What had the land done to deserve being fissured? Local residents protested that they were traumatized enough by the killer’s passage among them not to suffer a daily reminder of it, thronged by tourists. Some families of victims refused the use of their loved ones’ names, which are already enshrined on a modest monument—a suspended silver ring, in the woods—on Utøya. Last month, Norway officially canceled the project. — The New Yorker

The German parliament approved plans to build a Memorial to Freedom and Unity in central Berlin, with an ambitious timetable that envisages the monument’s inauguration on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 2019.

Designed by the Stuttgart-based architect Johannes Milla and the Berlin choreographer Sasha Waltz, the monument will commemorate the protest movement that toppled the East German communist regime and led to the reunification of Germany in 1990.  — theartnewspaper.com

Britain may soon have its own national memorial dedicated to Holocaust victims and survivors. Prime Minister Theresa May recently announced the official launch of the [UK] Holocaust Memorial international competition...The winning team will design the new Memorial and a below-ground public Learning Centre located beside Parliament in London's Victoria Tower Gardens. Plans for the memorial competition were first revealed by David Cameron this past January. — Bustler

The Polish government plans to demolish about 500 Soviet monuments throughout the country, head of the Institute of National Remembrance Lukasz Kaminsky said in an interview with online portal Onet.pl, the RBC news website reported Thursday.

Kaminsky — whose institute is responsible for investigating crimes against the Polish nation — said that plans for the demolition of the monuments, would be sent to local authorities in the coming weeks. — the Moscow Times

As the cityscape of Washington D.C. continues to evolve, another project is in the works at the National World War One Memorial at Pershing Park. Today, the U.S. World War I Centennial Commission announced that 25-year-old architect Joseph Weishaar of Brininstool+Lynch and New York veteran sculptor Sabin Howard won the Centennial Memorial design competition with their proposal, "The Weight of Sacrifice". Not a bad start for Weishaar's professional career, no? — Bustler

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. — theguardian.com

[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. — Next City

Called Lysningen or ‘The Clearing’, it has been designed by the Bergen-based architects 3RW. [...]

“It is actually much better than I had thought,.” [Jørgen Watne Frydnes, the general manager of Utøya,] said. “The frame around the woods and the silence of nature, makes it feel like a well.” — thelocal.no

Architect Frank Gehry’s modified design for the National Eisenhower Memorial received final approval from the National Capital Planning Commission Thursday, the final step in the federal approval process that has dragged on since 2011.

The commission voted 9 to 1 to move forward with the design for a memorial park on a four-acre site along Independence Avenue in Southwest Washington. — washingtonpost.com

A plan to erect a 10-storey statue in a national park on one of Canada’s most scenic shorelines has prompted outrage and sparked a growing political row [...].

The statue of Mother Canada – a cloaked female figure with her arms outstretched towards the Atlantic Ocean – is intended to honour the country’s soldiers who died overseas.

But growing anger over the plan has made it a new focus of opposition to the increasingly unpopular government of Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper. — theguardian.com

In Orange, Texas, the Texas Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans just built a large Confederate memorial park, complete with a classical-ish monument featuring 13 columns—one for each of the states in the short-lived, and utterly defeated, Confederate States of America. [...]

And this being Confederate sympathizers, they did not hesitate to build the memorial where the highway meets Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. — citylab.com

In 2010, a sanctuary in Santiago was completed in [Hurtado's] honor — at the very site where he founded the Hogar de Cristo back in the 1940s. The building was designed by Chilean architect Cristián Undurraga, of Undurraga Devés Arquitectos, and it is elegant and serene — a true space of contemplation. It also makes the most of simple materials: rough Béton brut concrete, glass blocks and blond wood ceilings that don't overwhelm the artifacts on display... — Los Angeles Times

Before Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha was killed on Feb. 10, she had an epiphany in her architecture class. [...]

"Within a few moments after we began the demonstration, she lit up like she completely got it. In her eyes, I remember the most, just the kindness in her eyes. Behind those deep eyes, a little bulb went on, and she no longer needed me. It's the moment any teacher wants to have with their students, like, 'OK, they get it, you can go now.' — indyweek.com

It’s easy enough to blame economic forces for the postwar destruction of slave markets, but not for the persistent concealment of their history. One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War, the South has no shortage of memorials to the Lost Cause, while memorials to the slave trade remain few and far between. [...]

After the Civil War, Johnson says, “the price of moving forward for the white United States was the forgetting of slavery.” — citylab.com

Blumberg doesn’t understand why a memorial to victims of communism was given such an “incredibly prominent, almost sacrosanct” site. “It is so centrally placed that it would seem to quite overshadow Canada’s true history.” [...]

"I have a massive problem, a huge problem, with this memorial going on that site. I think it completely misrepresents and skews what Canada is all about.” — ottawacitizen.com