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On Memorials
moniker
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Ground was broken yesterday for the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial site:
^clickable to the site with a movie that runs through a sketchup model and a few other renderings.
It's a pompous, arrogant, concealed, out of the way, uninspired, and way too complex/expensive for what it is meant to be and what it represents. I'll bet you a million dollars this is going to have a gift shop somewhere in it to sell cheap plastic crap with MLK somehow forced into it.
Why are memorials so difficult to get 'right' it seems? Filled with some grand and overly simplified profoundity shoved down the throats of everyone who either stumbles upon the enclave hidden away from the public or has it imposed upon them by the placing of the site or its scale. It would seem that memorials have become the last bastion for modernist design where the architect is allowed to attempt at deciding the visitor's reactions for them. To pick and choose what should be remembered of an event or person and to revise or edit out that which should not be, in their eyes.
What other problems and poor memorials come to mind that we can mock and promote an alternate take on, even though it's too late?
^clickable to the site with a movie that runs through a sketchup model and a few other renderings.
It's a pompous, arrogant, concealed, out of the way, uninspired, and way too complex/expensive for what it is meant to be and what it represents. I'll bet you a million dollars this is going to have a gift shop somewhere in it to sell cheap plastic crap with MLK somehow forced into it.
Why are memorials so difficult to get 'right' it seems? Filled with some grand and overly simplified profoundity shoved down the throats of everyone who either stumbles upon the enclave hidden away from the public or has it imposed upon them by the placing of the site or its scale. It would seem that memorials have become the last bastion for modernist design where the architect is allowed to attempt at deciding the visitor's reactions for them. To pick and choose what should be remembered of an event or person and to revise or edit out that which should not be, in their eyes.
What other problems and poor memorials come to mind that we can mock and promote an alternate take on, even though it's too late?
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There were comments in the chat thread about how the Vietnam memorial was pretty good, except for the statues - but I think even the statues have merit.
pic
They look tired. They look sad. They look the way they do because that's what fighters look like. What's in their faces is what matters.
i really like the simplicity and minimalist design of the vietnam memorial and i think the king memorial is too "busy". And seeing that its a large area thats going to attract people im sure that those benches are going to end up with hobo and skate board guards on them which will probably end up making them rather unfomfortable for the average visitor
I haven't paid attention to the Twin Towers in a while, but I remember they were arguing over how to build some huge memorial with the land and it went on forever. How about just rebuilding the towers to show that were going to continue with our lives regardless of terrorism. I think that makes much more of a profound statement instead of some gaudy monument.
They're just high.
The thing that statues like this does which I find inappropriate/bad for memorials is that they give you an idealized moment that likely never existed or overlooks the grand scale of what it is memorializing. Vietnam was a lot more than just soldiers struggling with a difficult war and yet this is all the statue truly shows, and it shows it in the stereotypical PC friendly color of rainbow BS situation (yet without women which is why the 3rd memorial had to be made). What's worse is that this one is raised on a dais at an intersection forcing people to view it and to imbue it with a sense of reverence. I don't consider the Korean war memorial to be all that great because of the 'these are soldiers on the battlefield and so this is how the war was' nature but at least it is more human in scale and is discovered along pathways rather than taking them over.
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It was a constant back and forth between 3 or 4 different designers on top of the Port Authority, the public, and Silverstein with noone willing to compromise. On top of the red tape issues and the fact that the contest was essentially rigged to begin with. Ever wonder why the same 'big names' in architecture (or grads from Yale and Harvard) seem to win all the major design competitions?
-It doesn't match the skyline
-It's 1776' height was a bullshit ploy from the start and implies a connection between the pinnacle of cut-throat capitalism and the birth of this nation/ideal of liberty that I personally don't feel should be there.
-It is ugly as fuck.
-Crap my dinner is burning.
-It is ugly as fuck.
If you never design something different from the current skyline how will the skyline ever change? Granted the newest version of it is ugly as fuck (not that the previous version was pretty anyhow) the principle still stands.
In short, Libeskind can choke on a dick.
It's true, someone has to break the status quo eventually and I would applaud them for trying to do so in a private venture. But this jerkoff is coopting a national icon to force his artistic vision on the area's architecture. That's just extremely inappropriate to me.
I mean, no offense, but like
isn't that exactly what architects do?
The original twin towers were a horrible blemish in the minds of many.
architects are, as a general principle, arrogant bastards
Only the shitty ones who get too much of their ego wrapped up in the projects to think that they are architecture, but not everybody falls into this. Look at Renzo Piano, he kicks all kinds of ass without being a pompous blowhard about it. The decon guys and gals tend to fall into the arrogant asshole category. The worst thing is, SOM can make some damn fine skyscrapers on their own right when they're the ones designing (look at the Burj Dubai). Libeskind is the real person at issue here and he really does need to just choke on a dick.
It is in a sense, but when the towers were built, it was just some building because the guy paying him needed office space. This time around the artist is being asked to rebuild something, to honor what used to be, and maybe punch it up a bit. This is a complete redesign.
But I shouldn't blame the guy, it was a huge opportunity for him and he took it. Still a douche though, and still a bad choice.
Nothing is more despised in the construction industry than architects.
NOTHING.
Also: Most memorials are just intellectual masturbation. "Look at me, I'm deep and meaningful!"
Fuck that.
Spend that money on a library.
Monuments and memorials are usually fucking expensive.
Though I did enjoy sitting under the giant disembodied head of Ghandi between classes.
I strongly agree with any course of action that involves hot lesbians.
Oh, and the absolute lack of humanity in the memorial is disgusting. If I didn't know any better, I'd swear the war was fought by stone columns, not people.
Humanizing it would make it really hard to prompt the whole "Glory of War" thing.
[spoiler:a7d699fc13]Just kidding[/spoiler:a7d699fc13]
I would do the opposite. Turn the site into a park, with a 10 foot tall scale model of the towers in the middle. It would add some open space, and be a nice reminder of what was there without being ugly or in your face all the time.
You're overreacting, but it does suck. A lot.
No, the original towers were horrible pieces of architecture. They created windstorms in the plaza at the base and made a real no-man's land contextually. That was the silver lining in all of the horror of 9-11 and we screwed it up.
And the WWII memorial is almost hilarious in its irony. The thing is most stark, authoritarian, facist/communist, neo-classical approach imagineable. Might as well have had Speer's son design it.
How do I put this....
DC is now considered almost as bad as FRESNO.
http://money.cnn.com/popups/2006/biz2/newrules_wherenot/6.html
This is just the frost upturned ass of the ice burg.
If DC ever gets invaded, it's the first place they'll roll their tanks into for photo-ops.
That page also said that Boston is bubble-proof. Fucking liars.
Well it depends on how the memorial is done. I wouldn't say that the Vietnam wall was mental masturbation but there certainly are a few that fit under this. Do it poorly and it is a horrible monument to your shitty design; do it right and it can be transcendental.
Well a lot of that money is generally donations freely given and such so you can't really complain.
I spent two years walking past this donation-begging thing on my college campus for a statue of some woman I've never heard of. The statue cost like 20k.
At the same time, I saw fellow students struggling to afford -books-.
Mind you, I'm all for useless art, but I'd much rather see a donation box for helping kids survive college than for some dead person to be cast in bronze and collect pigeon crap.
Those kinds of scholarships and things are out there too and would be more than happy to take your money.
It would probably go to an art student who makes monuments. :?
oh wait THEY STILL CAN't DECIDE ON ONE YET.
honestly the best one there is is the original globe from the WTC fountain survived and is on display in Battery Park.
More meaningful than anything they could design if you ask me.
I work in an architecture firm right now. Let me tell you they have a really hard time deciding on anything. I'm surprised either of them make it to work in the morning since they'd have to decide what to wear and what to eat for breakfast before even leaving the house.
They're also late for meetings constantly.
These two are very good architects but sometimes I need to step in and be like "HEY HEY GUYS! It's FINE. You're DONE. Quit over-working everything."
It wasn't one firm doing this, though, it was a design competition. One that was intended to go to Libeskind to begin with (or perhaps Koolhass or Zaha or Calatrava one of the other 'names'). After that it was a matter of making the design a reality, and that was where the problems arose because on top of those 3+ groups you tack on SOM's architect (who Silverstein wanted to do the whole design anyhow) to get the latest POS that's under construction. Personally I kind of liked Soleri's design for it, plus that guy deserves to have one arcology actually built.
This is just hypothetical of course.
Even after they picked the design everyone continued to rpessure for changes here and there. the city was like "there's not enoug retail space" meanwhile the advocacy groups bitched that the thing wasn't 90% memorial space.