IsisInBlog

Names on a Memorial: Lutyens at Burning Man

Memorial Day honors those who died serving our country, but we may also visit a grandmother's grave. Throughout the year, there are opportunities to keep her memory alive. One of the most distinctive is Burning Man, a festival for building and experiencing art in the desert, with or without clothing.

Each September, Burners transform a flat empty playa near Gerlach into Black Rock City, Nevada's third largest urban environment. After a week it disappears with the mantra, "Leave No Trace." Nothing on the playa reveals Black Rock City's existence until the next year. Climaxing the festival, a giant wooden Man burns the Saturday night before Labor Day in a bacchanalian rite of dance, performance art, and flames.

I attended Burning Man for six years. I have also researched name arrangement on memorials, including the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme in Thiepval, France, designed by Edwin Lutyens. When I first saw a photo of the WWI Memorial, it reminded me of Burning Man. Thiepval was an influence on Maya Lin for her Vietnam Veterans Memorial. David Best may also have studied Lutyens before building the Temple of Tears, Temple of Joy and Temple of Honor.

The Thiepval Memorial is a truncated tower with sixteen piers supporting intersected arches that increase in size for a two-story effect. In the interior, these piers hold names of 72,000 primarily British missing soldiers. Best's Temples also featured arches, towers, multiple stories, and interior names. Constructed of scraps from manufacturing 3D dinosaur puzzles, similar to cookie dough scraps, they were feathery shrines of light and memory.

Best's first Temple at the 2000 Burning Man, Temple of the Mind, designed with Jack Haye, was a ramshackle building not reflecting Thiepval. But in 2001, Best and Haye got serious. Their Temple of Tears (or Temple of Memory) featured a truncated tower and two arches, one on top of the other, giving the appearance of two stories. Burners wrote memorial inscriptions inside. Sunday night it made a glorious blaze of memories and dinosaur templates.

In 2002, Nest, with Haye, continued building upon his own work in addition to Lutyens. The Temple of Joy had the truncated tower, the multiple story effect, and interior names, but no arches. His Temple of Honor in 2003 brought the arches back, retaining the two-story idea, with an elongated tower. Temple of Stars, Best's final Temple in 2004, reflected only his own work, with a single story, tall tower and no arches. As always, Burners inscribed their memories into the interior. Mark Grieve designed the Temples of Dreams in 2005 and the Temple of Hope in 2006 without reference to Lutyens.

The Thiepval Memorial organizes names of the missing by regiments, rank and alphabetical order. Because British fighting units mustered into the Pals Battalions of their towns and neighborhoods, the Memorial keeps friends and relatives together. At Burning Man, the names are random, an ill advised organizational structure for memorials. Michael Arad, designer of the proposed World Trade Center Memorial, tried random. When surviving families vilified the suggestion as insulting, he reluctantly changed his easy-way-out random to a display that honors victims as friends and co-workers.

But random at Burning Man is only an appearance. Burners each carefully select a place on the Temple for their memories. They choose that place for a reason. Perhaps it reminds them of their loved ones; perhaps it's easy to get to or a challenge to reach. Each memory remains in its sacred space until the burn on Sunday night.

Some say the Temple is a superior burn to the Man. After all, the Man always looks the same, but the Temple changes each year. The burning of the Man is an invitation to party. The Temple burn glows with memories and the reverence is real, regardless of what Burners wear or do not wear.

This year the Man is green, an obvious 2007 theme for a festival that leaves no trace. Check it out. You don't need clothes, although costumes are a big part of the experience. Bring a tent, a shade structure, and lots of sunscreen and water. Bring those who now live only in your heart. When the Temple burns, it will carry your love into the sky.

Names on a Memorial: Oklahoma City

(This posting was originally intended for publication during the 12th anniversary week of the Oklahoma City bombing. That week also saw Yom HaShoa [Holocaust Martyrs' Remembrance Day] and the anniversaries of the Columbine High School massacre and the Branch Davidian fire. Next year, this same week will be the first anniversary of the shootings at Virginia Tech. This year, at the end of the week, I found renewal at a concert for the 38th Earth Day.

My posting therefore acknowledges another memorial, one without names, The Man with Two Hats, which honors the Canadian role in the liberation of the Netherlands during World War Two. Henk Visch's statue of a man with arms upraised, holding a hat in each hand, is located in both Ottawa and Apeldoorn and was first dedicated in the Netherlands on May 2, 2000.

At the Ottawa dedication on May 11, 2002, the Canadian Minister of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Rey D. Pagtakhan, a Philippine immigrant, commented that these statues would demonstrate "the true test of friendship -- of one country to another." Every year since liberation, Holland shows its gratitude with a gift to Canada of 10,000 tulip bulbs.)

The Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, yielded to pressure from the 9/11 families and announced a new arrangement of names for the World Trade Center Memorial. Random is out and affiliation is in. Almost. All names are to be listed with others in their affiliation. While rescue workers' unit affiliations will be fully expressed, corporate affiliations will not. Even American Airlines and United Airlines are excluded. Only flight numbers will be on the Memorial. Not surprisingly, the families remain unsatisfied. They want ages, floor numbers and corporate names.

The Oklahoma City National Memorial, designed by Hans and Torrey Butzer with Sven Berg, symbolically achieves all of that. The names of those who died on April 19, 1995 are engraved onto chairs sitting in the footprint of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The arrangement is geographic, with nine rows of chairs symbolizing the nine story building. Names are located on the floor they were on when they died, divided by agency, left to right, replicating the location of offices in the building. Names of employees and visitors are alphabetical within agency.

Five people died outside the Murrah Building. In alphabetical order, they are listed singly in a vertical line of chairs at the end of every other floor. The name on the first floor is Rebecca Anderson, a rescuer. Then one name from the Water Resources Building, two names from the Athenian Building and another from Water Resources.

Abandoning the geographic arrangement, alphabetical order for the non-Murrah names separates the two Water Resources employees. But if those names were arranged by building, where would that leave Rebecca Anderson? She didn't have a building. She walked into the ruin and died when part of the Murrah Building fell on her. In this case, selecting alphabetical order puts the rescuer in the first position.

A solution for the non-Murrah names would be to organize them by building, with the person not associated with a building at first or last. Rebecca died entering the ruin where the first floor had been. So placing her name first makes sense. This fulfils the geographic theme of the arrangement, keeps the names in each of the exterior buildings together, and still places the rescuer in the honored position on the first floor.

The designers made another organizational decision that is somewhat bizarre. Four married couples died at the Social Services Administration (SSA) on the first floor. Each couple followed the tradition of sharing the same last name. For them, alphabetical order was ignored to place the husband's name first. Research indicates the purpose was to keep the tradition implied by "husband and wife" or "Mr. and Mrs." The alphabet has a tradition too, so it seems an odd choice to make in the first year of the 21st Century, when the Memorial was dedicated.

If I were to change alphabetical order, I would place three children with their grandparents. Peachlyn Bradley, three years old, and her brother Gabreon Bruce, three months old, died at the SSA with their grandmother Cheryl Hammon. The accident of alphabetical order places Peachlyn and Gabreon together, but seven chairs separate them from Cheryl. LaRue and Luther Treaner died with their four year old granddaughter Ashley Eckles. They are now separated by 21 chairs.

Since the designers were open to changing the alphabet, each trio could have remained together, Cheryl surrounded by her grandchildren and Ashley by her grandparents. Theirs were the two families that lost three people. Keeping these loved ones together on the Memorial would have been a small, but perhaps meaningful gift.

For the World Trade Center (WTC), adding floor numbers to the names would help demonstrate that the highest numbers of deaths occurred above the point of impact in both buildings. The Oklahoma City Memorial geographically shows the location of the greatest number of deaths by arranging the names into a concentration of chairs, with more chairs in the middle and fewer chairs toward the right and left edges.

The bomb exploded directly under the cribs in America's Kids Child Development Center on the second floor. The most remembered image of that day is a fireman carrying the limp body of a baby. This bombing killed a lot of babies. The Memorial acknowledges their deaths by giving children smaller chairs.

It's an elegant arrangement, with just a couple of misses. Using only names and chairs, the designers showed affiliation, age, level of destruction, and location of death by floor, office and exterior to the Murrah Building.

They did one more thing. The Memorial's Survival Wall lists the names of more than 800 who experienced and survived the blast. They did not die, but they certainly had a life-changing experience. Offering them a part of the Memorial honors their suffering, gives them a place for contemplation, and helps visitors understand the enormity of the crime.

Survivors' names are alphabetized within the buildings, which are also in alphabetical order. The original plan was to arrange the building names geographically, but it was felt that the primary target needed to be first.  Alphabetical order places the Alfred P. Murrah Building at the front of the list. (Linenthal, 2001)

I wish the World Trade Center Memorial would consider honoring the survivors of 9/11. I am not suggesting the names of everyone in the WTC on September 11, 2001 be listed. That is probably impossible to know. However, the names of companies with offices in the WTC could be engraved onto the Memorial, giving thousands of people with horrific experiences a place of solace and a place for their own memories. For reasons that have not been explained, corporate names are disallowed and the World Trade Center Memorial continues to miss the opportunity to fully serve its community of 9/11 survivors and families.

(I am grateful to Brad Robison, Director of the Terrorism Information Center at the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism in Oklahoma City. I contacted Brad during the anniversary week and appreciate his taking the time to answer my questions.)

Names on a Memorial: Jessie C. Alba

(Today’s post honors Charlotte Winters, the last female U.S. veteran of World War I, who died last week at the age of 109.)

Reading the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM) from left to right, like a book, Jessie C. Alba is the last name on the memorial. Because the names are listed in chronological order of casualty, visitors often think he was the last to die, but the VVM is not intended to be read like a book. 

It is intended to be experienced as a circle, with the names beginning at the center vertex and continuing east. The first half ends with Jessie, who died on May 25, 1968. Visitors then must traverse the full length of the Wall to the far west panel for the next May 25^th name, John H. Anderson. The names then proceed in chronological order, alphabetical within each date, back to the center vertex, completing the circle.

The first name for July 8, 1959, and therefore the first name at the top of Panel IE in the center vertex, is Dale R. Buis. He was watching a movie with his unit when a sniper attacked. The final names, from May 15, 1975, are on Panel 1W, one panel to the west of 1E. These eighteen died during the rescue of the S. S. Mayaguez and its crew. Richard Vandegeer is the last name on the Wall, not Jessie C. Alba.

Many first time visitors don’t get the circle metaphor, which I believe is the weakest element of the Wall. The entrance to the VVM is not in the center, but at the west or east for a linear, not a circular experience. Rather than a meaningful symbol, the circle seems like a quirk of this memorial. I’m not complaining. Who knows what details allowed a 21 year old college student to win the VVM competition and to overcome the extreme controversy of her design? This was Maya Lin’s first major work. Some of her subsequent pieces also include circles. If she wants the beginning and the end in the middle, that’s her prerogative as the artist.

But it leaves the problem of Jessie C. Alba. Rather than the last to die, Jessie is the first name of those who died on May 25, 1968. A Texan, Sergeant Alba belonged to the Army’s 101^st Airborne Division, Delta Company.  He died on the ground in Thua Thien-Hue at age 20. His is the last name on the last panel to the east, Panel 70E. The other 88 names for May 25^th begin 140 panels to the west on Panel 70W.

One of the advantages of the chronology is the listing together of all names who died in a battle on a given day. I discussed this feature of the Wall in my 1/15/07 post, “Comrades in Vietnam and the Somme.” The arrangement design allows survivors of a battle to visit one area of the Wall, find their comrades and relive the experience. The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme achieves the same goal by listing regiments together. In that arrangement, the flow for three regiments is disrupted to promote Edwin Lutyens’ architecture (see my 2/4/07 post, A Path Among the Missing).

Rather than promoting architecture, I believe the Wall got caught up in its own rules -- chronological order, alphabetical order within dates and no space to indicate a new date. But the VVM also has rules for keeping comrades together. Those who died of injuries are listed with the date of injury not the date of death. The missing are listed with the day they went missing. Because the first rules were slavishly followed, the intention of the second rules was lost for Jessie.

An information arrangement is built by rules – the rule of the alphabet, the rule of chronology, or something more complex. Information arrangers often get caught up in their own rules, forgetting they were created to serve a goal. When a rule becomes more important than the goal, it’s time to rethink the rules. Here’s another rule for the Wall. If one name is left hanging at the end of 70E, it can be moved to the top of 70W.

As it happens, Jessie was the only one in his unit to die on May 25, 1968. The nearest chronological deaths for Delta Company are Elroy E. Beier, May 5, 1968, on Panel 55E and Nickolas G. Garcia, April 22, 1969 on Panel 26W. Alba and Beier arrived in Vietnam on the same day, December 14, 1967. Garcia arrived on April 27, 1968, a month before Jessie died, eight days before Elroy died.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter that Jessie is all by himself on that farthest panel. His buddies probably don’t know anyone else who died on May 25, 1968. But now Jessie belongs to another group. He belongs to the group who died on that day and it does matter that he is separated by 140 panels from the other members of his group. It matters to his fiancé, Mary Ann Lopez, who wrote on the The Wall-USA, “In 1996 I got a chance to see the Vietnam wall with his name on it and since I got there at night time it was so overwhelming for me. The wall is so huge and very scary in a way. I finally found his name and how ironic it was that his name is the last one almost all by itself at the end.”