ABSTRAKT Studio Architecture was chosen to design Canada's future National Memorial to Victims of Communism in Ottawa...The team was selected out of six finalists at the end of the two-phase national design competition held this summer. The memorial will pay tribute to the more than 100 million people around the globe who suffered or perished under communist dictatorship, as well as educate the public about the heavy consequences caused by communism. — bustler.net
As a national memorial, it will also signify Canada's role in offering refuge to those who escaped that oppression. It will be located on Confederation Boulevard beside the Supreme Court of Canada, the Library and Archives Canada, the Peace Tower, and other key federal institutions.
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Victims of Communism ... great PR for the coming war with Russia (even though it's not communist anymore).
Victims of Communism?! This is absurd. The faux-Representative-Democratic states of the pseudo-Capitalist ideology have left far more victims in their wake, especially the US. I'm sure most of the "victims of Communism" actually suffered at the hands of Western personnel directly, or indirectly met their end because of US interventionism.
And what does Canada have to do with this? If it's about refugees, it should be made more inclusive by "memorializing" victims of injustice everywhere, not some inflated number accredited to a scapegoat that you've already cut open and left to bleed out.
Team Cabbage. Excellent
memorials have become a medium for the parody of architectural fads...
the whole concept is a gross oversimplification of history. do the victims of anti-communist regimes get a memorial too?
This isn't an Onion piece? I thought Canada was communist, no? Are we burning books on communism now too? Let's see that means Karl Marx is the devil and since he studied under Hegel and wait let's keep going, Kant, Descartes, Socrates....we need a memorial to all those who perished at the hands of countries who adopted Greek philosophy. The Plato Death Memorial, I will make a Kickstarter page. Does this mean Canada will abandon their healthcare system since Healthcare is a socialist thing and socialist have a Communist leaning......how ill-informed are our children going to be? Listen if I was 10 and my parents took me to visit this memorial by the time I got to college I would be very hesitant about reading Marx or Hegel, talk about acidentally engraving superstition and stupidity into the psyche of a generation.
I don't get it (big surprise!). You have to walk up a monumental staircase to see a large picture of dead people? Who's gonig to maintain those long dark tunnels, from which I assume one enters to eventually get to the light at the end, only to be met by Mr. Putin or some Chinese fat cats. I'm trying, but this thing is hideous.
And why do we need to be directed to Bustler. I thought Archinect and Bustler where from the same folks?
It's never been popular to dwell on the atrocities committed by communist regimes. However absurd and over-simplified this memorial might seem, I one for am touched and grateful to be able to honor the memory of the victims of this particular ideology. My family and the community in which I was raised has been immeasurably scarred by this history--a history that no one wanted to talk about and no one wanted to hear. And now, what is most frightening, is that Russian leadership is consciously reviving the glories of communism while invading its neighbors and committing atrocities anew. So if the PR surrounding this memorial does anything, perhaps this time around the world community will be better informed, and human lives will be saved.
Miles, there will be no war with Russia. Russians and their government don't want any war.
^ Tell that to oBOMBa & Co.
Justin & Co.
Shitbow no doubt loves this project, which makes me wonder, why don't many of you cream your panties over this?
Justin Shubow, President. A 2008 graduate of Yale Law School, Mr. Shubow is the author ofThe Gehry Towers over Eisenhower: The National Civic Art Society Report on the Eisenhower Memorial, a 150-page critique of the memorial’s competition, design, and agency approval. He also writes about architecture forForbes magazine online. In June 2012, he testified to the House Subcommittee on National Parks on the future of the National Mall. In March 2013, he testified in front of the same subcommittee in support of a bill to scrap Frank Gehry’s design for the Eisenhower Memorial. Shubow spent four years in the University of Michigan’s Ph.D. program in philosophy, and has taught his own philosophy courses at Michigan and Yale. During law school, he was a Yale Journalism Scholar and studied in the International Security Studies’ Program in Grand Strategy. A former magazine and newspaper editor, he has contributed reviews and criticism to numerous publications. He has spoken about architecture and other subjects at Baylor University, Colorado College, Hamilton College, and the Universities of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, among elsewhere. Shubow sits on the Board of Academic Advisors for the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization.
Marion Smith, Chairman. Mr. Smith is Executive Director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. He is also president of the Common Sense Society located in Budapest, Hungary and Washington, D.C. He was a 2010 Washington Fellow at the National Review Institute in Washington, D.C, and a 2011 Publius Fellow at the Claremont Institute in California. He is a native of South Carolina where his ancestors fought as both Patriots and Tories in the American War of Independence. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Wofford College with a BA in Government & History and, after studying in England, France, and the Netherlands, received an MA in International Relations from Central European University, writing his thesis on the compatibility of NATO and EU security cooperation. In terms of architecture and art, he seeks to promote historical preservation and the continuation of the classical tradition. He has also participated in excavations of several ancient sites as an "amateur archaeologist" in the Middle East.
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