O de ou op toda at .routledge. o / Me orials as Spa es of E gage e t Desig , Use a d Mea i g B Que i Ste e s a d Ka e A. F a k % DISCOUNT ONLINE AT ROUTLEDGE.COM USE CODE DC "Ha i g lo g elie ed that ' hat happe s' i a e orial is the e ha ge et ee isitors a d the spa es the i ha it, I i d this ork to e as e thralli g as it is i sighful. It is the irst full-le gth, i -depth e a i aio of the e orial’s e oluio , a rillia t o pe diu of late- oder e orials a d a authoritai e a al sis of ho the ork.” Ja es E. You g, Disi guished U iversity Professor, U iversity of Massa husets A herst, Author of The Te tu e of Me o a d At Me o ’s Edge A out this Book I Me orials as Spa es of E gage e t Que i Ste e s a d Ka e A. F a k e plo e ho ha ges i e o ial desig a d use ha e helped fo ge lose , i he elaio ships et ee o e o ai e sites a d thei isito s. The autho s o i e i st ha d a al sis of ke ases ith ate ial d a f o e isi g s hola ship. E a ples f o the US, Ca ada, Aust alia a d Eu ope i lude oi ial, fo all desig ed e o ials a d i fo al o es, those eated the pu li ithout oi ial sa io . Me orials as Spa es of E gage e t dis usses i po ta t issues fo the desig , a age e t a d pla i g of e o ials a d pu li spa e i ge e al. Co te ts . I t odu io Part I: Me orials as O je ts a d Spa es . F o Vie i g to E gagi g : F o St aighfo a d To Challe gi g . F o Ge e al To Pa i ula Part II: Me orials as Used a d U derstood . Co e o ai g . O up i g . I te p ei g Part III: Me orials As Respo si iliies . Ma agi g . Pla i g . A Spe ial Ki d Of Pu li Spa e Que i Ste e s is Asso iate P ofesso of U a Desig at RMIT U i e sit , Mel ou e, a d p e iousl o ked at the Ba tlet S hool of Pla i g, U i e sit College Lo do . He is autho of The Ludi City a d o -edito of Loose Spa e, The Uses of Art i Pu li Spa e, a d Tra sfor i g Ur a Waterfro ts. Kare A. Fra k is a p ofesso i the College of A hite tu e a d Desig at the Ne Je se I situte of Te h olog . Me orials as Spa es of E gage e t add esses t o topi s she has e plo ed p e iousl : uses of pu li spa e i Loose Spa e a d i te io s a d o se ue es of desig de isio s i Desig through Dialogue a d Ar hite ture fro the I side Out. Routledge · Septe PB: - HB: - - e · pp - ·$ . $ . - ·$ . $ . 

Memorials as Spaces of Engagement: Design, Use and Meaning Quentin Stevens and Karen A. Franck Routledge, 2016 (released 17 September 2015) ISBN: 9780415631433 http://www.tandf.net/books/details/9780415631440/ CHAPTER ABSTRACTS Chapter 1 Introduction Although many free-standing ‘statue monuments’ are still erected, since the 1980s there has been an increase in large ‘spatial’ memorials such as Washington’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, London’s Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain and Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. People unfamiliar with such contemporary memorial designs may be surprised to learn that they are often used similarly to other public spaces, for sitting or lying to rest, meeting other people, running, climbing, bathing in fountains, and playing games. These memorials are engaging spaces that people can enter and move through, and that support opportunities for a variety of actions and a diversity of sensory experiences beyond the visual. Many recent memorials are also created spontaneously and informally within public spaces by groups of ordinary citizens, through assemblages of flowers, cards, candles and other tributes, most notably after the September 11 terrorist attack in New York. This introduction outlines the geographical scope of this book’s case studies of memorials in urban public spaces, both large and small, and the sources of information drawn upon, including field observations, interviews, archival materials and planning and management policies. It overviews the key empirical and theoretical literature on memorials from various disciplines. Chapter 2 From Viewing to Engaging Until the nineteenth century most public memorials were portrait statues on pedestals in parks, plazas and streets, designed only for viewing. Many contemporary memorials are also selfcontained objects. Later, statues were often closer to the ground so people could approach them, and formed ‘spatial monuments’ within architectural settings people could enter and occupy. Some were modestly scaled, others grand complexes. After World War I, new commemorative landscapes included tree-lined Avenues of Honour. European architects and artists began designing modern, abstract, spatial memorials. The first built US example was Washington’s 1982 Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Hard-surfaced abstract commemorative landscapes have become increasingly common. Memorials are increasingly merged with public space and its everyday activities, including informal memorials laid onto sidewalks and formal memorials embedded into them. Some invite people to approach very close, allowing a variety of tactile and auditory experiences, including touching individual names and hearing recorded voices. The closeness and openness of many recent memorials allow visitors great freedom of engagement, encouraging them to be active, even proactive, participants in their experience of the memorial, not just viewers. Informal memorials reflect the highest level of individual agency in commemorative engagement. Many formal memorials also encourage individual contributions. Chapter 3 From Straightforward to Challenging Memorial design has diversified beyond the traditional themes of heroism and monumental forms of statues, columns and triumphal arches. This reflects social changes including the Civil Rights movement, women’s suffrage, and the struggles of indigenous persons and workers. Diverse social groups have erected anti-memorials or counter-monuments (Gegendenkmäler) to difficult, negative subjects and events including colonialism, massacres, genocide, and terrorist attacks. Dialogic memorials, often commemorating the Holocaust or the social conflict of the Vietnam War, critique specific, conventional heroic memorials nearby through contrasting forms, symbols and meanings. New memorial forms have also been inspired by formal changes in sculpture and other art practices, such as abstraction, minimalism, and ephemeral and participatory art. Anti-monumental forms are inversions of the conventional memorial genre, including dark, sunken shapes, voids, and reflective surfaces, invisible memorials underground, and ephemeral memorials such as light projections. Multiple, repeated memorials like Germany’s Stolpersteine and the mobile AIDS Quilt are dispersed through public space. The forms, symbolism and meaning of commemorative sculptures and landscapes can be difficult for visitors to interpret and cause disagreements. The phenomenology of recent memorials that are multi-sensory, interactive spaces is often challenging. Such attributes may metonymically convey to visitors the conceptual, ideological and formal challenges of remembering the past. Chapter 4 From General to Particular In recent decades, depiction of events and persons in memorials through imagery and text has become increasingly diverse and detailed. Abstract markers often represent individual victims. The postures, emotions, ethnicities, attire and accoutrements of figurative sculptures increasingly convey realism and narrative detail, not allegorical ideals. Relief sculptures and etched photographs often adorn memorials’ walls. Such expressions are often contested. Informal memorials very often include personal photographs of victims, newspaper photographs, and handmade drawings. Material historical artifacts displayed at memorial sites give visitors a visceral, meaningful connection to past events. Victims and later visitors also leave small artifacts behind. Memorials’ engraved texts are increasingly complex. Broad inscriptions collectively honor or admonish. Heroes’ carefully excerpted speeches emphasize particular events and values. Personal quotations from victims and mourners convey diverse, mundane experiences and viewpoints, as do letters visitors deposit at memorials. Texts also provide factual information about events. Textual arrangements establish complex narratives. The inclusion and arrangement of commemorated individuals’ names, what further information to include about individuals, and the names’ closeness to visitors all present significant design challenges. Although historical information is now widely accessible, messages on public memorials bring emotional gravitas, clarity, and recognition of marginalized people and events. Chapter 5 Commemorating People visit the sites of recent tragic events (or public spaces near them), interact with other people there, and leave tributes like flowers, cards and candles, or objects with specific commemorative meaning. These offerings may be uniform or varied, conventional or creative. They are typically carefully arranged on the ground, fences, walls and posts, and may later be curated, collected or edited. Formal memorials offer permanent places for continuing pilgrimages, tributes and commemorative ceremonies, both official and personal. Some informal commemorative sites retain long-term significance in these ways. Commemorative places, and victims’ names marked at them, are particularly important when no gravesite exists. Visitors’ behaviors may either affirm or interrupt the desired solemn atmosphere. Through commemorative activities, visitors publicly express their varied, contrasting feelings about past events, including political sentiments. When moving through memorial sites, people also connect with other mourners. Individuals have varying degrees of agency and choice when commemorating publicly. Informal memorials must be adapted to available settings. Formal memorials vary in how well they accommodate various choreographed ceremonies. After its construction, the Lincoln Memorial became utilized for unanticipated ceremonies with unanticipated political purposes. All commemorative rituals at memorials were invented sometime, often through early informal actions. Chapter 6 Occupying People occupy and engage with the forms, spaces and landscapes of contemporary public memorials in diverse ways, including many unanticipated, surprising activities besides commemoration. Observations of visitor actions at numerous memorials including the Diana Memorial Fountain in London’s Hyde Park and Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe illustrate the choreography of people’s circulation through these small-scale geographies: their arrival at memorial sites, entry into them, how they move within them and pause at particular points. People rest at memorials in varied postures, sitting, lying, or leaning their bodies. Their activities include climbing, sliding, rolling and moving objects. They interact with other visitors, posing for photographs, gathering in various orientations, and encountering strangers or hiding, thereby giving attention to each other rather than the memorial object and its meanings. These observations suggest how and why memorial settings engage visitors’ attention and their bodies: memorials’ rich sensory, physical and social stimuli, especially for touching; their complex, varied affordances to a range of body sizes, postures and movements; their open, abstract surfaces; their broad physical and social openness as public spaces; and their lack of prescribed functionality. These factors encourage unscripted, exploratory play that discovers opportunities for engagement. Chapter 7 Interpreting Memorials are discursive constructs; their forms evoke past people, events, ideas and places. Their emotional impacts depend on visitors’ interpretations of their experiences. Beyond explicit, didactic text, the symbolism of memorials’ inscriptions, imagery, sculptural form, non-visual sensory cues to meaning, and spatial relationships to historic sites all require literacy, for example to recognize subjects evoked but absent. Figurative sculptures encourage literal reading, analogy and imitation. But memorials’ symbols and intended meanings can be vague or complex, and may be misunderstood or only perceived unconsciously. Formal ambiguity and obscurity engender varied responses. Visitors may oppose, unpick or rework memorials’ meanings through their actions. Published academic and media critiques and observations of visitors’ engagement with memorials illustrate different ways people discover meaning in form, draw associations to other places and objects, and actively perform meanings. Washington’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and other abstract examples respond to politically controversial, difficult events with minimalist forms that challenge conventions. They eschew representation and clarity, inviting visitors to instead project their own diverse memories and feelings through actions and by leaving tributes, and provoke their detractors to add elements and clarify meanings or remove and replace them. Chapter 8 Managing Memorials are a distinctive, special type of public space, but are often exposed to the wider public realm. They thus pose particular challenges for managing use, appearance and meaning. Management practices seek to responsively or proactively regulate memorial visitors’ actions and experiences, to maintain decorum and counteract deterioration. Management must respond to diverse visitors’ needs in ways consistent with each memorial’s commemorative purpose. Analysis of various signs and rules at memorials shows how and why they constrain particular activities, and how they help define atmosphere. Some signs engage visitors, suggesting particular activities, or tolerance. Similarly, on-site staff often act more as ‘hosts’ than ‘guards’. Memorial designs and budgets often underestimate maintenance costs. Both durable and ephemeral memorials, and offerings left at them, require ongoing maintenance or removal. While memorials commemorate past events and people, to draw visitors they must remain relevant in the present. To do so, managers may organize or allow ceremonial events, incorporate new physical elements or add information to existing memorials, to explain them, educate the public about them and expand their constituency. Sometimes changes involve contesting or altering a memorial’s meaning, or moving or removing it. Chapter 9 Planning Increasing numbers, varieties and uses of memorials in public spaces pose challenges for specialpurpose planning policies, regulations and decisions. Demand for sites intensifies as key precincts and axes become filled. Large victims’ memorials arise quickly, in both prominent and historic locations. Planning seeks to coordinate memorials and their uses with public open space needs, traffic management, and economic development. Plans and redevelopment enhance supply of suitable sites. Complex approvals processes define national significance, encourage decentralisation, temporary installations and events, and prescribe delays. War memorials and politicians’ statues still predominate. Strategies advocate broadening commemorative subject matter, acknowledging social diversity and difficult histories, and accommodating ‘anti-memorials’ and ‘dialogic’ ‘counter-memorials’. But memorial policies also often suppress conflicting memories and ignore local community needs, constraining democratic expression. The complex, evolved memorial landscapes and piecemeal planning of older national capital cities such as Berlin, London, and Budapest, and New York, contrasts with Washington, Ottawa and Canberra: newer showpiece capitals with comprehensive memorial strategies. All commemorative landscapes are surprisingly fluid, reflecting historical changes and both incremental shifts and revolutions in social consciousness and values. Informal and temporary ‘spontaneous’ memorials enrich these complex landscapes of memory. Ongoing debate and change are important dimensions of reckoning with history. Chapter 10 A Special Kind Of Public Space Memorials are often very public settings, in terms of their accessibility to diverse users, and because the public engage more in their development processes than with other kinds of public spaces. Memorials offer lessons for public space design and management generally: they are physically, sensually and emotionally highly engaging, offering great freedom of action and rich, distinctive opportunities for encounter. They accommodate commemorative, political, practical and playful uses. In order that memorials can affirm special meanings and functions, through symbolism and ritual and remembering through the body, their management often provides high levels of oversight, investment, protection and maintenance. But sometimes their management is especially permissive, they are open to different interpretations, and their meanings, purposes and uses can change. Memorials are also special public spaces because so many people are engaged directly and indirectly in their creation and evolution. This is true for both informal, ‘grassroots’ memorials and the making and re-making of formal memorials. Many individual citizens participate in a range of procurement processes, alongside civic organizations, government officials and agencies, to initiate memorials, generate ideas, raise funds, seek public support and official sanction and sites, define programs, judge proposals, and oversee memorials’ design and construction.