Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Young, James E.
• Wehrs, Donald R.
• Nalbantian, Suzanne
• Tucker, Don M.

Titel

The Memorial's Vernacular Arc Between Berlin's Denkmal and New York City's 9/11 Memorial

Ist Teil von

• Cultural Memory, 2023, p.161-172

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In April 2003, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation called a press conference to announce an open international design competition for a World Trade Center Site Memorial, and I was one of 13 members of the design-jury introduced that day. Within two months, we received some 13,800 registrations from around the world, and by the August 2003 deadline, we had received 5,201 official submissions from 63 nations, and from 49 American states (only Alaska was missing from the list). The winning design, "Reflecting Absence," by Michael Arad and Peter Walker, proposed two deeply recessed voids in the footprints of the former World Trade Center towers, each 200 square feet, with thin veils of water cascading into reflecting pools some 35 feet below, each with a further deep void in its middle, This memorial would "reflect absence," even as it commemorated the lives lost with living, regenerating flora. In this adaptation of the Introduction to my book The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between, I trace what I call "the arc of memorial vernacular" connecting the dots between Maya Lin's design for the Vietnam Veterans' Monument, Berlin's "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe," and the "National 9/11 Memorial" located on the site of the former Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. The "stages of memory" here refer both to the public staging of these memorial projects and to the incremental sequence (or stages) of these memorial processes as they unfold. In every case, the emphasis here is on the process and work of memory over what we might call its end result.