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These conjoined entities are the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the latter more commonly identified as a memorial to the victims of lynching. They are both extraordinary, though it is the second that behooves a pilgrimage. To my mind, it is the single greatest work of American architecture of the 21st century, and the most successful memorial design since the 1982 debut of Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. — Dallas News
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened to the public this past April, is the first memorial dedicated to the victims of lynching and racial prejudice in the US. The design, a collaborative effort between MASS Design Group and the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), was recently... View full entry
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opens Thursday on a six-acre site overlooking the Alabama State Capitol, is dedicated to the victims of American white supremacy. And it demands a reckoning with one of the nation’s least recognized atrocities: the lynching of thousands of black people in a decades-long campaign of racist terror. — The New York Times
In a week that began with Confederate Memorial Day in Alabama, a new chapter of American history has begun today with the official opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, a place so central to the crimes and injustice of white supremacy in the South. The memorial... View full entry
[...] according to a U.K. government press release published Thursday, the site will become a formal memorial to the fire’s victims.
The announcement of the plan—which could also see the nearby Latimer Road Tube station renamed to Grenfell—strikes the right note so far, making it clear that residents of the West London housing project will get the deciding say on any kind of memorial that happens on the tower’s site.
— citylab.com
While the memorial signals a commitment to remembrance and honoring the victims, the article points out the shortcomings in the official response, the display of incompetence, the ongoing hardship for Grenfell Tower's former residents, and the still looming fire hazard of countless other... View full entry
Mr. Cooper began his career in 1958 as overseer for architect Eero Saarinen in the construction of Washington Dulles International Airport. [...]
Mr. Cooper was best known for his work on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Korean War Veterans Memorial, dedicated in 1982 and 1995, respectively.
— The Washington Post
Kent Cooper's architecture firm, Cooper-Lecky, became the architects of record for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. While Maya Lin's now iconic design for the memorial was chosen as the competition winner in 1981, Lin was an architecture student at the time and not a licensed... View full entry
Lahdelma & Mahalmäki Architects have unveiled Requiem, their competition proposal for the Museum for the Defense and Siege of Leningrad, St. Petersburg. The project was undertaken in partnership with Ralph Appelbaum Associates who, together, formed the only international team amongst the four... View full entry
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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. — The Art Newspaper
"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." View full entry
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
Memory Wound, a bold proposal by the Swedish artist Jonas Dahlberg, won a government competition for a memorial dedicated to the seventy-seven victims of a massacre committed by Andres Breivik on July 22, 2011. The artist's design called for cutting a channel across the... View full entry
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
"The monument is animate and is not to be approached merely as an object for contemplation," Milla & Partner state on their website. "The intention is that people shall actually enter it and walk on it and set it in motion, movement being achieved by visitors working together as a group.""The... View full entry
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
More on Archinect: Frank Gehry and Maya Lin find their ancestral roots on PBS Winner of the Canadian National Memorial to Victims of Communism Proposal for the future of Auschwitz-Birkenau View full entry
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
According to the report, the monuments will be relocated to museums where they can serve as a "witness of hard times."Many Soviet war memorial have been vandalized and demolished in Poland, whose population views the Soviet role in the Second World War "with ambiguity or outright... View full entry
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
Here's a glimpse of the winning proposal:More about the project on Bustler. View full entry
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
More pieces on the cultural history of demolished or renovated structures:Saving Buildings with Social Media (Or Not)The Folly of Saving What You Kill"Historic Status" won't protect against demolitionInteractive Decay View full entry
[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
