Pentagon 9/11 Memorial: Tyranny of Modernist Memorial Design

September 11, 2008, must have been a tough day for architecture critic/writer Catesby Leigh. On this day, officials dedicated the Pentagon Memorial—the first memorial to the American tragedy completed since September 11, 2001. (1)

Pentagon attack by Islamic terrorists, September 11, 2001. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Pentagon_crach_site.jpg; accessed September 13, 2008.	The green shaded area in the aerial photo is the site of the Pentagon Memorial. It abuts the Pentagon section destroyed Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists slammed a hijacked airliner into the building and killed 184 persons. (US Department of Defense photo.) Source: http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=43622; accessed September 13, 2008.

Leigh in November 2002 observed with concern the unveiling of the six finalist designs for the Pentagon crash site, which he described incredulously as follows: “One plan calls for a Rubik’s Cube-style wall with 184 parts—the number of the victims at the Pentagon and aboard American Airlines Flight 77. Set in a clearing in a rectangular grove with 184 trees, the wall is meant to be dismembered, or deconstructed, so the ugly voids that result can serve as a record of loss. Parts can be shared with victims’ families or hometowns.”

The second finalist’s proposal, “dubbed the Pentagon New Day Memorial, tugs at the heartstrings more gently and is conceived as an interactive tabula rasa, a make-your-own memorial. It features a maze of 184 glass slabs standing perpendicular to one another. The maze is on a granite island in a reflecting pool and can be accessed from the surrounding landscape at several points. Cool air flowing from below causes condensation, which allows visitors to engage in finger-painting of sorts. The sentiments they register on the glass fade away with the next morning’s dew. (The upper parts of each slab would be inscribed with a victim’s name.)”

The third finalist’s proposal, “offers a sunken plaza with a stark, polished wall in whose upper portion the Pentagon’s reconstructed façade is reflected. In the plaza, a long table-slab is surrounded by 189 block-like seats—including five for Flight 77’s hijackers. How generous! Vine-covered walls are fronted by flower beds, surely intended to calm the suicidal impulses sparked by this dismal setting.”

The fourth finalist’s proposal was a “dark pavement from which 184 ‘life recorders,’ concrete boxes inspired by the ‘black boxes’ aboard aircraft, protrude. Orange on the outside (as black boxes, in fact, are) and filled with water, the ‘life recorders’ have two-way mirrors on their bottoms. They would reflect the sky by day and be lit from below at night. The mirrors would be etched with names and their glass encasements would even contain mementos.”
The fifth finalist’s proposal was the “coup de grace”: a low, marble, pedestal-like mound without a statue. [Leigh loves statuary.] “No statue? Why, the visitor is the statue!”

Pentagon memorial, September 2008. Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo /2008/09/12/PH2008091203529.html; accessed September 13, 2008.	Pentagon memorial bench. Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/photo/2008/09/11/PH2008091103849.html; accessed September 13, 2008.

The sixth proposal--eventually the winning design--was in the same class as the other five. Leigh writes, “Then there’s the plan for a ‘memorial field’ with 184 ‘memorial units consisting of benches shaped rather like desktop staplers. Below are water-filled aluminum wells that also light up at night. Concrete seats are cantilevered over them. The stapler-benches, in turn, are arrayed in ‘age lines’ (determined by the victims’ years of birth): Fifty-nine benches face one way (for the killed airline passengers), 129 the opposite [for the killed Pentagon staff and visitors killed]. Like weird.” (2)

I. Lingering Influence of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Leigh cries out, “What happened to traditional memorial architecture?” What happened to “monuments and tombs so disposed and adorned as the edifices raised by man, for whatsoever uses, that the sight of them may contribute to his mental health, power, and pleasure?” (3)

Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Source: http://www.hodgman.org/travel/washington-2000/20000711-2-15A-DC-Viet-Nam-Memorial.jpg; accessed September 13, 2008.

“The heart of the problem,” says Leigh, “lies in the dehumanization of architecture that resulted from the human body’s displacement by the machine as the point of departure for design during the early decades of the 20th century. Humanist design…is grounded in the idea of composition, of composing lesser parts into orderly, legible wholes. The operative paradigm is the human body, in which there is a legible subordination of parts—hands, arms, feet, legs, torso, head, etc.—to the whole. Not only does the feeling for order, hierarchy, and symmetry that derives from a humanist approach to design shape buildings, it is also conducive to a harmonious relationship between architectural masses and the public spaces they define.” (4)

In the past, Western architects have provided a satisfying sense of “vertical thrust or horizontal repose, situating them on streets or in squares whose proportions and vistas satisfy the eye and make our bodies feel at home.” A good example is Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, located at the foot of Fifth Avenue. The Park’s Memorial Arch (vertical thrust) (to celebrate the centennial (1889) of George Washington’s inauguration as president) and Fountain (horizontal repose) are the two major architectural monuments strengthening the whole. A paucity of landscaping with plants does not detract from the humanity of the space. Another example of traditional memorial architecture is Gettysburg National Military Park, fifty miles northwest of Baltimore, in the small town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Washington Square Park, example of traditional memorial architecture. Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/da/ Washington_square_park.jpg/800px-Washington_square_park.jpg; accessed September 13, 2008.	Washington Square Park, winter 2004. Source: http://untitledname.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/04/washington-square-arch.jpg; accessed September 13, 2008.

“With modernism’s advent, this whole outlook on design was lost,” opines Leigh. Modern architecture radically simplifies form and eliminates ornament. “The old World Trade Center is an excellent example of the resulting dysfunction [of modernism]. Derived from Le Corbusier’s ‘towers-in-a-park’ paradigm, the twin towers were tall and bleak, and the plaza was vast and stark. From a design standpoint, the WTC was an utterly dehumanized entity, a function of merely quantitative concerns. Sure there are lots of pretty photos showing the setting sun shining on the towers, but the sun is the source of beauty here, not the architecture.” (5)

Examples of Le Corbusier's modernist architecture. Source: http://www.simplymod.com/images/bk-lecorbusier.jpg; accessed September 13, 2008.	World Trade Center example of modernist architecture. Source: http://blog.aia.org/mt- static/plugins/Ajaxify/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/ plugins/imagemanager/images/favorite_architecture_images/ 19_world_trade_center_aerial_lg.jpg; accessed September 13, 2008.

The minimalist, abstract idiom of civic art has been in vogue for a little more than two decades—since Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial,” avers Leigh. Even the simple Vietnam Veterans Memorial has “an emotional focus: the vertex where her two wall sections meet.” (6)

II. Julie Beckman and Keith Kaseman: Pentagon Memorial Creators

The designers of the Pentagon Memorial are Julie Beckman and Keith Kaseman. “Beckman earned a BA in The Growth and Structure of Cities from Bryn Mawr College in 1995 followed by a Master of Architecture from Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in 2001. Julie and her partner Keith Kaseman founded KBAS [Kaseman Beckman Amsterdam Studio, also Kaseman Beckman Advanced Strategies] after their design for a memorial to the victims of September 11, 2001 at the Pentagon was selected in 2003. Prior to her work with KBAS, she worked as a project manager/architectural designer with several design firms in and around New York.” (7) Kaseman earned his BS in design in architecture at Arizona State University in 1995, and his Master of Architecture from Columbia University in 2001.

Architects Julie Beckman and Keith Kassman. Source: http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2003/092003/09072003/1070822/lomemorial.jpg/photo_view; accessed September 13, 2008.

The couple sketched their winning design for the Pentagon Memorial in an Italian restaurant one door down from their studio apartment on the Upper West Side, according to a 2002 interview. (9) “From the start, the pair agreed there must be something to represent each victim. As they read all they could find on the Internet about those who died, a vision emerged. The vast age range of the victims—from 3 to 71—would be shown by grouping the 184 memorial units into timelines. They would group people of the same birth year on the same line and place them in rows paralleling the jetliner’s path into the Pentagon. And to distinguish those killed inside from those on the flight, the units would face in opposite directions. Each memorial unit would be a cantilever bench etched with the victim’s name, extending over a lighted pool of water. The names of the people killed inside the Pentagon would be visible as visitors faced the building. The names of those on Flight 77 would be visible as visitors faced the sky.”

“One of the goals…was to tell the story of that day on two levels—at the individual level, telling something about each person; and at a collective level, showing both the magnitude of the loss and that those killed were people of all ages, going about their everyday lives. The designers also wanted to feature color and light by including a grove of trees. They favored paper-bark maples chiefly because their leaves are bright red in the fall and are among the last to drop—giving a sense of suspension of time, especially when seen in contrast with other trees at the Pentagon or at nearby Arlington National Cemetery.” (9)

III. “Do Such Trivia have anything to do with a Proper Memorial?”

Leigh was appalled by the KASB memorial design in 2006 when he wrote, “Do such trivia” as illuminated pools indicating “an abstract demographic cross-section of the victims, showing the random nature of the September 11, 2001 attack on the Pentagon” have anything to do with a proper memorial? “It gets worse,” he continued. “The park will be covered with stabilized gravel, with each precast, stainless-steel bench-cum-pool set within a pair of stainless-steel timeline-strips crossing the site on the birth-year axis, and parallel to Flight 77’s fateful path. The smoothed gravel finish on each memorial unit will maintain a visual continuity with the ground. Epoxy polymer concrete will bind the gravel to the stainless steel—with the concrete (the architects have written) seemingly ‘freezing’ the gravel in place and floating it above the light pool.” (10)

“Frozen gravel? Can they be serious? Absolutely. Their memorial park will boast a gravel carpet that appears to peel up and morph into the multitude of diving boards. It all sounds like a House and Garden editor’s hallucination…Apart from the curious sculptural gesture of the memorial units, the memorial designs boils down to factoids: The victims’ dates of birth, and where they were at the time of the crash, plus the flight path. This conforms to the documentary, value-neutral’ tenets of postmodern memorial design. The memorial units—dubbed ‘light benches’ before assuming their bureaucratic [military] appellation—are variations on the 168 chairs at the Oklahoma City Memorial, where the chairs are arranged in rows corresponding to the number of victims on each flood of the Murrah Federal Building.”

Oklahoma City National Memorial, example of modernist memorial architecture. Source: http://weblogs.newsday.com/sports/basketball/knicks/blog/2007/03/; accessed September 13, 2008.

“Should memorials amount to furniture, even if it resembles diving boards? That’s just one of the questions the Pentagon Memorial project raises. Another is how on earth this design got selected in the first place.” (10)

IV. How DID the KASB Design Get Selected?

Leigh researched this end of the riddle of the KASB selection. In the aftermath of September 11, a Baltimore-based Army Corps of Engineers landscape architect named Carol Anderson-Austra “served as project manager in charge of selecting the site for the memorial, ‘educating’ a Family Steering Committee of about a dozen family members of victims about memorial design, and organizing the design competition. (11) Leigh continues, “She hired two modernist apparatchiks to serve as competition advisers: Reed Kroloff, former editor of the defunct Architecture magazine and now dean of Tulane’s architecture school, and Mark Robbins, dean of the Syracuse architecture school.”

Leigh recalls an interview with Anderson-Austra, as follows: “Anderson-Austra spoke in soothing maternal tones about the jury selection process during a telephone interview. ‘We were looking for a certain kind o background, expertise, sensitivity, integrity. A certain combination of heart and brain,’ she said. ‘Sensitivity’ and ‘an emotional connection’ to the memorial project were crucial, she emphasized. The guiding assumption was that ‘if the families did not think it was good, and if the design community internationally did not think it was good,’ the Pentagon Memorial would be a flop. ‘It had to speak to those two groups and the world at large.’”

“Actually, it’s the ‘world at large’—meaning the public—that’s getting the short end of the stick with this project,” announced Leigh.

“Design professionals—‘public artists,’ architects, and landscape architects, all of them modernist—constituted a majority on the panel of 11 competition jurors and one alternate. Terence Riley, at that time director of the department of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, served as chairman. The jury’s lay members included former defense secretaries Harold Brown and Melvin Laird. The classical tradition, representing thousands of years of accumulated design knowledge, shaped the great monumental vistas in and around Washington. But its exponents had no voice on the jury.

“The Family Steering Committee, two of whose members also served on the jury, issued a statement urging the competition entrants “ to search your souls and envision a memorial that inspires visitors to contemplate what the attack means to them personally, to us as family members, to the community, the country, and to the world.”

“The committee also declared that ‘the memorial should instill the ideas that patriotism is a moral duty, that freedom comes at a price, and that the victims of this attack have paid the ultimate price….Our loved ones’ deaths have ended the ripple effect of their lives touching many others through the universe; their loss has created an incalculable emptiness.’ The statement concluded: ‘We challenge you to create a memorial that translates this terrible tragedy into a place of solace, peace, and healing.’”

Leigh fumes on: “Quite an agenda. But the therapeutic mission was plainly paramount. Not surprisingly, the six finalist schemes that emerged from a field of 1,126 submissions all focused on ‘loss’ or ‘absence,’ and all of them were of the same reductive, conceptualist ilk.”

V. What Kind of Design Did Leigh Support for the Pentagon Memorial?

New York classical architect Dino Marcantonio submitted an entry consisting of “a handsomely massed and decorated marble cenotaph, crowned with eagles. Unlike the profusion of memorial units, the cenotaph would offer passing drivers a readily legible landmark, an important consideration at this site. A pair of marble lions in front of the cenotaph faces a reflecting pool enclosed by rows of cherry trees, while the memorial precinct is itself enclosed by a handsome wrought-iron fence with limestone piers capped by finials and urns.” (11)

Alamo cenotaph, example of traditional memorial architecture. Source: http://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/00/12/bc/6e/alamo-cenotaph.jpg; accessed September 13, 2008.

Leigh writes, “Marcantonio’s memorial conforms to the classical idea of design as an intimation, in symbolic form of a transcendent realm that endows our brief earthly sojourns with meaning. His cenotaph speaks not only to the lives lost on September 11, but to our republic’s sustenance in times of trial by high ideals. And it’s precisely the artistic embodiment of such idealism, employing fine materials and an humanist idiom everybody understands at an instinctive level, that would allow his Pentagon Memorial to stand for the ages.

“By contrast, meaning is not intrinsic to the Beckman-Kassman design, but rather amounts to whatever significance the visitor might happen to pin on it. Aside from the eccentric sculptural gesture of the memorial units, we are left with biographical data and environmental phenomena such as surface ripples in the pools and the gentle gurgling sound of water passing over a weir into the circulation system, or the nifty shadows cast by the paper bark maples, which exfoliate their bark, upon maturity, in a delightfully picturesque manner—and in winter shed small leaves that could make ground maintenance a pain.”

VI. Tyranny of the Pentagon Memorial

When the Pentagon Memorial was dedicated on September 11, 2008, Leigh must have breathed a heavy sigh. He writes, “The main idea behind [the KASB] design seems to be that the memorial units, with the names of their loved ones inscribed on the benches’ front ends, will help the bereaved reach closure. The precedent is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Mall, with its multitude of names listed in the chronological order of death. But leaving aside the fact that the chevron-shaped Vietnam memorial is spatially compact, clearly focused on its vertex, and handsomely inserted in its landscape setting, it is becoming increasingly clear that the therapeutic culture’s dominion over memorial design since Maya Lin’s triumph has swiftly degenerated into tyranny. This tyranny suppresses any expression of civil idealism, let alone spiritual destiny.

Iwo Jima Memorial (The United States Marine Corps War Memorial), traditional memorial architecture. Located near Arlington Cemetery, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. Source: http://z.about.com/d/dc/1/0/g/Z/DSC03149.jpg; accessed September 13, 2008.

Notes:

1. Pentagon Memorial Project homepage is available at http://memorial.pentagon.mil/; accessed September 13, 2008. Mike Mount: “Pentagon 9/11 memorial honors victims in symbols, concrete.” CNN.com, September 11, 2008. Available at http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/09/11/pentagon.memorial/index.html; accessed September 13, 2008.
2. Catesby Leigh: “The wrong way to remember: How bad are the design finalists for the Pentagon’s 9/11 memorial?” The Wall Street Journal. November 8, 2002. Available at
3. 3. John Ruskin: The Seven Lamps of Architecture. Adamant Media Corporation, December 1, 2005, p. 8. Facsimile of the edition published in 1900 by George Allen, London. Available at http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/1402197837/ref=sib_dp_pt#reader-link; accessed September 13, 2008.
4. Catesby Leigh: “Back to you Corb.” National Review Online. February 27, 2002. Available at http://www.nationalreview.com/flashback/flashback-leigh022703.asp; accessed September 13, 2008.
5. Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, also known as Le Corbusier (1887-1965) was a Swiss-born, French-naturalized architect famous today for his contributions to “modern architecture.”
6. Catesby Leigh: “World War II on the Mall.” The Weekly Standard. May 31, 2004. Volume 009. Issue 36. Available at http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/116lxtzm.asp; accessed September 13, 2008.
7. “Julie Beckman.” Source: http://www.design.upenn.edu/new/arch/facultybio.php?fid=336; accessed September 13, 2008.
8. “Keith Kaseman.” Source: http://www.design.upenn.edu/new/larp/facultybio2.php?fid=302; accessed September 13, 2008.
9. Pamela Gould: “For each of the groups working to erect a memorial to the people killed at the Pentagon on Sept. 11, the effort is person.” The Free Lance-Star, September 7, 2003. Available at http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2003/092003/09072003/1070822/index_html?page=3; accessed September 13, 2008.
10. Catesby Leigh: “The unbearable lightness of the Pentagon memorial.” The Weekly Standard. May 29, 2006. Available at http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/26166.html; accessed September 13, 2008.
11. Linda D. Kozaryn: “Pentagon memorial design competition draws global interest.” American Forces Press Service News Articles. July 25, 2002. Available at http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=43622; accessed September 13, 2008.