Holocaust memorial in Berlin. Photo by Flickr user reutC; used under Creative Commons license.Architecture is the stage on which war is waged. It is the bridges defended, the bunkers busted, and the ruins rebuilt. When the shooting ends a secondary architecture of war emerges, with memorial sites as sanctioned settings for remembrance.
Architecture has long been the preferred medium with which to publicly memorialize societal traumas such as war. Recent non-architectural efforts such as web-based archives, memory projects such as Claude Lanzmann's Shoah documentary, and participatory media such as the AIDS quilt are still considered by many to have less authority to officially memorialize than architectonic volumes that occupy physical space. Given that confronting and accepting the mass and permanence of a stone monument parallels the necessary encounter with the societal memory and moral lessons of the event itself, the continued presence of stone monuments as the dominant medium for memorialization is understandable. Like a sidewalk under construction, these sites act as physical interruptions or ruptures in the normal patterns of use for the public spaces they occupy, confronting witnesses with the historical rupture of the events they memorialize. The solid calls attention to the void.
The danger of such centralized memorials is that, like a gated cemetery, they delineate a separate space for remembrance, unfairly relieving the community at large from the burden of memorial responsibility.
The role of a memorial site as 'set apart' from the spaces of daily life is specifically addressed at the Holocaust memorial in downtown Berlin. The site is defined by a field of stone blocks of varying height, creating an undulating effect from above and an unsure horizon for those passing through. While referencing the ordered otherness of a cemetery, the site features no fence nor identifying signs. The knowledge of the site's significance, like the responsibility for the Holocaust itself, is borne collectively and thus resists the impulse to contain and render safe the past within a designated area.
The openness of Berlin's memorial obscures the protracted debate regarding its design, which resulted in an extended period when the site was indeed surrounded by fences and left fallow. Some argued that this vacant lot, and even the design competition itself were more appropriate memorials to the national shame of the Holocaust than any architectonic memorial could ever be. Some argued that there was no need for a simulated graveyard in a city that had seen enough real death.
The motif of a physical void symbolizing war likely also inspired the designers of the 9/11 memorial in New York, who created sunken reflecting pools for the footprints of the twin towers. Nearby, a "Freedom Tower" will rise to 1776 feet, enshrining in steel the year of American independence. In contrast to the mournful voids of the pools, the Freedom Tower's height is an aggressive symbol that leaves little emotional space for grief and loss, and the ideological power of a structure's basic physical properties.
At the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, the physical dimensions of the permanent exhibition space -- a chronological walk-through of the nation's wars -- also takes on political symbolism by leaving very little expansion space for future exhibits on future wars. In contrast, the exterior of the museum offers a more contemplative meditation on war. Concrete walls resembling long-forgotten bunkers are roofed by rolling grasses evoking a partially-healed trench battlefield. Here, the museum simulates the site being memorialized. As the actual battlefields are reclaimed by nature or deliberately demolished and the last surviving veterans pass away, simulations like the grassed roof of the Canadian War Museum become the sole remaining loci of memory.
Like the pieces of the Berlin Wall now scattered around the world on public display and in private collections, the memory of conflict is dispersed and reabsorbed into society. Remember that although the fragments of the Berlin Wall are too small and scattered to be reassembled into a weapon of war, they have not disappeared.
The Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, Ontario
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