Aldo Rossi The Architecture of The City
Paul Virilio Bunker Archaeology
Johanna Saleh Dickson MOVE: Sites of Trauma (I think it's #22 or #23 in Princeton's Pamphlet Architecture series)
Diller+Scofidio (w/ Jean-Luois Delotte, Thomas Keenan, Frederic Migayarou, Lynn Tillman, and Georges van den Abbeele) Visite aux armées: Tourismes de gurerre

i hope these help ....

wow! great stuff smokety..

Thanks smokety.. thats a great start i will definately look into all of those.

when people start talking memorials... I always think of the aids quilt.

I am continually amazed at the odd combination of ad-hoc and official, zoomed-out grand scale and zoomed-in detail, it's ability to split up, move around, recombine...

there's a give-and-take with participants (and observers) that I think is key. The vietnam memorial has something along these lines - rubbings of names - but the aids quilt is really an extreme in alot of ways.

i declare a moratrorium on memorials...

I´d recommend the nuremberg documentation center by gunter domenig, and the competition process for that. That´s a special situation, though, since the task was to work with the nazi spirit of that place... I think commemoration there means reveiling the roots of the "tragic events", sort of an enlightening, informing approach, very different from earlier memorials/monuments, stressing the good/bad, us/them conflict.

read some of Eisenman's stuff. He's got a book called 'Memory...', or something like that. Good stuff, I thought, with pretty diagrams.

There are certain things that all memorials have in common in one way or another.

(1) The project must symbolize the event it is memorializing through landscape, buildings, follies, etc. (6 towers for 6 million people, empty chairs in landscape, voided building footprints etc.)
(2) Reflect the mood of the event. (Tragic, joyful, tranquil, crowded, stark)
(3) Create a “place” that is recognizable in the city/ rural area that draws people to investigate and educate.

What I would be interested in it being able to create memorials without these prerequisites. Can one design a memorial that does not relate to the event yet be as strong symbolically? The holocaust tragedy versus flight 93? in Pennsylvania brings up the question of scale. It is hard to get a sense of 6 million versus the 60? people that died in Pennsylvania. When something is tragic a designer’s instinct is to have personalized memorials (tombstone like element) for each of the people who died (pentagon memorial, Oklahoma city bombing, etc.) but when it is 6 million what do you do? (The Boston holocaust follie is a good example in a small urban space.) Also now that Washington DC is becoming overrun with memorials is this a good or bad thing in the urban landscape?

By the way thank you for not doing another Architecture is frozen music thesis. If I see another one of these projects I wil make a memorial for them in every architecture school

happy sunday images...

this is good stuff! thanks alot guys.. i must say that this is the first time in a while that i feel real good about what im trying to do ..joe u are right.. memorials are becoming stereotypical .. i like the idea of a building that doesnt commemorate a tragic or even a positive event, but then who would the client be for the project?

You are right, I think when you design a building to reflect a tragic event, the three things you named are common in memorials.. but i dont think they are common in a building.. how can we convey the same information in a built form? And if its not using that information, how about conveying the opposite of those things?

when we´re already at it, how does the non-german world understand the holocaust memorial in berlin?

in germany there has been a controversial debate wether this memorial would be a sign of self-castigation and disgrace, and thus be cancelled, topic closed, move on... I personally see it less as a place of mourning, it´s not yad vashem, nor auschwitz, more as a monument of the current german generation of acknowledgment what happened, from a distance of two generations...it´s neither by the victims nor by the committers...

Evoking emotion causes memory thus gives a project symbolic nature... this coming from my clinical neuropsychologist fiancée anyway. Also, I would like to share an experience I had in Normandy since we are on the whole WWII topic. I went to Normandy beach and saw the scene that everyone is now familiar with from saving Private Ryan. However, the battlefield did nothing for me... it was not until I went to the cemetery and saw those perfectly aligned stark, simple tombstones did I feel the impact. The memory of the graveyard was much stronger than the actually place where the battle took place. I think this dichotomy should be investigated. You would think this would be the total opposite, but almost everyone else in my group felt the same way.

so late to the party

the typology of the memorial as functional architecture has long researched and is often manifested in the form of memorial libraries, hospitals, schools or in larger scale development namely urban design where sites of memory or monuments become integrated into the scheme. Interesting would be however the marriage of a memorial with other perhaps unrelated architectural forms for instance commerce or housing.

Memory and Architecture

Eleni Bastea

http://www.unmpress.com/Book.php?id=10123373381846

"The Monument In the Age of Political Correctness"
Landscape Architecture (ASLA) magazine Feb 08

"Contemporary memorial design is in a crisis. Minimalism has become the accepted, culturally sensitive way of commemorating loss. But does it communicate anything more than silence" by Kieran Long

I would be careful to lend yourself to a tragic event that one cannot possibly comprehend, for example the holocaust. That's just me though. Those things tend to get lost in the literature of others rather than your own. Best of luck!