

served in Vietnam and 9 million were in

the military during that era. The war

touched a lot of people. And even with

so many models on tour, they have not

saturated the market.”35

With “so many” replicas, and the

exponential meanings generated

through their production and display, a

theorization of the Moving Wall resists

total comprehension. As the Moving

Wall is continually located and relocat-

ed on sites throughout the United States

(figs. 10, 11, 12), it effectively defies a

singularization of its meaning, and inter-

pretations become multiplied through

the ongoing process of simulation.

Although millions of people continue to

visit the original VVM in Washington,

Baudrillard’s writings on the process of

simulation—as applied to the case of

The Moving Wall—provide a framework

with which one is able to de-emphasize

its importance as a discrete object and,

in turn, recognize the presence of “so

many” memorials and an even greater

number of individually constructed reali-

ties. The Moving Wall implies more than

the absence of an objective reality; it

can be thought of as a traveling figure

that generates multiple meanings in the

absence of a singular truth. Unlike many

of the minimalist memorials that we see

today, it does more than merely gesture

toward this eternal void. Instead it high-

lights the presence of more realities

than we can know or name.

32 FRAMEWORKS

This paper is an extended version of the

research, writing, and discussions that

originated in a graduate seminar,

Architecture and National Identity, taught

by Greig Crysler in spring 2005. I am grate-

ful to Professor Crysler and to my class-

mates, many of whom helped to shape the

thoughts presented in this paper.

Except for figure 1, all images are courtesy

of John Devitt, the Moving Wall, and the

Bridgeport, Washington School District.

Julie Kim is a third-year M.Arch. student.

She is currently working on a research

thesis about reproductions of original

architecture.FW

Figure 9: The Moving Wall in Tombstone, Ariz., April 16-23, 2000.

Figures 10, 11, 12 (left to right): The Moving Wall in Hawthorne, Calif. (November 21-27, 1999); Atlanta, Georgia (May 26-June 5, 2000); and Zanesville, Ohio (June 9-15, 2000).

MEMORIALS 3534 FRAMEWORKS

PORTFOLIORaveevarn Choksombatchai: Three Memorials

In her design practice, CED

architecture professor Raveevarn

Choksombatchai has always integrated

the visceral with the abstract, deftly

constructing compelling architectural

narratives without resorting to literal

storytelling. Nowhere is this more evi-

dent than in three memorial designs—

the Minnesota Vietnam Veterans

Memorial, the Woman Suffrage

Memorial, and the National AIDS

Memorial—where memories are

evoked as a physical response to the

presence of the historical, the cultural,

and the phenomenal.

Each of these designs is an

attempt at weaving the past with the

present, the facts with the emotional

memories, the manmade with the natu-

ral, all with the goal of building a com-

plete sensory experience. Taking cues

from the recent history of memorials,

each design pushes the boundaries of

the memorial narrative while allowing

the nature of the specific site and the

memorialized event to fully emerge.

The resulting experiences let visitors

connect the personal to a larger frame-

work of memory and landscape.

VIETNAM VETERANS MEMORIALMinneapolis, MN 1990

Project Team:Raveevarn Choksombatchai, Ralph Nelson

Two polished, stainless walls bisecting

a circular grove of aspens are etched

with the names of the veterans memori-

alized. The polished surfaces reflect the

visitors as well as the seasonal

changes of the nearby deciduous

plants. The interior of the walls also

contains a stream of water, adding the

auditory to the visual and sensorial

aspects of the visitor’s experience.

36 FRAMEWORKS MEMORIALS 37

WOMAN SUFFRAGE MEMORIALMinneapolis, MN 1999

A process of change lay at the core of

the women’s suffrage movement; the

memorial reveals change through phys-

ical transformations that mark the pas-

sage of time. Challenging the “time-

less” neoclassical character of the

Washington Mall and the traditional

paradigm of memorialization, the design

registers three specific marks of time

related to specific events and phenom-

ena—political time, biological time,

geological time—by means of physical

interventions. A stainless steel woven

trellis climbs a slope—with each verti-

cal post marking a year in the suffrage

movement and each horizontal steel

bar marking the lifeline of an individual

suffragist—and is complemented by

plantings of native prairie and wood-

land wildflowers and by the earthwork.

Project Team:Raveevarn Choksombatchai, Ralph Nelson,Martha McQuade

38 FRAMEWORKS MEMORIALS 39

THE NATIONAL AIDS MEMORIAL San Francisco, CA 2005

AIDS is a global crisis, the first great

epidemic in the era of mass information.

The catastrophe is singular, a slow

train-wreck of death, infection, and loss.

This ineffable, time-elapsed tragedy

defies all previous paradigms of memo-

rialization. We propose a new paradigm

to respond to these conditions.

Since 1981, when AIDS was dis-

covered, we have responded with

shock, fear, and awe at the horror of

the epidemic. Today, AIDS and HIV

exist in our consciousness with an illu-

sion of familiarity.

Our awareness of the epidemic

operates like an automaton; we have

become numb to the knowledge and

unable to comprehend the massive

impact of the epidemic upon the

human race.

Lest they become mere statistics,

the dead and infected must become part

of our collective consciousness and

conscience. This proposed design

intends to experientially jolt the viewer

and reveal the impact of these massive,

incomprehensible numbers.

In this instance, the usual strate-

gies of memorials—personal names and

symbolic gestures—fail to express the

magnitude of the loss and inadequately

rouse consciousness. There is no place

to put one’s own worded portrait: the

experience is the only “material” one

takes away. In short, they do not per-

form the “memorial work” demanded by

AIDS and HIV. As a counter proposal to

a traditional memorial, we eschew

remembrance of individuals and of AIDS

as a historical event. Instead this design

critiques how we cope with the epidem-

ic globally and as a human race.

Project Team:Raveevarn Choksombatchai, Jacob Atherton,Michael Eggers, Andrew Shanken