Archinect - News

NYC approves Olalekan Jeyifous and Amanda Williams' Shirley Chisholm monument for Brooklyn

2023-07-18T14:48:00-04:00

New York City is getting a new monument dedicated to the late pioneering Brooklyn congresswoman Shirley Chisholm following the approval on Monday, July 17, of a sculpture designed by artists Olalekan Jeyifous and Amanda Williams.

The piece is part of the city’s new She Built NYC initiative, a series of public art commissions created under the de Blasio administration that will install monuments to historic trailblazers in every borough over a proposed four-year timeline.

A previously-approved version of the monument, which will be the first ever to depict a woman in Brooklyn, was delayed through the pandemic and will now restart using a slightly refined design featuring a gestalt of imagery that combines Chisholm’s silhouette and the U.S. Capitol Building dome into one 32-foot latticed steel form. The artists say this combination “symbolizes how she disrupted the perception of who has the right to occupy such institutions and to be an embodiment for democracy.”

The 2019 'Our Desti...

Nina Cooke John's Harriet Tubman monument debuts in Newark

2023-03-09T12:08:00-05:00

This morning, Mayor Ras Baraka of Newark will preside at the unveiling of a massive monument to the abolitionist hero Harriet Tubman. “Shadow of a Face” has been installed in a park where a statue of Christopher Columbus stood until it was removed in 2020 in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. Last year Baraka led a ceremony that changed the name of the park — which had been Washington Park since the 1790s — to Harriet Tubman Square.

Tubman, who may yet grace all $20 bills minted after 2030, made stops at the still-existing Old First Presbyterian Church on Broad Street while aiding escaped slaves on their journey through Newark. Baraka said the new monument would “make her experience real for all of us.” Its existence itself is a mild triumph considering the state’s previous rejection of Nina Cooke John’s proposal in June of last year.

The decision was eventually overruled to make way for the nearly 25-foot-tall monument. Speaking to the Times about her desire to keep a lasting vestige of its predecessor, Cooke John said “I’d love it in 10 years for someone to say, ‘What’s that?’ It needs to be part of the story of why the people of Newark decided it was important for it to come down and to have a monument to Harriet Tubman in what had been Washington Park.”

New program created to protect African American burial grounds endangered by construction projects

2022-12-23T11:21:00-05:00

New federal legislation is set to be introduced which will help protect African American burial grounds impacted by new construction. The African American Burial Grounds Preservation Act is part of a series of measures expected to be signed into law by President Biden before the end of 2022 and is the result of five years of bipartisan efforts.

The act will create the African American Burial Grounds Preservation Program, which aims to identify burial grounds ahead of infrastructure projects and commercial development. It is hoped that the program will minimize construction delays on projects, as well as avoid “unnecessary community heartache.” The program will also assist descendants and communities in expressing their histories through grant money to identify, interpret, and preserve historic cemeteries.

“The African American Burial Grounds Preservation...

A new documentary explores the process behind UVA's Memorial to Enslaved Laborers for the first time

2022-11-07T17:42:00-05:00

A new documentary from local filmmaker Erik Duda exploring the process and impact of the University of Virginia’s Memorial to Enslaved Laborers has been released, providing insights into the creation of one of the most important public monuments in America since the opening of Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1982.

Titled The Lives Between the Lines, Duda’s documentary was included as part of this year’s Virginia Film Festival and offers a look into the implementation, design, and eventual construction of the monument, which, unfortunately, had to open in a subdued ceremony last year owing to health concerns related to the pandemic.

Previously on Archinect: A decade in the making, UVA’s Memorial to Enslaved Laborers begins to take shape

The memorial was first commissioned in 2013 as part of the UVA President’s Commission on Slavery and the University, which eventually led to the formation of a Community Engagement Committee comprised of descendants of the enslaved communities ...

Take a look at photos of Michael Heizer's 'City' ahead of its debut

2022-08-26T17:51:00-04:00

The long-awaited public opening of land artist Michael Heizer’s monumental earthwork City is just around the corner, and the Triple Aught Foundation, the group which manages its remote Lincoln County, Nevada site, has shared some amazing new photos that offer a sense of the scale and stasis of the massive sculpture which has taken 52 years and another $40 million to finish.

City © Michael Heizer. Courtesy Triple Aught Foundation. Photo: Joe Rome

Complex One and Complex Two, City. © Michael Heizer. Courtesy Triple Aught Foundation. Photo: Joe Rome

Complex Two, City. © Michael Heizer. Courtesy Triple Aught Foundation. Photo: Joe Rome

Critic Dave Hickey recently described it as "a gracious intervention in the desert...composed and complete."

LACMA Director Michael Govan reflected on its realization, stating: "Over the years I would sometimes compare Michael Heizer's City project to some of the most important ancient monuments and cities. But now I only compare it to itself. It's an artwor...

'I knew I had to do something': A Bulgarian architect on preserving a monument to her country's ugly past

2022-05-24T12:00:00-04:00

What do you do with a building that was built to glorify an oppressive Communist system but, ravaged by rain and snow and stripped bare by thieves, is now a wreck? Should it be torn down in the spirit of reckoning with history — just as the statues of Confederate generals have been toppled in the United States and monuments to Soviet hegemony have been demolished across Ukraine, particularly since Russia invaded in February?

After receiving two rounds of funding totaling $245,000 from the Getty Foundation in back-to-back years, the ever-popular photographer’s subject is struggling to raise the millions needed to restore it to the former 'glory' seen in what its designer Georgi Stoilov called “morally and materially superior times.”

Bulgarian Architect Dora Ivanova, who is leading a new push to conserve the Buzludzha Monument, says she “does not want to glorify the past” but rather intends to use its grimy edifice as an educational tool that fills a void in her native country’s national conversation about its less-than-sterling communist history.

“We don’t want a museum freezing everything as it was,” she told the New York Times, “but a place for discussion about the past. The idea is to overcome this silence — the shame of talking about what happened.”

...

Edoardo Tresoldi's installation 'Monumento' opens the Chipperfield-restored Procuratie Vecchie with a timely message on fragility

2022-04-14T12:30:00-04:00

To coincide with the long-awaited public opening of Venice’s iconic Procuratie Vecchie, Italian artist Edoardo Tresoldi has produced an installation that helps highlight the mission and function of its newly reclaimed space.

Titled ‘Monumento’ and taking as its backdrop the 16th-century monumental staircase restored by David Chipperfield Architects as part of its five-year renovation project, the installation presents a subversion of the traditional thinking and rhetoric that surrounds monuments worldwide.

Image © Roberto Conte

Using his standby wire mesh material, Tresoldi was able to replicate past installations in New York and Abu Dhabi using the column itself as a kind of 50-foot-high metaphorical guidepost standing between societal values and contemporary life. Developed in collaboration with architect Carlotta Franco and with support from GICO Studio, the wrapped column is also meant to be as much in dialog with the space around it as it is expressive of a...

The de Blasio administration failed to live up to some of its monumental promises

2021-12-31T09:04:00-05:00

Early into his second term, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a $10 million initiative, led by his wife, that would break the bronze ceiling by introducing seven new statues of historical women to New York City’s commemorative landscape of mostly men. It was to be one of Mr. de Blasio’s signature marks on the landscape. Days from the end of his administration, with only $1 million dedicated, none of those sculptures has yet materialized.

The failure mirrors de Blasio’s much-hyped but ultimately fruitless promise to remove some $1 billion from the police budget, which critics say was an insincere attempt to assuage the Black Lives Matter movement at a time when activists were taking to the streets nationwide to protest the killings of unarmed Black men.

The monuments were another area of unfulfilled administrative posturing about groups of people and neighborhoods that are not the benefactors of effective public spending. This came at a time when state officials were dedicating successive monuments in areas more often associated with financial services such as Battery Park City. The issue comes down to funding priorities, according to Stony Brook University historian Michelle H. Bogart.

“The problem is that maintenance and conservation are not sexy,” she told the New York Times. “Works in those communities don’t necessarily have ready constituencies who will raise money for the upkeep of older monuments.”

...

Canada is one step closer to National LGBTQ2+ Monument after revealing commission finalists

2021-11-16T11:26:00-05:00

Seventy years after one of the darkest chapters in Canadian LGBTQ history began, the Government of Canada has taken steps toward reconciliation and remembrance with a slate of just-announced new proposals for what will one day become the LGBTQ2+ National Monument in Ottawa.

By locating it in the nation's seat of power, the monument will serve as a symbolic educational resource for Canadians young and old to learn about the struggles endured by their fellow citizens at the hands of their own government.

Image courtesy of Team SOM

“The systemic injustices that occurred during the LGBT Purge should never be forgotten. While we cannot right the wrongs of the past, this monument will serve as an educational tool and a reminder that we must not repeat the mistakes of the past,” LGBT Purge Fund director Michelle Douglas, whose successful 1990 lawsuit helped end discrimination in the Canadian Armed Forces said in a statement. “The five shortlisted designs show the pain endured during this d...

A decade in the making, UVA’s Memorial to Enslaved Laborers begins to take shape

2019-10-19T16:10:00-04:00

“The memorial is a circle, a continuous ring never ending, an opening for people to step inside and contemplate, to learn what slavery was about. For the community, I hope it enlightens young and old, and reminds everyone that slavery was a very evil part of our history.”

Members of the University of Virginia share their personal experiences and connections to the currently-under-construction Memorial to Enslaved Laborers that is taking shape on the campus.

The university’s Board of Visitors has chosen an interdisciplinary team to bring the project to life that includes Höweler+Yoon, UVA alumna Mabel O. Wilson; Frank Dukes, past director of the Institute for Environmental Negotiation in the UVA School of Architecture; Gregg Bleam, a UVA-based landscape architect; and the artist Eto Otitigbe.

Washington Monument reopens after lengthy renovation

2019-09-20T14:02:00-04:00

The Washington Monument will again welcome visitors up to its observation deck, where, from more than 500 feet in the air, visitors can see national landmarks including the U.S. Capitol, Washington National Cathedral, Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, the Lincoln Memorial and the Jefferson Memorial. But first, you have to go through security.

After undergoing a 3-year renovation, including elevator upgrades and adding a new glass-and-steel security screening center designed by Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners, the 555-foot-tall obelisk reopened to the public on Thursday, September 19th.

The Nonument Group: digitally preserving architectural treasures before they're lost

2019-08-01T16:25:00-04:00

Working with an international team of researchers and artists, Tomšič and Bricelj Baraga study, map and archive fading sites and Brutalist-style structures. They’re building a database of about 120 case studies across Europe and in former Soviet states and will be releasing a book this year.

"Using a surveying and data-collection process known as photogrammetry and a series of high-powered computer workstations, a team led by Georgios Artopoulos will create a digital model of the monument for use with virtual reality headsets or smartphones," writes the Guardian's Nate Berg about the efforts of the Nonument Group to map and document the rapidly deteriorating and severely vandalized Monument House of the Bulgarian Communist Party (also known as the Buzludzha Monument) — one of many "hidden, abandoned, unwanted or otherwise forgotten" contemporary heritage sites the group aims to digitally preserve before they're gone forever.

The badly damaged interior of the Buzludzha Monument Auditorium. Photo: Stanislav Traykov/Wikimedia Commons

As we celebrate its 130th birthday, we look at the copycats inspired by the Eiffel Tower

2019-03-21T15:35:00-04:00

"Beyond its strictly Parisian statement, it touches the most general human image-repertoire: its simple, primary shape confers upon it the vocation of an infinite cipher ... [Gustave] Eiffel saw his Tower in the form of a serious object, rational, useful; men return it to him in the form of a great baroque dream which quite naturally touches on the borders of the irrational."

- Roland Barthes, “The Eiffel Tower,” 1964

Who would have guessed that the Eiffel Tower, a widely despised structure at the time of its completion exactly 130 years ago, would not only become an icon, but the icon of icons? Did its image become so pervasive in the modern era because it is not a sacred monument, as Roland Barthes had observed, but rather a secular one? Is it because it signaled the escalation of the Industrial Revolution, both in its simplicity and its ingenuity of structural form?

Whatever the reason, the iconic structure has inspired over 30 imitators spread across the globe of varying scales ...

Bulgaria's Buzludzha Monument opens its doors for the first time in eight years, with restoration plans underway

2018-05-23T15:00:00-04:00

Officially called the “House-Monument of the Bulgarian Communist Party”, the building fell into disrepair following the collapse of the country's socialist government in 1989, but remains a popular landmark and tourist attraction. The trip comes before an expected visit by European and Bulgarian experts at the end of 2018, who will report on the building’s structural integrity with the view of opening it officially to tourists.

“Weak Monument”: Estonia's 2018 Venice Biennale Pavilion examines the implicit politics of everyday architectural forms

2018-05-10T15:35:00-04:00

For the 2018 Venice Biennale, Estonia's pavilion, “Weak Monument”, explores the explicit representation of the monument and the implicit politics of everyday architectural forms.

Curated by Laura Linsi, Roland Reemaa and Tadeáš Říha, the exhibition takes over the former Santa Maria Ausiliatrice church in Venice with pavement and a monument-like concrete wall that divides the exhibition space in two. As visitors cross through the wall, they'll find a collection of photos, drawings, and models of Estonian and European examples of “weak monuments”. They will then encounter a “wall altar”.

Wall altar. Image © Weak Monument.

Weak Monument Section. © Weak Monument 2018.

“Monuments reside on the margin of the architectural discipline while directly embodying some of its most central qualities, such as relation to the site, delimitation of public space and capacity for representation,” the curatorial team explains.

“In Estonia, the notion of monument appears as a foreign intruder. Its pre...

Snøhetta and collaborators unveil a monument for Archbishop Desmond Tutu

2018-03-08T20:25:00-05:00

Designed by Snøhetta in collaboration with Local Studio and Design Indaba, the Arch for Arch stands as a monument to the human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, affectionally known as “Arch” by fellow South Africans.

Desmond Tutu Memorial Arch by Snøhetta and collaborators, located in Cape Town, ZA. Image: David Southwood.

Marking the site where Tutu began many of his Anti-Apartheid protests in Cape Town, the Arch frames the public entrance to a landscaped promenade known as the Company’s Garden, home to many of the city's cultural institutions.

Desmond Tutu Memorial Arch by Snøhetta and collaborators, located in Cape Town, ZA. Image: Design Indaba.

The structure is formed from 14 strands of Siberian Larch wood, a highly durable and resistant material. The warmth of wood was intentionally selected to lend the Arch an intimate, tactile quality, that invites people to interact with the structure in a way that differs from the conventional materia...

New photographs show Daniel Libeskind's National Holocaust Monument in greater detail

2017-10-11T20:11:00-04:00

A new set of photographs of the recently opened Canadian National Holocaust Monument have been released and help give a better understanding of the Daniel Libeskind-designed space: how it sits in its surrounding landscape created by Claude Cormier, and what atmosphere the large-scale, photographic landscapes by Edward Burtynsky create inside the fortress-like exposed concrete structure.

We were able to publish an initial, limited set of images a few days ago, shortly after the monument opened, and it managed — not entirely unusual for a Libeskind project — to spark first reader comments.

For a more detailed project description click here; scroll down to see the new photographs of the monument.

All photographs courtesy of Studio Libeskind.

David Chipperfield to restore Venice's Procuratie Vecchie that's been closed for centuries

2017-10-05T13:58:00-04:00

Once the renovation is complete, the four-storey building will be used as a venue for art exhibitions, installations and seminars that will be open to the public, as well as a philanthropic institution to help vulnerable people including refugees...any old material removed from the building will have to be taken away in barges along Venice’s canals, while new material will have to be brought in the same way.

David Chipperfield will lead the painstaking renovation of the monumental Procuratie Vecchie in Venice's St. Mark's Square. When the project is complete in 2020, the building will be accessible to the public for the first time in some 500 years.

First photos of Daniel Libeskind's newly opened National Holocaust Monument

2017-10-02T16:13:00-04:00

Last week we mentioned the Canadian National Holocaust Monument celebrating its grand opening in Ottawa. The stock of available imagery has been very limited for the last years and consisted of mostly the same aerial rendering in a few variations.

Now we've received new photographs that give a better understanding of the completed monument design — a collaboration between Studio Libeskind, Lord Cultural Resources, Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, Montreal-based landscape architect Claude Cormier, and holocaust scholar Doris Bergman.

"This monument not only creates a very important public space for the remembrance of those who were murdered in the Holocaust," Daniel Libeskind said in a statement, "but it also serves as a constant reminder that today’s world is threatened by anti-Semitism, racism and bigotry. Canada has upheld the fundamental democratic values of people regardless of race, class or creed, and this national monument is the expression of those principles and of ...

Libeskind-designed Canadian National Holocaust Monument opens in Ottawa

2017-09-27T14:30:00-04:00

Canada today (27 September) inaugurated its first national Holocaust Monument, in Ottawa, an endeavour ten years in the making. [...] The monument’s design and construction was a collaboration between the New York-based architect Daniel Libeskind, the Montreal-based landscape architect Claude Cormier, the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky and the University of Toronto professor Doris Bergman, an expert on the Holocaust.

"From above, the monument is the shape of a skewed Star of David," The Art Newspaper writes, "which [...] recognises the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, but also other groups who were persecuted, such as homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses."

Winning design for NYC’s first official LGBTQ monument is revealed

2017-06-28T17:55:00-04:00

After the attack at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., that left 49 people dead, Governor Cuomo formed the LGBT Memorial Commission to honor the fight for equal rights and remember victims of hate, intolerance and violence. A request for designs for the new memorial went out in October. It is to be built in Hudson River Park near the waterfront piers that have played a key role in the city’s history as both a meeting place and a haven for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people

Designed by a Brooklyn-based mixed-media artist, Anthony Goicolea, the LGBTQ monument consists of nine boulders, some bisected with glass that acts as a prism and can emit a subtle rainbow. Meant to be communicative, usable and complimentary to the landscape, the design was inspired by sites like Stonehenge and Easter Island as well as burial mounds and African stone circles.

“It feels like there are certain shapes and patterns that are encoded in our DNA as humans that transcend any particular culture and speak to how we are unified in the larger scheme,” said the artist. “I wanted to create a space that feels familiar, even though it is new.”

Recreation of Palmyra's Arch of Triumph presented in Trafalgar Square

2016-04-20T12:00:00-04:00

A monumental recreation of the destroyed Arch of Triumph in Palmyra, Syria, has been unveiled in London’s Trafalgar Square. The 1,800-year-old arch was destroyed by Islamic State militants last October and the 6-metre (20ft) model, made in Italy from Egyptian marble, is intended as an act of defiance: to show that restoration of the ancient site is possible if the will is there.

For more on the relating topics in this article check out these links:

Palmyra after ISIS: a first look at the level of destruction

Before + after photos of Syria's devastated heritage

Another Grade II listed building loses its protected status in north east England

London's V&A to host a robot construction team this summer

Whatever the architecture, memorializing a structure for its memories

2015-12-28T17:57:00-05:00

Bank buildings have become bars. Football grounds have been turned into prestige housing. All things must pass. Buildings that have outlived their purpose have no right to be preserved perpetually in a Prince Charles-style attempt to stop the clock on history. Sentimentality about an imagined past is a British disease. For all that, the emotional link between a building like the Washington Post’s and the people who once worked there will live on, for years to come.

More pieces on the cultural history of demolished or renovated structures:

Stonehenge may have originated in Wales, new study suggests

2015-12-08T13:52:00-05:00

archaeologists have found several recesses in rock formations in Wales that match the size and shape of Stonehenge's bluestones, leading to theories that the monument may have been erected in Wales first, before being moved to its present site in Salisbury Plain. The researchers also discovered evidence of what they described as “a loading bay" from where the massive boulders could have been dragged away.

Wales is over 130 miles / 209 kilometers from Stonehenge's current site in Salisbury Plain – a distance that would have taken Neolithic people over 500 years to transport the monoliths over, according to Professor Mike Parker Pearson, a British late prehistory professor at UCL who led the study.

Researchers involved in the project find it unlikely that, after the bluestones had been removed the quarry, the harvesters would have immediately set a course for Salisbury Plain. What is perhaps more likely is that the stones were used for a monument in Wales first, and were then transported to their current site through a massive coordination effort with people living in both areas.

“One of the latest theories is that Stonehenge is a monument of unification, bringing together people from across many parts of Britain," Pearson told The Guardian.

A young designer rethinking how we memorialize collective trauma

2015-11-17T13:46:00-05:00

[Sara Zewde] argues that while the traditional monument commemorates a singular event or individual by placing an object in a space that is a break from its surroundings, the 400-year practice of African enslavement demands a different approach. “For Afro-descended people, you wake up every day with the legacy of slavery,” she says. “How do you deal with that spatially?” One approach is to translate cultural practices into spatial ones.

Turns out the Washington Monument is shorter than we thought

2015-02-16T15:06:00-05:00

Using new international measurement standards and technology not available in the past, NOAA’s National Geodetic Survey has calculated the official architectural height of the Washington Monument to be 554 feet 7 11/32 inches [...]. Although the newly established architectural height differs from the historical height of 555 feet 5⅛ inches, neither the starting point nor the so-called “standard deviation” used for the original 1884 measurement is known [...].

Daniel Libeskind design wins Canadian National Holocaust Monument competition

2014-05-12T14:00:00-04:00

Team Lord of Toronto was announced today as the winner to design the new Canadian National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa, Canada's capital. The team's proposal, titled "Landscape of Loss, Memory and Survival", was selected out of six finalists who were invited to present their concepts to a jury of professionals and then to the public during the national design competition.

Led by co-president of Lord Cultural Resources Gail Dexter-Lord, the Toronto-based team also includes Daniel Libeskind (architect), Edward Burtynsky (artist–photographer), Claude Cormier (landscape architect), and Doris Bergen (subject-matter advisor).

More info about the project on Bustler.

Washington Monument Set to Reopen Today

2014-05-12T13:01:00-04:00

More than 150 cracks have been repaired, rainwater leaks have been sealed, and the 130-year-old Washington Monument is set to reopen Monday for the first time in nearly three years since an earthquake caused widespread damage. The memorial honoring George Washington has been closed for about 33 months for engineers to conduct an extensive analysis and restoration of the 555-foot stone obelisk that was once the tallest structure in the world.

The monuments of tech: architecture in the age of planned obsolescence

2014-03-06T13:55:00-05:00

Silicon Valley long prided itself on building world-changing technologies from the humble garage, or the nondescript office park. The new spaces are more distinctive, as companies seek to build a consumer profile [...] [There] is a sense that nothing is permanent, that any product can be dislodged from greatness by something newer. It’s the aesthetic of disruption: We must all change, all the time. And yet architecture demands that we must also represent something lasting.

Gezi Park Monument by Studio Vural

2013-07-22T18:56:00-04:00

New York-based Turkish architect Selim Vural, founder of architecture and interior design firm Studio Vural, has shared with us his design for a Gezi Park Monument. The memorial commemorates the recent protests on Istanbul's Taksim Square against the planned construction of a shopping mall in place of the historic Gezi Park — which sparked the nationwide 2013 protests in Turkey (previously on Archinect).

Project Description from Selim Vural:

Beyond commemorating important events, monuments come to being through significant ideas. Their bodies are usually aesthetic, dynamic, communicative and distinctive yet beyond all, they are clear embodiments of their generative ideas.

It is also significant that all monuments of liberty in history are made of or derived from female figures. There is a soft power, an illuminated fearlessness in their stance, which is not evident in the singularly powerful male figures. On the one hand they are complex, conflicting, and plural and on th...