Modern memory.(architecture)

DURING Operation Desert Storm, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf revived the apothegm, attributed to Stalin, that "quantity has a quality all its own." The principle no doubt holds true for tanks, bombs, and troops. But memorials are another matter.

Nevertheless, memorial design recently has tended to substitute quantity for quality. Sometimes, it is true, this is mandated by the sponsors, as with the numbingly overscaled five-acre site for the September 11 memorial at Ground Zero. It's as if the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation thought a sprawling memorial would make for a meaningful one. Preservation of the Twin Tower footprints, which are nearly 200 feet square, has made it very difficult to provide a focus for the memorial. Not surprisingly, the winner of the Ground Zero memorial competition, Michael Arad, is attempting to make the footprints the foci by turning them into sunken pools girded by waterfalls.

The Pentagon's September 11 memorial will also be a sprawler, consisting of 184 diving-board-like memorial benches, each perched over its own tub of water-one bench for each victim of American Airlines Flight 77's immolation. The benches will be arranged on timelines that indicate each victim's age. At the Oklahoma City Memorial, 168 chairs are arranged on one side of a shallow pool flanked by flat, minimalist arches, with each row of chairs corresponding to the number of victims on the different floors of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.

And of course it was through the sheer quantity of names of the dead inscribed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial that Maya Lin intended to impart a sense of the magnitude of the loss that the war inflicted. But Lin's memorial is uncluttered and spatially contained. It has a clear focus--the vertex of the granite chevron she implanted in the Mall's landscape. Focus is one of the key missing ingredients in our current crop of minimalist memorials.

Certainly that is the case with Peter Eisenman's new Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which was dedicated in May. Situated near Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, this memorial sprawls over five and a half acres and boasts 2,711 gray concrete blocks arranged in a grid. The uneven cobblestone pavement slopes downward as the visitor ventures into the grid. The blocks, which rise just a few inches from the ground on the memorial's perimeter, gradually morph into slabs as tall as 15 feet. The surrounding city becomes invisible; the slabs tilt ominously. The idea is to convey a visceral sense of a world slowly, inexorably, coming unhinged.

This sort of purely conceptual approach to memorial-making almost always falls flat, however, because its artistic and symbolic content is so, well, minimal. Not surprisingly, the authorities who oversaw the Berlin project took out a sort of insurance policy in the form of an underground multimedia information center, which documents the Holocaust with textual displays and personalizes it with accounts of the havoc it wreaked on individuals and families. The information center thus serves as a documentary crutch for an artistically and symbolically hamstrung memorial.

Not surprisingly, such a documentary facility is planned for the Ground Zero memorial--and even for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The Oklahoma City Memorial includes a full-fledged multimedia museum that documents every aspect of the terrorist bombing and its aftermath in exhaustive detail.