Memorials used to be about awe. We looked up at the statue of the general on horseback, or the brooding, seated Abraham Lincoln gazing out on the National Mall. And we no more would have jumped on Lincoln’s lap than we would have slapped the preacher a high-five after his Sunday sermon.
But times and architecture change.
The point-and-click technology of the computer enables us to interact with machines in a way that was unthinkable 20 years ago.
At the zoo, we don’t just watch the lions and monkeys behind bars. We enter a replica of their environment and imagine what it is to be like them, as if we were actors on a stage.
For better, and sometimes for worse, this also is the age of the interactive memorial.
If the international design competition for a memorial to the victims and survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing demonstrates nothing else, it is that the old monumentality is dormant, if not altogether dead.
The newly-announced winning entry inevitably will be compared to a makeshift memorial that has become a national icon, a chain-link fence around the site of the now-demolished Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. To it, visitors attach an astonishing collection of objects – teddy bears, T-shirts, American flags, even impassioned, hand-written commentaries about the bombing and those whose lives it took.
An angry America still mourns the victims of the bombing, the fence plainly shows.
If the permanent memorial succeeds, it will channel that raw emotion into a permanent work of commemorative art that is at once elegant and powerful. If it doesn’t work, it will seem like a gimmick or, worse, a graveyard.
The memorial’s dominant feature is 168 stone and glass chairs. Already, they are provoking derision. When a radio interviewer asked me about them the other day, he had a negative tone in his voice, as if to say: “That’s it? For the worst terrorist attack on American soil? Empty chairs?”
I asked him to remember the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which was viciously attacked when its design was made public 17 years ago precisely because it did not resemble a traditional memorial–white, heroic, thrusting into the sky.
A black gash of shame, some veterans called it.
Now we know better.
So many mementos are left in front of those V-shaped, black granite walls each day that the National Park Service has a warehouse to hold them. People make rubbings of the names on the walls, as if they want to hold onto the memorial’s extraordinary experience forever. They weep openly. It is a place of public catharsis. And it works precisely because of what isn’t there.
All that warmth, all that emotional energy, is provoked by a design that, in reality, is cool and abstract.
Walking a thin line
As a result of the memorial’s extraordinary popularity, Americans have come to expect memorials to let them to reach out and symbolically connect with those being memorialized.
We can see that in the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, also in Washington. Its figural sculptures enable us to imagine that we are in a Depression bread line, or gathered around FDR’s dog Fala, or sitting on the president’s lap. While the sculptures aren’t powerful works of art, and some of them seem downright corny, they are nonetheless revealing.
Through them the president is portrayed as intimate and familiar, not distant and different, but that depiction cuts two ways. With grinning tourists lining up for snapshots beside the wraiths in the breadlines or mugging for the camera on FDR’s lap, dignity is lost as affinity is gained.
All this raises the question of quality. For unlike all men (and women), all interactive memorials are not created equal.
The best ones supply what is, in effect, a rough outline and leave the rest to the mind’s eye. They don’t restrict us or make us think we’re in a theme park by telling too much of the story.
That is the fundamental strength of the design for an $8.8 million Oklahoma City Memorial by three architects from Berlin, Hans-Ekkehard Butzer, Torrey Butzer and Sven Berg. Organizers, who announced their selection on July 1, aim to build it on the memorial’s three-acre site by 1999.
In the plan, all the key figures (save the killers) are subtly evoked from that moment, 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995, when a truck bomb tore into the Murrah Building’s concrete and glass facade.
On one side of a reflecting pool that splits the memorial would be the dead, their absence symbolized by 168 chairs on the narrow, rectangular site of the now-demolished Murrah Building. The chairs will be arranged in nine long rows for the building’s nine stories. Nineteen of them would be undersized, representing the 19 children killed.
On the other side of the reflecting pool will be a tribute to the survivors, their names chiseled into a stone wall encircling an elm that withstood the blast and is now thriving.
Around the tree will be an acknowledgement of the rescuers. The fruits of their labor, the ongoing lives of the survivors, will be represented by an orchard of pear and apple trees.
The entire tableau will be frozen in time, marked by the gates that flank the reflecting pool. One gate will be marked with the inscription “9:01,” the other with “9:03,” bracketing the minute when the bomb went off.
“We come here to remember,” the words atop the gates would say.
Those words suggest that, for all the proposed Oklahoma City Memorial has in common with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a more apt comparison may be with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which opened in 1993.
Both are about bearing witness to acts of atrocity–and never allowing the world to forget them. Both are about walking the fine line between recognizing the impact of violence and honoring those who perpetrated it. Both differ from battlefield cemeteries, which give no hint of the rivers of blood that ran on them.
At the Holocaust museum, we are instantly aware that we have left behind the optimistic landscape of the National Mall for the horrors of the concentration camps when the building’s steel elevator doors clank shut.
Clarity and reserve
In Oklahoma City, the chairs will be bunched together in the middle of each row, creating a concentration that mirrors the concave chasm the bomb gouged in the Murrah Building. Its jagged outline would be plainly visible from a raised public plaza next to the memorial.
The chairs also would personalize the impact of the bombing, underscoring that the memorial will not be a mass burial mound that erases differences among the dead.
Who cannot relate to an empty chair at the dinner table? What more concrete symbol is there of a mother or father, son or daughter, aunt or uncle taken away by circumstance?
The idea is to turn visitors in shorts and T-shirts–that’s how American tourists dress these days–into empathetic witnesses, allowing them to envision themselves in the place of federal workers at their desks or children in the Murrah Building’s day-care center.
And yet, all that is properly left to the imagination. As James Ingo Freed, the architect of the Holocaust museum said of his building, “You shout into this and you get your own echo back.”
There is an appealing clarity and reserve to this plan.
Only two years have passed since the bombing, in contrast to other memorials, where far more time is allowed to transpire between event and commemoration. The risk was that the jury, in which survivors and victims’ families held a majority, would opt for something maudlin. Instead, the winning entry appears able to convey a profound sense of loss without descending into sentimentality.
Still, if the plan is not detailed correctly, it could wind up hindering the very interaction it seeks to encourage. The key detail is the chairs.
The architects call for them to have stone seats and pedestals of glass block, which will be lit from below at night when people continue to visit the site. This feature should create an extraordinary effect, making the chairs seem like flickering memorial candles, symbols of souls transported to another world.
But the chairs could come off as a superficial gesture or, with their stone seats, as tombstones.
To be sure the stone may be necessary because the chairs will have to stand up to heavy use. Whatever material is used, the chairs should possess a certain dignity, yet should not be so imposing that we will feel awkward about approaching or even occupying them.
The memorial is not, after all, a cemetery. To see it as such would be to admit that the terrorists have triumphed by reducing two blocks of an American city to lifelessness.
The memorial is supposed to be about death and life, repose and activity, serenity and strength. It should be about coming to terms with the past as well as moving on to the future.
The vitality of the makeshift, chain-link memorial reminds us, in this era of cyberspace, of our need to make connections in physical space and of the power the built environment still holds to reveal that which matters most to us.
The Oklahoma City Memorial has a higher purpose: to be truly interactive architecture, design that expresses–and transforms–us.
