dangerous design

[Richard Haut]

I understand that the redesigned memorial at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp is currently being built (winning scheme: KSP Architekten Engel und Zimmermann).

I am curious as to how designers can avoid such projects being representative of something other than the tragedy that they are intended to commemorate. For example, a memorial to Nazi atrocities being seen as either a target or as a symbol glorifying those who committed the atrocity, or even as being tainted by what is happening today.

While memorials have always had this risk element, is it different today - better or worse ? Will the WTC memorial be symbolic of the innocent victims in New York, the innocent victims in Iraq, a symbol of imperial ambitions, or either just irrelevant, or a memorial to victims of oppression whoever they are ?

The initial efforts of many European memorial designers following World War Two described them as victims of Fascist aggression, but there seems to be a move to "personalise" the message, so making it victim-specific, while seemingly ignoring others.

[djavolak]

While the visual language of such memorials can be quite potent, the alternate meanings are after all interpreted intellectually. Without the written word, they are nothing more than masses of steel, concrete and wood. In my previous life (up until my very recent conversion to architecture student), I was actually a historian of memory. It's a really fascinating subject. One of the things people in general don't realize is just how volatile collective memory usually is. Read something like Henri Rousso's book on WWII in French collective memory, or Pierre Nora's theoretical articles on history and memory, and you'll see that the collectivelly accepted meanings of historical events go through major transformations on a very regular basis. In the twentieth century, in the so-called developed world, significant re-interpretations of this kind happen once every five-ten years. An interesting book to read in this case would be Charles Maier's on the German historical debate in the eighties (I forget the name of the book and the correct spelling of his last name, but it should be fairly easy to find). It involved the creation of the German national museum in the early nineties and Jurgen Habermas's passionate and intellectually challenging attack on historical apologetics of late-80's German academia.

[Richard Haut]

"nothing more than masses of steel, concrete and wood"

I would agree. One of the most moving memorials that I have seen was the large concrete dome built over the ashes of the victims at Majdanek in Poland. It is quite impressive, but is basically a big concrete dome. What made it so moving was that on an ordinary day just a very few years ago there were bunches of fresh flowers placed around it by ordinary people.

I will certainly be looking out for the references that you mention, especially because I live in France (but am British) and the French collective memory is so different from the British.

At the moment designing memorials is - as I see it - impossible because there are forceful attempts to corrupt the collective memory. (One of the latest from Britain has been to pretend that the French "ran away" in the First World War). Interestingly, this type of propaganda frequently has the opposite effect to that intended. As people hear what they know or learn quickly are lies, so they start to find out as much as they can what really happened, and so the memory, while being from a distance in time, adjusts to at least an approximation of the truth.

I would imagine - and will be interested to see what the authors that you mention say - that major shifts in collective memory build up gradually and suddenly break through to becoming the newly accepted interpretations.

[djavolak]

I'm glad you're actually interested in this. I'm a Serbian Canadian, who spent a chunk of his childhood in Russia. My main area of research used to be group identity and intellectual life of Russia and former Yugoslavia since 1848. France I know a bit about because a lot of the theory I've read (like the stuff I mentioned above) is, of course, French. Britain I was never really interested in, philosophically or historically, so I can't really even begin to discuss it here.

BTW, you're not entirely right. These shifts develop dynamically in my experience. Structuralist thinkers of the sixties will have you believe that social constructs are static and go through periodic radical shifts. In fact, careful research shows that collective knowledge is developed through a very dynamic continuum. Then again, there are periods of time during which a given historical discourse goes through a fairly dramatic crisis and a quicker shift of accepted knowledge. France in the twentieth century is interesting indeed, because of the very dramatic manner in which it went from imperial superpower and unquestioned center of Western culture, to punching bag for the newly-formed German superpower. The passage to secondary 'powerdom' [sic] was a long and painful process for France. The same cannot really be said of Britain.

I hate generalizing like this, but I can't exactly write a careful essay in an online forum.

[Richard Haut]

group identity in the former Yugoslavia since 1848 ? That is one tangled subject. Have you read John Reed's book The War in Eastern Europe? (Reed wrote Ten Days that shook the World). It gives an extraordinary if tragic view of Serbia in the middle of the 1914-1918 war.

I have only looked at the subject in terms of individual areas, for example how the French really behaved in WWII, and why.

It is interesting to see that Britain's current insecurity in terms of its own identity makes it so nervous of the European Union. Britain is not a world power these days - it has no Empire, and not much military force. One only has to remember that the phrase "we come as liberators not conquerors" has been heard before, said by Lt.Gen. Maude when British troops reached Baghdad in 1917.

There was a competition a couple of years ago for what to put on the last empty plinth in Trafalgar Square in London. The most spectacular idea was from artist Rachel Whithead - it was a transparent inverted plinth to go on top of the stone one. A society that does not know what to respect.

I wonder what effect Michael Moore's film winning the "Palme d'Or" at Cannes will have on American awareness.

[Kevin]

"The Monument" at Trafalgar Square

(Though, the plinth's prior emptiness having persisted for more than 150 years, may not point very precisely at the recent/current situation.)

[Richard Haut]

the 4th. plinth, as it is known, was intended to support a statue of William IV, but it was not done owing to a lack of funds - and later because of bickering about whose statue should be there.

(ironically it was in William's reign that the 1832 Reform Act started the transfer of power from the Monarchy to Parliament).

Kevin, being in the New World, you simply do not appreciate that 150 years from initial plans to failed completion is the "recent/current situation".

[Kevin]

[Richard Haut]

talking of dangerous design, I have just realised that Terminal 2 here in Nice was designed by a Canadian-Parisian architect called ..... Paul Andreu.

I didn't think much of the finish when I went to look at it. Next time, I will admire the exterior.

http://www.paul-andreu.com/images_nb/086b.jpg

[steveA]

I wonder what effect Michael Moore's film winning the "Palme d'Or" at Cannes will have on American awareness.[/quote]

Michael Moore contributing to awareness? Now there's a stretch!

[Kevin]

'Course I haven't seen the movie yet, but early reviews are that it is a more serious and complete piece of filmmaking than the Moore-centric knock-offs he's tended to produce previously. And that the incredble reception for the movie at Cannes was as much for the profound quality of the filmmaking, as for the content of the film per se.

[Richard Haut]

As I heard it, QuentinTarantino, the head of the jury, said to Moore that he had got the award because it was the best film that the jury had been shown, not for "political" reasons.

[djavolak]

Kevin,

Sounds good. I'd like to see it if that's the case (because I'm not much of a Moore fan otherwise). Tarantino can say what he likes, though. All such awards are at least partially political - this one especially so, given the timing of it.

[djavolak]

[SDR]

(Belated) greetings, Richard and Milos: I'll take this opportunity to point to a WW I memorial, that at Thiepval, in France, north of Amiens (according to architectural historian Vincent Scully, whose volume entitled "Architecture: the Natural and the Manmade" [which I can highly recommend] ends with a discussion of this and of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, by one of his students, Maya Lin). He describes the passage up to and through the structure, and down to the fields of graves beyond, with some of the most moving words I have ever encountered in architectural criticism. And he points out something remarkable -- to me, at least -- about the design: that it is a baldly and boldly anthropomorphic building, a piling-up of arched forms, with perfectly-placed tondi -- decorative cartouche-mandalas in the white trim stone that dresses this "enormous [brick] monster" -- that read perfectly as eyes, high up on its head, above its "high arch [that] screams. It is the open mouth of death... " And then he points out that Lutyens' "monster" (which his photographs reveal to be exactly as he describes it) is in fact informed clearly by the nearest pre-existing church: "He adopted its redbrick and stone trim and abstracted their relationship and clarified and magnified their forms." And so it is. All, news to me, and a remarkable portrait of a remarkable edifice. Salutations.

SDR