On the Memorials
Does anyone like the final eight? Here are some initial New York reactions.
1. They're
generic (NYT):
"These plans are impersonal and generic," said one of the disappointed, Debra Brown Steinberg, a lawyer with Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft who has donated her time to represent many victims' families. "There is nothing about them that is unique to the tragedy that happened down there. These plans could be in any park, or any memorial, for any purpose."
...
Others objected to what they saw as the designs' banality. "They all look pretty much the same," said Raymond Smith, 49, an illustrator and painter. As he surfed the images on the Internet in his apartment in Hoboken, N.J., he likened many of the designs to hotel lobbies.
"When I first saw the Maya Lin thing, I walked right up to it and I started crying," he said, referring to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and its designer. (Ms. Lin served as a judge, not a participant, in this competition.) Mr. Smith clicked on another image. "This wouldn't make me cry. This looks like an airport design in the 60's." He viewed another and said, "Welcome to the MGM Grand."
2. They're
poorly planned (NY Newsday):
The proposals are crammed with symbolism, but few of them acknowledge - much less take advantage of - the memorial's placement amid office buildings, streets and traffic. Most would replace the World Trade Center's original barren plaza with an equally arid public space. Rather than somehow stitch a new sanctum into the city's profane bustle, the designers have gone out of their way to separate life from the contemplation of death. They would build 10-story barriers and buried bunkers, they would flood the site and create islands - anything to carve a massive mausoleum out of a vital city.
3. They're
misleading (Slate):
We live in an age of remarkably sophisticated design and presentation tools, ones that can turn workaday architectural schemes into jaw-dropping digital imagery or computer animations. We expect that design images will thrill us, or move us, as soon as we encounter them.
This is a dangerous way to judge architecture, but it's an even more dangerous way to think about memorials. The landmarks of the genre, like Lin's veterans' memorial, reveal their power slowly and relate deeply to the site and to the idea of remembrance in ways that may not be immediately apparent in a couple of renderings. The materials that the LMDC e-mailed out this morning contained relatively few plans and elevations and were instead heavy on dazzling imagery. And the renderings of each scheme included one extra-sexy "signature" image. All of us will need time to look closely at the designs in as much of a contemplative state as we can muster; otherwise we risk choosing designs with style over those with something more like staying power.
4. They're
all about shoppping (Muschamp, NYT):
...I found myself thinking about the obstacles the jury must have faced while I was looking at another of the eight entries. 'Suspending Memory,' designed by Joseph Karadin with Hsin-Yi Wu, both of New York, reverses the concept of the Arad scheme. It envisions a garden within each of the footprints, surrounded by an immense pool of water.
But this plan, too, is overburdened with features: columns of concrete and glass; capsule biographies of the victims; a memorial bridge with references to the Pentagon attack and the crash of the hijacked plane in Pennsylvania. As these features pile up, the project comes to seem more and more like an artifact of the memorial industry, less like a heartfelt response.
More to point, the overembellishment would in all likelihood limit the range of emotions visitors would be allowed to feel. This is an old Olmsted principle, and it happens to be a sound one. It is precious to be alone with your thoughts in a public space. Anything that compromises this experience is as unwelcome as sale signs in a shop window.
As for the other designs, they all offer an excess of spectacle. There are no embarrassments, unless beauty is embarrassing, but perhaps, in this context, it is. Everything here is wonderfully polished. Each finalist could be the winner in a dozen memorial competitions. But that is not really a compliment, is it? Memories don't want to put on their party clothes so soon.
I was pondering this subject of shopping the other day, watching the various Joe Reality shows. It's said over and over again, so it's either true or might as well be: Maybe we no longer know how to experience anything other than shopping. There is advertisement, comparison, then purchase. Discard, repeat. Imagine walking through that cemetery of glass columns, each with that person's biography. Then try to imagine doing that without subconsciously shopping: pretty glass sculptures, different heights and shapes, with different stories...
A similar thing happens with the Reflecting Absence scheme, too, but in this case it's a shopping mall without stores. Maybe visitors will be primed to shop for something but find nothing. That's probably good. I'd do without the waterfall, though.
* Ray, 11/20/2003 11:03:06 AM
