Monuments and Memorials: The Latest Architecture and News

For the first time in history, a John Hejduk structure has been permanently installed in a public space. The American architect's Jan Palach Memorial has officially opened last week at Jan Palach Square (formerly Red Army Square) on the Alšovo Riverbank in Prague after 25 years in the making.

"The work, entitled House of the Suicide and House of the Mother of the Suicide, which was originally built in Atlanta in 1990, then Prague in 1991, honors the Czech dissident Jan Palach, whose self-immolation in protest of the Soviet invasion of 1968 served as a galvanizing force against the communist government in Czechoslovakia. A plaque at the base of the monument displays the poem The Funeral of Jan Palach, by former School of Architecture Professor David Shapiro," says The Cooper Union.

On September 10, the Flight 93 National Memorial opened the doors to its new visitor center complex. Designed by Paul Murdoch Architects, the memorial honors the victims of United Airlines Flight 93, which was one of the four hijacked planes during the September 11, 2001 attacks.

In partnership with EarthCam, the National Park Service, the National Park Foundation, and Friends of Flight 93, a time-lapse video has been produced to document over 1,800 days of construction in under two minutes.

Earlier this month, after viewing the contenders in the US World War I Centennial Commission’s competition to redesign the National World War I Memorial in Washington DC, organizations like The Cultural Landscape Foundation began to began to voice their opinion regarding the reach of the competition. With the cultural importance of the site in mind, such organizations had hoped that the redesign would maintain the existing Pershing Park, but were disappointed to discover that the majority of the competition’s design proposals seek to demolish the existing landscape.

Although left off of the competition’s shortlist, KAMJZ Architects’ proposal for the World War I memorial addresses these concerns by leaving Pershing Park almost completely intact. Leaving alone the park’s seating areas, agora, and landscaping, the design proposal unifies the park by adding an outer ring of trees “along the borders of the site [to] provide an acoustic barrier from the noisy adjacent streets.”

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On March 11, 2011, a massive earthquake and tsunami hit the coast of Japan at Sendai, damaging the Fukushima nuclear power plant, and taking over 10,000 lives. Over the past three years, only temporary memorial observances have been utilized to honor these victims in Sendai. To address this deficiency, MIT graduate student Beomki Lee has created a concept design for an innovative new memorial space called [ME]morial.

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In May, the US World War I Centennial Commission launched its design competition for the redesign of the National World War I Memorial, located in Washing DC. Though some concerns about the fate of Pershing Park, which currently occupies the site, have been voiced, the competition will continue nonetheless, aiming to fulfill the Commission's stated aim "to transform Pershing Park from a park that happens to contain a memorial to a site that is primarily a national World War I memorial, within a revitalized urban park setting with a distinct sense of place."

After cycling through a first stage of entries, the competition has reached its second stage, which entails a public viewing and commentary of the top five designs, before a winner is selected in January 2016.

View the five finalists, after the break.

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Last May, we published an open call for the redesign of the National World War I Memorial at Washington DC's Pershing Park, situated between the White House and the Capitol on Pennsylvania Avenue. Opened as a park plaza in 1981, the park’s current state is in need of renewal.

The competition, hosted by the United States Federation for the Commemoration of the World Wars and sponsored by the World War I Centennial Commission, received over 350 entries. While these entries did generally follow the guidelines they were given, most of the designs incorporated the complete demolition of the park.

Now, because the park is one of the most significant works of Modernist landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg, with planting plan designs by Oehme, van Sweden & Associates, landscape architecture organizations like The Cultural Landscape Foundation are speaking up against the possibility of demolition.

The National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) has awarded Frank Gehry's controversial Eisenhower Memorial final approval during a meeting held on July 9. This means all agencies overseeing the project has (finally) agreed on the design, which has taken 15 years and many design revisions to achieve. The project, now a joint venture between Gehry and AECOM, was initially granted preliminary approval last October.

"The resulting Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial design satisfies the goals of the seven design principles established for this site in 2006 by the NCPC to preserve and enhance the unique character of this site and establish a new green space within the context of L’Enfant’s plan for Washington D.C.," said the NCPC in their final report. You can read the report in full, here.

The act of remembering looms large in national cultures. Shared national memories act as a foundation for national identity, a unifying collective interpretation of history that can define what it means to belong in a certain place. Monuments loom even larger - define a national memory in concrete and stone, and you can help define your vision of the nation. That's why Nevena Katalina, a graphic design masters student at the University of Novi Sad in Serbia, has taken the famous abstract war memorials in the former Yugoslavia and translated them into posters, attempting to reconcile the imposing concrete forms with the impact they've had on culture and memory in countries around the former Yugoslavia.

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ABSTRAKT Studio Architecture has won a nation-wide competition to design Canada’s national memorial to the victims of communism in Ottawa. Select from six finalists, ABSTRAKT’s provocative design superimposes 100 million singular pixel-like memory squares, each representing the fingertip of the lives lost, on a folded triangular concrete plane.

“As the most prolific communist murderer Joseph Stalin famously said: 'One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic’… This 'statistic' takes main stage in our design by realizing its sheer enormity, thus raising awareness that every human life is unique and precious,” stated ABSTRAKT.