Today’s post honors Phillip Gibbs and James Green, killed shortly after midnight on May 15, 1970 by police at Jackson State College in Mississippi. On May 4 of that year, Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder were killed by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University.
This
post will also be the Memorial Day essay for Discover the Region, where
some of my writings will now be published.
Like all language, organized information persuades. It “directs our thinking,” as biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote about classification. Information arrangement shapes perception and interaction. Names on memorials are examples of organized information where arrangement defines a visitor’s experience. The thoughtful chronology of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial builds a space for individual remembrance. A World War I memorial does the same, but with a different arrangement strategy, reflecting the difference in the two wars. In contrast, the random arrangement proposed for the World Trade Center memorial almost derailed the project. Yet, in another context, random builds community at the Memorial Temples of Burning Man.
By listing names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM) in chronological order, designer Maya Lin gave surviving Vietnam Vets personal spaces for contemplation, spaces that make the VVM our most powerful memorial. Names are arranged by date of casualty, not date of death. Those who died later of wounds received in battle are listed on the day of the battle along with their buddies who died that day or went missing. When a surviving soldier visits the VVM, he need only remember one name to look up in the index. He finds the panel and sees the names of his friends who died in a battle he fought. They remain together where he can visit them and remember his own experience.
Architect Edwin Lutyens influenced Lin with his World War I Memorial to the Missing of the Somme. This open structure of 16 huge columns, with intersecting arches and a truncated tower in Thiepval, France lists more than 72,000 names on its huge columns, names of British soldiers missing from a single battle. Like the VVM, the memorial gives survivors an individual place of remembrance, but the two use different arrangements to achieve the same goal. The VVM honors over 58,000 dead or missing during a 20 year war. The Somme memorial lists those missing from a five month battle, most from a one day massacre when British troops surged into waiting German lines.
In World War I, Britain recruited Pals Battalions. Men who signed up together could serve the entire war with their buddies. Cities and towns mustered their own fighting units, sending them off to France with names like the Sheffield City Battalion. On July 1, 1916, many of these towns lost nearly a generation of young men.
The names on the Somme memorial are arranged by British Army Order of Precedence. That’s how military units appear on the parade ground. These units came from individual towns, so the arrangement has the effect of organizing missing soldiers by their home towns. Even today, with only a few remaining World War I vets, relatives and neighbors have their own place of remembrance.
Michael Arad, designer of New York’s National September 11 Memorial, ignored individual places of remembrance when he selected random as the arrangement. This would have dispersed names from each company all over the monument. Instead of a personal place to remember fallen coworkers, survivors would have had to hike to see each name. The arrangement infuriated surviving families and they eventually refused to contribute to the memorial fund. At that point, the design committee reconsidered and offered “meaningful adjacencies.” Families can now place their loved one’s name within a group or next to an individual. Many names will appear with the companies they worked for, but they might also be with special friends. In one case, a married couple who worked at different companies will now be forever together on the memorial.
The designers of the National September 11 Memorial paid dearly for an arrangement error, losing money, prestige and the community’s good will. They went from simplistic random to perhaps the most complex arrangement on any memorial with individualized name placement and multiple types of groupings. If the designers had originally selected an obvious arrangement, such as geographic by floor, survivors would have had their places of remembrance. They would not have needed strong family associations to fight against the arrangement and ultimately to fight for a more detailed names design.
In the right context, however, even random can build private spaces of remembrance. David Best did this at Nevada’s Burning Man art festivals. His Memorial Temples in 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004 reflect the Somme memorial as arched open structures, topped with a tower and filled with names. Burners inscribe the names they want to remember anywhere on the memorial. The effect is random, but each inscription describes a private remembrance. For the week of the festival, Burners have a personal place to grieve, a place they have chosen. When the Temple burns on Sunday, individual memories and the combined memories of all Burners float into the evening sky.