Introduction

Emptiness is not nothing

But something that is there
That which indicates something is missing.1
Nick Hullegie

Like most architecture, designed memorial spaces can be perceived as

collective efforts that rely on resources provided by political and financial
powers. At the same time, memorial architecture, being an act of repre-
sentation, touches upon the essence of architectural creation and the
question of how space mediates some of the most intricate social and
cultural processes. Both the predicament and the allure of the task of
designing a memorial space became clear to me in a very personal quest
to commemorate through architecture the Siege of Sarajevo (1992–95).2 In
1992, when American architect Lebbeus Woods was working on his book
War and Architecture, the destruction of Sarajevo and its citizens by heavy
artillery and sniper fire was in full swing.3 While one of the many targets
was being destroyed – the city’s twin towers, ‘Momo & Uzeir’ – Woods
made the pessimistic statement that the burning towers of Sarajevo were
‘markers of the end of an age of reason, if not reason itself, beyond which
lies a domain of almost incomprehensible darkness’.4 As a compassionate
observer who entered the besieged city in the midst of the ongoing carnage,
he preoccupied himself with Sarajevo’s architectural wounds. Intuitively
recognizing a need for order and some sense of control that was lingering

1
Author’s translation of the words that accompany Nick Hullegie’s 2011 sculpture, Not There,
which combines plexiglass and tree stump. The original text reads ‘Leegte is niet niets, maar iets
dat er is wat aangeeft dat er iets mist.’
2
The Siege of Sarajevo by the combined forces of the Yugoslav People’s Army and the Army of
Republic of Srpska, often referred to as the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern
warfare, started on 5 April 1992 and officially lasted until 1 November 1995 when the Dayton
Agreement was signed. However, it was only in March 1996 that the occupying forces left
the city.
3
Lebbeus Woods, War and Architecture, Pamphlet Architecture 15 (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1993).
4
Ibid., p. 3. 1
2 Introduction

among its citizens, Woods focused on the city’s wounded tissue and looked
at the smallest details, for example a damaged window, in an effort to
preserve traces of war.
To understand destructed space, Woods aimed to make a distinction
between architecture as a weapon of destruction, or part of the problem in
war, and architecture as a system of protection. Along this typically Janus-
faced characterization of architecture, he proposed architectural solutions
for establishing the order needed for the continuation of life in peace. He
termed them as ‘the scab’ and ‘the scar’, arguing that ‘the natural stages of
healing might not be pretty, judged by conventional aesthetic standards,
but they are beautiful in the existential sense.’5 In this view, architecture
can act as a symbol of the resilience of the human spirit and the will to live
of those targeted for destruction.
My interest in the role of architects as creators of order in devastated
environments started in the post-war atmosphere of Sarajevo, when making
sense of things was a priority. After having been continuously exposed to
severe urbicide for almost four years, in 1996 the city and its citizens faced
the prospect of peace in a place defined by overwhelming architectural and
psychological debris which now had to be confronted in its real scale and
meaning. An eagerness to tell the story of survival was widely present
among citizens, and it seemed to be getting stronger as life continued to
be normalized and the eternal fire of the Second World War memorial in
the centre of the city was lit again, exactly 50 years after ‘justice had
vanquished two tyrannies, bringing forth a new paradigm of world his-
tory’.6 At the same time, the ‘other’ side – the participants in the war who,
actively or inactively, supported the destruction of the city – had and still
have a different memory of events. As the issues surrounding possible ways
of memorializing the war started to become more prominent, the complex-
ities of the memorializing process began to unfold, demonstrating the
contemporaneity of memory and the presence of counter-memory. In his
contemplation on negative memory in the German collective conscious-
ness, German historian Reinhart Koselleck touched upon three interlinked
questions: who and what should be remembered, and how should it be
done?7 Observing through a lens of a designer whose experience was shaped

5
Ibid., p. 24.
6
Jeffrey K. Olick, The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility (New
York and London: Routledge, 2007), p. 175.
7
Reinhart Koselleck, Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, trans. Sean Franzel and Stefan-
Ludwig Hoffmann (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), p. 243.
 Monument versus Memorial? 3

by a post-conflict environment, my focus was inherently inclined to the

‘how’ conundrum, or more precisely the official (and to a lesser extent
unofficial) memorials, because these are usually the most challenging and
controversial assignments architects can receive. This is a daunting topic in
the electric age where information is abounding and available to everyone,
creating ‘memory of the multitude’ that ‘softens history, changing the
parameters of the who, what and why of remembering’.8

Monument versus Memorial?

While I was contemplating what a memorial for Sarajevo should be, on the
other side of the Atlantic similar issues were raised in a difficult discussion
about how to commemorate the events of 9/11 in New York. What was
instantly clear, amid the arguments between those who fought for recon-
struction and those who pleaded to leave the newly created void as a
signifier, was that whatever form it took, the memorial had to carefully
communicate the emotional tension and stay objective, informative and
truthful. It seemed an impossible balancing act. If we understand repre-
sentation of memory, both individual and collective, as ‘the function by
which symbols, or simulacra, or surrogates, come to stand for some absent
referent’, it is inviting to comprehend how this might manifest and what it
means for memorial architecture in particular.9 What are the symbols,
simulacra or surrogates used in contemporary memorial projects? Now
that the memorial for 9/11 is built, the question of how to design a
structure as a signifier of something that is missing due to violent destruc-
tion remains relevant and equally as challenging.
The distinction between monument and memorial remains ambiguous.
The two notions are continuously interchangeably used both in academia
and practice. The general process of creating is similar for both typologies
in that they are (almost always) directly faced with strong emotions and
sentiments. And like in all design projects, there are restrictions of funding
and resources. However, building a memorial is further complicated by the
involvement of additional tasks such as preservation and questions
of education and tourism. As a rule, all these aspects are the subject of
multilayered views on a particular memory or set of memories and are

8
Andrew Hoskins (ed.), ‘Memory of the multitude. The end of collective memory’, in Digital
Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition (London and New York: Routledge, 2017),
pp. 85–109, p. 88.
9
Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and Memory Crisis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1933), p. 8.
4 Introduction

deeply embedded in the political and social context. As well as these

defining tasks, a memorial is normally the focal architectural edifice within
its built context and is therefore perceived as a representation of that
particular context (even if this is not necessarily the case), often becoming
a frequented visiting attraction and mental signifier for that physical
location in the collective imagination.
The extensively quoted remark by Robert Musil that ‘there is nothing in
this world as invisible as a monument’ perhaps best describes the process of
disregarding a monument’s power as an aide memoire.10 In his 1927 essay,
Musil was of course referring to the traditional notion of a public monument,
an edifice dedicated to the memory of a person or an event, usually taking the
form of a sculptural work installed on a pedestal.11 The discussion about the
invisibility of monuments implies that there is an expiry date for the monu-
ment’s performance of memory, related to the intricate set of circumstances
that produced the monument in the first place. Referring to Musil’s observa-
tion, the scholar James E. Young argued that the reason for this invisibility is
‘the essential stiffness monuments share with all other images: as a likeness
necessarily vitrifies its otherwise dynamic referent, a monument turns pliant
memory to stone’.12 In this sense, monuments imply an act of termination
since monuments are seldom erected for the living, but the affective nature of
a monument keeps memory alive for posterity.13 The affective nature of a
monument is what is often neglected, a tendency also recognized by Young,
who argued that ‘too often, a community’s monuments assume the polished,
finished veneer of a death mask, unreflective of a current memory, unrespon-
sive to contemporary issues.’14 The supposed short-term familiarity of public
monuments, Peter Carrier argued, is

10
Robert Musil, ‘Monuments’ (1927), in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, trans. Peter
Wortsman (Hygiene, CO: Eridanos Press, 1987), pp. 64–8, p. 61.
11
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a ‘monument’ has its origin in Middle English
(denoting a burial place), deriving via French from the classical Latin monumentum, from
monēre ‘to remind’ and stands for: a statue, building or other structure erected to
commemorate a notable person or event; a statue or other structure placed over a grave in
memory of the dead; a building, structure, or site that is of historical importance or interest; an
enduring or memorable example of something. See Angus Stevenson (ed.), Oxford Dictionary of
English, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
12
James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1993), p. 13.
13
David Lowenthal, The Past Is the Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1985), p. 323.
14
James E. Young, ‘Memory/Monument’, in Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (eds.), Critical
Terms for Art History, 2nd edn (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003),
pp. 234–47, esp. p. 245.
 Monument versus Memorial? 5

compounded by the long-term familiarity of a form of symbolic commu-

nication and cultivation of collective memory whose semantic and
political function – urging us to understand and identify with, love or
fear historical figures and events – harbours few surprises.15

Hence the generic form of monuments fails in the face of dramatic changes
of human perceptions and means of communication. Today, however,
artists like Christo and Jean-Claude and, more recently, Tatzu Nishi make
us rediscover monuments with long-passed expiry-dates by changing their
context and literally bringing them closer to us through the use of contem-
porary architectural space.
The longevity of using the symbolic monument genre for communi-
cating social and political messages has been consistently used throughout
history. The French historian Françoise Choay argued that a monument
entails the concept of a defence against the traumas of existence and that
the affective nature of a monument rests upon its being an ‘antidote to
entropy, to the dissolving action of time on all things natural and artificial,
it seeks to appease our fear of death and annihilation’.16 Hence, the power
of a monument resides in its affective nature and the ability to stir up
emotions in people with regards to the monument’s story. According to
the Viennese art historian Aloïs Riegl, a monument in its oldest and most
original sense is ‘a human creation, erected for the specific purpose of
keeping single human deeds or events (or a combination thereof ) alive in
the minds of future generations’.17 According to Riegl, the perception that
future generations will have of a monument is dependent on the existing
context, norms and values or the Kunstwollen or ‘artistic will’ of that epoch
and how a monument responds to these.18 Riegl recognized three types of
monuments: intentional, unintentional and monuments possessing ‘age-
value’.19 In preservation, the first category, intentional monuments, is

15
Peter Carrier, Holocaust Monuments and National Memory in France and Germany since 1989.
The Origins and Political Function of the Vél’d’Hiv’ in Paris and the Holocaust Monument in
Berlin (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005), p. 16.
16
Françoise Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), p. 7.
17
Aloïs Riegl, ‘The modern cult of monuments: its character and its origin’, Oppositions, 25
(1982), 25–56, 21.
18
See Kurt W. Forster, ‘Monument/memory and the mortality of architecture’, in K. Michael
Hays (ed.), Oppositions Reader: Selected Readings from a Journal for Ideas and Criticism in
Architecture, 1973–1984 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), pp. 18–35.
19
Unlike historical value which relates to historical knowledge and is therefore restricted to a few
monuments, age value has broader appeal since everyone can perceive it immediately. See
Choay, The Invention, pp. 111–16.
6 Introduction

specific because these had a more or less protected status in the course of
history, unlike the historic monument, a term introduced in the nineteenth
century with the emergent interest in the preservation of historical heritage
and the recognition of ‘style’. The intentional monument commemorating
a person existed in many cultures, but it was only with the Renaissance,
Riegl argues, when the notion of beauty was given a prominent place, did
people begin to understand and appreciate monuments for their commem-
orative value, as part of their heritage and not simply a mere display of
patriotic recollections.20
An intentional monument in its original sense is not only an informative
structure from a specific historical period, but also an engaging edifice
invested with living memory. To this category belong only ‘those works
which recall a specific moment or complex of moments from the past’.21
Much later, art historian Horst Janson made a distinction between three
categories of Western monuments: the funerary monument, the monu-
ment to historical ideas and events and the monument commemorating
great men.22 In principle, a commemorative monument is always built
with the intention to last. However, this has often proved impossible and
led many monuments to end up as mere signs of the failed infrastructure of
memory they initially embodied, transforming them into uncanny or
unwanted reality.23 Looking closely to two national memorial sites, the
Vél d’Hiv in Paris and the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, Carrier stressed
that the essential significance of commemorative projects is in their
‘non-prescriptive heuristic stimuli that enable individuals to encounter
and understand both the past and their relation to the past via representa-
tions of it’.24
In memory studies, the term memorial is used interchangeably with the
notion of a monument, and distinctions are rarely made between the two.
This is also true in the field of architecture since designers often intertwine
the two notions. In the late nineteenth century, there was a significant
development in the design of public monuments, what Kirk Savage dubbed
‘spatial monument’, which moved from ‘an object of reverence to a space

20
Riegl, ‘Modern cult of monuments’, p. 26. 21
Ibid., 24.
22
Horst W. Janson, The Rise and Fall of the Public Monument (New Orleans, LA: The Graduate
School, Tulane University, 1976), p. 1.
23
Andrew Shanken, ‘Towards a cultural geography of modern memorials’, in Jill A. Franklin,
T. A. Heslop and Christine Stevenson (eds.), Architecture and Interpretation: Essays for Eric
Fernie (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2012), pp. 357–80.
24
Carrier, Holocaust Monuments, p. 230.
 Monument versus Memorial? 7

of subjective experience’.25 In addition, as Sergiusz Michalski signalled in

his history of public monuments, the years before the First World War
were characterized by a certain zest for experiments in commemorative
sculptures.26 A more psychologically-oriented approach was introduced:
the sculptural compositions descended from their high pedestals to stand
eye to eye with their audience and enclose beholders into their space,
thereby inviting more engagement with the monument.27
Erika Doss demonstrated how in the American context the two words
are used to depict a variety of commemorative projects, ranging from
traditional stone obelisks to other facilities including parks, highways,
libraries and so forth. This is the heritage of the post-WWII debate about
‘living’ memorials.28 The word ‘memorial’ appears to be more popular, but
there is also a hint that designers seem to perceive monuments as celebra-
tory whereas memorials are commonly understood as spaces of a pro-
foundly contemplative nature that can offer more possibilities.
Some aimed to establish parameters that turn a war monument into a
memorial and hence argued for a symbolic repertoire that focuses on the
acceptance of violence and recognition of sacrifice that enhances under-
standing of a debt by the living and thus their will to reciprocate – a
memorial as

A sustenance for memory achieving significance for the past sacrifice in

order that future devotion will require further commitment to confirm
the social order and establishing the key social relationships that make
life worth having or at least worth bearing.29

This distinction in purpose and content was also recognized by philoso-

pher and critic Arthur Danto, who explained:

25
Savage commented on the monument to Abraham Lincoln (1887) in Chicago by sculptor
Saint Gaudens and architect Stanford White. The monument, together with other monuments
built at the time, was perceived as innovative since it combined sculptural monument with
architectural solutions and allowed visitors to penetrate the sculpture. See Quentin Stevens and
Karen A. Franck, Memorials as Spaces of Engagement: Design, Use and Meaning (New York:
Routledge, 2016), p. 14.
26
Sergiusz Michalski, Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage 1870–1997 (London: Reaction
Books Ltd, 1998).
27
Ibid., p. 41.
28
Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 2010), pp. 37–48.
29
Michael Rowlands, ‘Remembering to forget: sublimation as sacrifice in war memorials’, in
Adrian Forty and Susan Kuchler (eds.), The Art of Forgetting (Oxford: Berg, 2001), pp. 129–45,
esp. p. 144.
8 Introduction

Monuments make heroes and triumphs, victories and conquests, per-

petually present part of life. The memorial is a special precinct extruded
from life, a segregated enclave where we honor the dead. With monu-
ments we honor ourselves.30

Danto situated his argument in a discussion about the well-known Viet-

nam Veterans Memorial (VVM), designed by Maya Lin and inaugurated in
Washington, DC in 1982, representing a memorial to defeat instead of
victory. Danto perceived the memorial as a moral connection between the
Washington Monument (1885) as a symbol of triumph and the Lincoln
Memorial (1922) as a temple of submission. While this is perhaps true in
this specific context, it cannot be taken as a formula since many monu-
ments do invite retrospection, and at the same time memorials are not
necessarily non-celebratory quiet precincts. After the VVM was erected,
the opposing views in the bitter debates regarding the memorial’s appear-
ance and meaning marked its first years. Consisting of two long dark
granite walls inscribed with the names of the dead, cutting into the
landscape, the memorial constitutes an important development in the
conception of an architecture of remembrance. The memorial embodies
some of the ideas that changed the perception of what a monument should
look like. The VVM invites participation on several levels and manages to
remain in a contemplative and emotional realm, demonstrated by its
ongoing acceptance and popularity. The memorial’s unobtrusive horizon-
tality is also contradictory to its physical setting: the National Mall in
Washington, DC. Similarly to the ‘counter-monument’ (Gegen-Denkmal)
generation of artists, Lin claimed that she designs memorials and anti-
monuments.31
In collective memory studies there is a tendency to see memorial spatial
expressions primarily as characterized by the ‘primacy of the visual’.32 And
so art historian Daniel Sherman writes that ‘sight is the only sense power-
ful enough to bridge the gap between those who hold a memory rooted in
bodily experience and those who, lacking such “experience,” nonetheless

30
Arthur C. Danto, The State of the Art (New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1987), p. 112. Several
authors similarly argued that monuments are a means to acknowledge the past, whereas
memorials pay tribute to the dead. See for example Marita Sturken and James E. Young,
‘Monuments: historical overview’, in Michael Kelly (ed.), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, vol. 3 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 272–8, p. 274.
31
Doss, Memorial Mania, p. 39.
32
Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, vol. 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture
(London: Verso, 1994), p. viii.
 Monument versus Memorial? 9

seek to share the memory.’33 For the purposes of this study, the visual is the
axes in the definition of a monument as an architectural or sculptural
composition, or a combination thereof, dedicated to a person, event or
particular act. A monument is intended primarily as a visual marker and a
symbolic tool for communicating social and political ideas. This depiction
relates to what has been understood as a ‘traditional’ sculptural monument.
Accordingly, as a representation of its political, social and cultural context
a memorial has a similar goal and designation, but it differs from a
monument in several aspects. Different from a monument, a memorial is
an architectural construct that is defined by its employment of space as an
architectural tool. A memorial’s symbolic function is not necessarily appar-
ent and often requires visitors’ engagement to be discovered. In other
words, instead of only creating a representation of what is being commem-
orated, a memorial is a custom-designed experiential space in reference to
its topic. In this way, a memorial space is inevitably engaging visitors on
several levels, not only on the level of visual perception.
When engaged with the memorial, a visitor is exposed to its designed
mnemonic power, participating as audience and performer at the same
time. Furthermore, a memorial addresses the facilitation of mourning
instead of only representing loss. A useful definition of public memorials
is the one used in the field of transitional justice by which public memorials
are ‘designed to evoke a specific reaction or set of reactions, including
public acknowledgment of the event or people represented; personal reflec-
tion or mourning; pride, anger, or sadness about something that has
happened; or learning or curiosity about periods in the past’.34 Although
this definition is concerned only with the representation of past events, a
contemporary memorial is usually involved with present events or, rather,
the existence of the past in the present, and in some cases memorials deal
with ongoing but also anticipated future events.35

33
Daniel J. Sherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Chicago, IL and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 14.
34
Sebastian Brett, Louis Bickford, Liz Ševčenko and Marcela Rios, Memorialization and
Democracy: State Policy and Civic Action (New York: International Coalition of Sites of
Conscience, 2007). The report is based on the international conference of the report’s title held
on 20–22 June 2007 in Santiago, Chile.
35
One example of this is a memorial planned for a location in Carlsbad, New Mexico, which is
used as a transuranic waste site by New Mexico’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. In the year 2030,
the storage facility will reach its maximum capacity. This provides the rationale for the
memorial as a structure that would warn future generations of the lethal toxicity of the site. See
Julia Bryan-Wilson, ‘Building a marker of nuclear warning’, in Robert S. Nelson and Margaret
10 Introduction

Scope and Boundaries

Technically, this book is focused on architecture as a space for remem-

bering and is therefore concerned with the memorial genre as a designing
process that aims to understand and respond to social currencies. The
main questions I ask are concerned with the purpose of creating a
memorial in a given location, its translation into an architectural concept
and its materialization. To see how memorial form originated and
evolved I focus on the following key points: how architectural space
supports memory and commemoration, what innovative design solutions
are proposed in the face of social and political challenges, and how are
these solutions implemented. To a limited extent, the investigation
explores what the impact of the design is once the memorial is installed
in real time and space.36 In-depth research on the effects that discussed
memorials have on their visitors and built environment will require
research of its own. Before addressing these questions, I seek to situate
memorialization in a wider context to be able to observe it more critically,
and attend to several points which are relevant to the process of creating
a memorial.
In an approach that explores different disciplines (namely history,
psychology, anthropology and sociology), the aim is to establish a rele-
vant framework for analysing contemporary projects. This framework
constitutes the base for the analysis of the case studies that we will
discuss. By focusing on contemporary memorial architecture in Europe
and a few examples from the United States, I aim to take a closer look
into processes of designing memorials today and how these translate
memories and experiences of human loss into an architectural space.
Memorials were selected to complement each other and to give a diverse
range of practices in commemorative topics dedicated to war and
contemporary violence. With the selection of projects gathered in this
book I do not want to claim to make representative statements that apply
for all Europe. Instead the discussion tries to offer a larger perspective

Olin (eds.), Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade (Chicago, IL: Chicago University
Press, 2003), pp. 183–205.
36
I address the spatial influence on the visitor based on several points: my own experience as a
visitor (I purposefully conducted visits before pursuing any in-depth exploration, in that way
trying to assimilate with a common visitor); information from existing reviews left by visitors;
and information gained from interviews with employees about the most utilized routes and
reactions of the visitors. Any more comprehensive and data-based observations would require a
further research project.
 Scope and Boundaries 11

on how spaces of memory are perceived from a viewpoint of a designer

who, in the end, solidifies calls for remembrance. Without attempting to
make bold statements about how these memorial spaces influence their
specific contexts and thereby, arguably, collective consciousness about
events commemorated, my goal is to take a closer look into conceptual
and aesthetic characteristics of contemporary memorials to try to discern
current day perceptions in the production of public memorial spaces
dedicated to wars and contemporary violence. The impact memorials of
our internet-based time have on the collectives will most likely start to be
understood in the future, since we are only now beginning to realize the
effects on how media from the beginning of the century influenced
processes of collective remembrance.
Before going any further, I need to address the historical literature on
the politics of memory – a field that is huge, and growing daily. Much of it
focuses on three sets of problems:

(1) How do those in power orchestrate projects focusing on remembering

the dead of the two world wars in uniform? Here the works of German
historians – in particular Reinhart Koselleck and George Mosse take
pride of place.37
(2) How, if at all, has remembering the Holocaust transformed patterns of
remembrance of the Second World War? Here state projects and those
arising from within civil society are significant. In this domain, many
historians from different Western countries have made foundational
contributions. Among them are Deborah Lipstadt,38 Saul Friedländer,39
Peter Novick,40 Aleida Assmann,41 Jeffrey Alexander,42 Omer

37
Reinhart Koselleck, ‘War memorials: identity formations of the survivors’, in The Practice of
Conceptual History: Timing, History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner et al.
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 285–326; Reinhart Koselleck (ed.), Zur
politischen Ikonographie des gewaltsamen Todes. Ein deutsch-französischer Vergleich (Basel:
Schwabe, 1998); George L. Mosse, Germans and Jews: The Right, the Left, and the Search for a
“Third Force” in Pre-Nazi Germany (New York: Howard Fertig, 1970).
38
Deborah E. Lipstadt, The American Press & the Coming of the Holocaust 1933–1945: Beyond
Belief (New York: The Free Press, 1986).
39
Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (Frome and
London: Butler & Tanner, Ltd., 1998).
40
Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston, MA and New York: A Mariner Book,
Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000).
41
Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit – Erinnerungskultur und
Geschichtspolitik (Munich: C. H. Beck Publishers, 2006).
42
Jeffrey C. Alexander, ‘On the social construction of moral universals. The “Holocaust” from war
crime to trauma drama’, European Journal of Social Theory 5 (2001), 5–85.
12 Introduction

Bartov,43 Alon Confino,44 Charles Maier,45 Dominick LaCapra,46

Kerwin Klein,47 Dan Diner,48 Henry Rousso,49 Annette Wieviorka50
and Jay Winter.51 They write from different theoretical standpoints,
but in different ways all wrestle with the problem of identifying and
exploring the implications of an epistemological break between
before and after the Holocaust.
(3) How did the ossification and collapse of the Soviet empire affect
patterns of remembrance in what Timothy Snyder has called the
‘Bloodlands’ of Eastern Europe and Russia, where the majority of the
victims of both Hitler and Stalin lost their lives?52

This study cannot possibly interpolate the profound insights of all these
scholars, but it engages in a dialogue about these three questions, and takes
the view that while states try to orchestrate commemoration, they rarely
succeed on their own in setting a society’s commemorative agenda. In
addition, from the late 1970s, remembering the Holocaust has entered into
the public history of the Second World War, and necessarily architects and
designers have joined others in braiding together war and genocide. This is
not the case everywhere, especially in Eastern Europe, but the public
disagreements over how to remember the Second World War in, say,
Poland or Hungary return time and again to the Holocaust. It is on the
commemorative agenda, even when it is minimized or marginalized.
This study starts with the assumption that while politics on the local,
national and transnational level is ever-present in commemorative

43
Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing and Representation (New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
44
Alon Confino, ‘From Psychohistory to Memory Studies: or how some Germans became Jews
and some Jews became Nazis’, in Roger Frie (ed.), History Flows through Us: Germany, the
Holocaust, and the Importance of Empathy (London and New York: Routledge, 2018),
pp. 17–30.
45
Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
46
Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2001).
47
Kerwin L. Klein, From History to Theory (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011).
48
Dan Diner, Beyond the Conceivable: Studies on Germany, Nazism, and the Holocaust (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 2000).
49
Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
50
Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, trans. from the French by Jared Stark (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2011).
51
Jay Winter, War beyond Words: Languages of Remembrance from the Great War to the Present
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
52
Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2011).
 Scope and Boundaries 13

projects, so is the question of the organization of space and the visualiza-

tion of memory. What an architect can offer modestly is a spatial counter-
point, a sight and senses-driven approach to the question as to how do
monuments and memorials emerge in space and time? This always
involves material issues of funding as well as the inevitable tendency of
those who have survived violence to claim privileged knowledge not only
about their experiences but also about how to represent them to posterity.
In a sense, for a designer to enter this domain is to move into a
minefield. And yet designers have a viewpoint which has not been central
to much of the vast literature cited above. Some historians, in particular
Reinhart Koselleck and James E. Young, have a deep sense of what Young
has termed the texture of memory. This book follows their lead by serving
as a commentary and an examination of the ways artists and architects
have designed the texture of a number of important commemorative
projects over the past century. It has been, of necessity, selective, but it is
my hope that the book will add a relevant and until now neglected
viewpoint to the vital and vibrant debate about commemoration of the
victims of violence in today’s world.
Having dealt with violence and representing violence throughout most of
my life and career, I am well aware that to focus on visual forms of
remembrance is to invite a descent into the nightmares of our times. I see
engagement with this task not as a matter of choice, but as a moral
obligation. Each of us - architects included - brings to that task what we can.

*
To address these questions, I carefully consider both theoretical
approaches and how mourning and memorial practices unfolded over
time. I undertook fieldwork to study many projects in situ. Accordingly,
the structure of this book is divided into two parts. The first and largest
part of this book is dedicated to addressing several issues such as the
notion of memory and the process of mourning, funeral architecture, the
limits of architectural representation, and a historical overview of signifi-
cant architectural developments following the First World War up until
the present day. In an interdisciplinary approach that takes cues from
psychology, philosophy, anthropology, political and social history, together
with art and architectural history, the purpose of this part is to establish a
framework in which contemporary examples can be analysed. The second
part, chapters three, four and five, is focused on a detailed analysis of
contemporary memorial projects commemorating wars and more recent
atrocities, including their design, construction and performance.
14 Introduction

The first chapter presents a brief historical overview of significant archi-

tectural developments with regards to memorial projects, as shaped by
different political climates. The overview is primarily concerned with archi-
tectural projects and concepts in Western Europe. There are a few examples
from the United States and fewer still from Eastern Europe, as well as
countries from other continents. My aim is to show the development of
commemorative architecture in Europe and in the United States at a time
when transcultural exchanges of information have been frequent and fruitful.
I also discuss examples from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union
where architects and designers have historically been seen as more resistant
to ‘Western’ influences and are more directly the product of state policies.
Certainly, there are many stories to be told of commemoration in Southern
Europe, in Scandinavia, in Asia Minor, but the mountain of material avail-
able on Western Europe, Central Europe, and the United States is daunting
enough to climb. I recognize that more needs to be done, and hope I have
shown some ways in which a more complete history of the architecture of
commemoration in the twentieth century and after can be written.
The first chapter follows the development of commemorative architec-
ture after each of the world wars – the interwar period and the late 1940s
and 1950s – as well as the upsurge in commemorative efforts during the
1960s and after 1980. Throughout, the politics of memory is the resultant
of many different vectors, but among them is the shifting perspectives of
artists and architects on the legacies of the two world wars and in particular
on the legacy of the Holocaust. Others matter, but this book focuses on the
group of architects and designers, men and women, who have sketched out
and realized commemorative projects.
The second chapter, ‘The Dual Role of Memorial Architecture’, is focused
on the intricate relationship between architecture and representations con-
cerning death, psychological aspects of mourning, particularly mourning
related to the experience of trauma, and the facilitation of its ritual. By
trauma, I follow the general usage that the experience of mass death in the
twentieth century shattered the sense of self of many survivors and made it
difficult, and at times impossible, for them to resume their ante bellum lives.
Other issues relevant to the contemporary context and the production of
memorial spaces are also tackled here, namely the private and public role
of memorial architecture and the possibilities of architecture as a form of
agency in remembering and dealing with a difficult past. The overarching
question in the creation of a memorial space is how the design can add
meaning to the memory-work that naturally involves many participants,
with a variety of expectations and demands. Moreover, memorials can
 Scope and Boundaries 15

possibly provide a significant locus to future generations for processing the

legacies of trauma, since studies have shown that an attuned physical
environment is beneficial to psycho-emotional health.53 Various proposals
and designs for both memorial and funerary architecture by different
architects in different historical periods are observed. In this framework,
attention is also given to cemeteries as commemorative landscapes con-
taining features relevant for memorial architecture, such as transitional
spaces. Since funerary architecture strongly influenced the evolution of the
architectural memorial, this chapter will trace how the topic of death
inspired some of the most influential designers of monuments and memor-
ials in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In the third chapter, I examine several memorials dedicated to the
victims of contemporary terrorist attacks. These include the 11-M memorial
in Madrid, the 9/11 memorial in New York, the July 22 memorial in Utøya,
and the recently dedicated European memorial to victims of a war incident –
the MH17 memorial in Haarlemmermeer municipality in the Netherlands.
The Madrid memorial, now over a decade old, is analysed in depth with the
intention to create a framework through which to observe current efforts in
designing memorials that have a similar purpose. By looking at the process
of creating the 11-M memorial and whether and how it has fulfilled its
purpose during the last decade, a reference point is introduced for contem-
porary developments that still need to perform in practice and create the
much-needed time distance to observe them critically.
The fourth chapter is a comparative analysis of two Holocaust memor-
ial museums: the Kazerne Dossin in Mechelen, Belgium and the Cité de la
Muette in Drancy, France. In these two case studies, architects were faced
with a similar task, namely to design new museums adjacent to or on sites
that were used as internment transit camps during the Second World
War. Several scholars have argued that the commemoration of the
Holocaust has set the precedent for memorials dealing with violence in
recent decades.54 Memorial museums as a relatively young form of

53
See Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of
Trauma (New York: Viking Penguin Group, 2014). In addition, recent research indicates that
psychophysiological trauma can have intergenerational effects. See, for example, Rachel Yehuda
et al., ‘Holocaust exposure induced intergenerational effects on FKBP5 methylation’, Biological
Psychiatry: A Journal of Psychiatric Neuroscience and Therapeutics 80.5 (1 September 2016),
372–80. This is the first demonstration of an association of pre-conception parental trauma
with epigenetic alterations evident in both the exposed parent and his or her offspring.
54
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of
Decolonization (Paolo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
16 Introduction

commemoration emerged from the predicament of finding ways to com-

memorate the Holocaust in physical spaces associated with genocide. As
museums are becoming more popular and technologically advanced, it is
inviting to understand how these projects address the task of dealing with
Holocaust sites in their spatial, material and operational logic, and how
these projects set agendas for other forms of commemorative architecture
dealing with other crimes and other victims.
The fifth chapter examines two projects dedicated to the centenary of
the First World War: the ‘Ring of Memory’ at Notre Dame de Lorette
near Arras in northern France and the project entitled ‘Remembrance
Park 14–18’ in Flemish Belgium. The centenary has so far produced
numerous commemorative activities and architectural projects across
Europe. The two projects analysed here are inviting as examples of
different design efforts undertaken during the centenary of the war. The
chapter will look closely at the architectural, spatial and semantic qual-
ities of the two projects to gain a better understanding of their signifi-
cance in the societal and political environment of the twenty-first century
in Western Europe.
In these later chapters, the discussion focuses less on theoretical and
formal descriptions and more on problems of practice. Hence, architec-
ture’s emphasis on operating time and space as a medium of communi-
cation with visitors is the primary focus of the analysis of case studies.
The architectural examples were selected based on the following ques-
tions: who is the commissioner and what is the context? What were the
demands and expectations of the commissioners? What was the design
solution to a particular problem and how did the design process develop?
How does the realized building operate in practice and how does it affect
the visitor?
The scope of this book is wide. But its remit is neither to be a summary of
memorial architecture nor to develop a singular optic for understanding all
contemporary memorials. Rather, the aim is to distinguish a set of issues,
demonstrated by means of case studies, which are commonly addressed by
commissioners and designers of contemporary memorials and, in this way,
provide a framework for future projects. I argue that this way of approach-
ing the topic can contribute to a better understanding of the design process
and can increase the options that can be applied in practice. My aim is both
to understand the history of the dialectical relationship between people and
spaces of memory, and to add to it in the hope of recognizing meaningful
ways to commemorate victims of war and violence.