As Christopher Columbus plunged into Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, and General Robert E. Lee dismounted his pedestal in Richmond, a distinctive kind of memorial has been gaining traction.[1] While past debates centered on a memorial’s formal qualities—figurative or abstract?—attention has pivoted from aesthetic attributes to the ways in which a visitor interacts with a memorial. Rather than an object to be contemplated, today’s memorial is a space to be experienced. And with this shift from contemplation to experience, a focus driven in part by faculty and alumni of the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), comes an emphasis on active engagement, now and in the future.
Take, for example, the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers (MEL), which swells from the lawn just east of the Rotunda on the University of Virginia’s (UVA’s) campus. Designed by Höweler + Yoon, a firm founded by GSD professor of architecture Eric Höweler and dean of Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning J. Meejin Yoon, who graduated from the GSD in 1997, this installation honors the 4,000 enslaved individuals who built and worked at the university from its inception in 1817 through the Civil War’s conclusion nearly 50 years later. Composed of concentric granite rings, the outermost cresting to 8 feet in height, the memorial beckons to passersby traversing campus and across the street in Charlottesville. On the larger ring’s smooth inner wall they find inscribed 578 names and 311 phrases of kinship or occupation, such as “daughter” or “mason,” along with more than 3000 “memory marks”—placeholders for the yet-unidentified enslaved individuals. Visitors also encounter a timeline, awash with water, that denotes the racial violence underlying Jefferson’s “Academical Village.” These features partially enclose a circle of grass, a public space for meeting and interaction, recalling clearings in the woods where enslaved people would secretly gather. Meanwhile, in certain light conditions an ethereal portrait of Isabella Gibbons—a former enslaved domestic worker at UVA who became a Charlottesville school teacher—materializes on the MEL’s outer wall, suggesting that the history of which the memorial speaks is ever present, even when unseen.
Dedicated in 2021, the MEL is a contemporary memorial in date and sensibility: it engages visitors in an active manner, through multiple and flexible means; it contains room for emergent information (new names can be inscribed); and it incorporates input from a range of stakeholders, including UVA students and descendants of the honored individuals, who took part in its conceptualization. The MEL aspires to more than the commemoration of a person, group, or event; it sheds light on a previously suppressed history—not as a closed episode, but rather as an ongoing collective conversation in the present and future. “Righting past wrongs is what we were asked to do,” Höweler remarked. “How do you begin repair in the present by starting with the past and being more truthful about it?”[2]
A reflection of changing attitudes toward memorialization, in 2016 the National Park Service, National Capital Planning Commission, and Van Alen Institute co-sponsored Memorials for the Future, “an ideas competition to reimagine how we think about, feel, and experience memorials.”[3] After analyzing the 89 submissions drawn from around the world, the organizers issued Not Set in Stone, a document underscoring potential key aspects of memorial design moving forward. The overarching message highlights the heterogeneous audiences that today’s memorials address as well as the inherent complexity and multi-dimensionality memorials now embody. The report offers broad guidelines for thinking about new memorials, recommending that they engage with the present and future as much as the past; accommodate shifting narratives; harness public involvement for conceptualization; and explore mobile or temporary forms of expression.[4] The winning submission for Memorials for the Future, Climate Chronograph by landscape architects Rebecca Sunter and Erik Jensen, exemplifies these ideas, repurposing a portion of East Potomac Park in Washington, DC, as a place for visitors to kayak among the dead cherry trees, left behind as persistent sea level rise subsumes the land.[5]
Throughout the past decade, elements espoused by Not Set in Stone have appeared with increasing frequency in new memorials, as evidenced through a brief survey of projects by Harvard GSD affiliates—including those responsible for the MEL. Höweler + Yoon also designed the Collier Memorial (2015), sited on Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s campus where Officer Sean Collier was shot and killed following the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013. Comprising 32 blocks of granite that create a five-way stone vault, the memorial serves as an iconic destination, mid-campus passageway, and dynamic sculptural presence, its form suggesting that strength derives from unity.
The notion that contemporary memorials are “more visitor-centric”—less about observation and more about interaction—aligns with the recent competition-winning design for the Fallen Journalists Memorial (FJM) by Chicago-based architect John Ronan, who graduated from the GSD in 1995.[6] Located on the National Mall in Washington, DC, and slated for completion in 2028, the FJM serves a twofold purpose: to honor journalists who have died in the pursuit of truth, and to educate visitors about the First Amendment’s role in a democratic society. With the FJM still working its way through the federal approval process, images of the design have not been released. Yet it has been revealed that Ronan’s design employs an array of glass elements through which visitors navigate to reach a “place of remembrance,” echoing the investigative journalist’s “journey of discovery” as a story comes together.[7] The FJM thus distinguishes itself within its monument-saturated landscape by demanding the visitor’s active engagement.
A prerequisite of active engagement likewise informs Penjing, the shortlisted project for the Memorial to the Victims of the Los Angeles Chinese Massacre of 1871 by GSD alumni J. Roc Jih, James Leng, and Jennifer Ly (who graduated in 2012, 2013, and 2014, respectively). Nearly 150 years ago, a racist mob terrorized and lynched 18 Chinese men. The incident, which precipitated anti-Asian laws that restricted Chinese immigration, remained largely unacknowledged until 2021, when Los Angeles and California allocated funds for the commemoration of the massacre. In response to a call for submissions, Jih (of Studio J. Jih in Boston) and Leng and Ly (of San Francisco-based Figure) crafted a design that unites the Chinese concepts of Pen (frame) and Jing (scene) in a series of multitextured limestone vessels that house miniature gardens and mark locations in downtown Los Angeles significant to the massacre. The designers envisioned the installations as living sculptures to be cultivated by residents, who encounter the gardens as they move through the neighborhood; inscriptions on the ground educate visitors, ensuring that the massacre remains part of the public discourse. As Jih noted, “We see remembrance as a constant and ongoing act rather than as something sacred and unchanging.” Through the incorporation of living elements, “the act of remembering also becomes one of care and maintenance, inviting tactile engagement.”[8]
Likewise, visitor engagement figured prominently in the conceptualization of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice (2018), created by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). Following years in-depth research on lynching and the lasting impacts of racial violence, EJI collaborated with an array of designers and artists to construct, across a six-acre site adjacent to the State Capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, a memorial that honors the more than 4,400 victims of racial terror lynchings that took place in the United States between 1877 and 1950. MASS Design Group, founded by Michael Murphy and Alan Ricks (GSD graduates from 2011 and 2010, respectively), worked with EJI on one of the memorial’s elements of the memorial: a pavilion that contains 800 suspended steel columns—one for each of the counties in which a lynching took place—engraved with victims’ names.
A passageway descends through the columns, with visitors journeying to a position below, gazing up as if part of the crowd at a public lynching. Surrounding the pavilion, matching columns wait for their respective counties to claim and transport them home. In this way, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice engages more than its immediate visitors, extending its reach to hundreds of counties that must choose to create local memorials, thereby acknowledging their past atrocities, or leave the columns in Montgomery, signaling their lack of remorse. The National Lynching Memorial thus acts as a tool for engagement, education, and public accountability.
In 2019, the Gun Violence Memorial Project, designed by MASS Design Group and Songha & Company, where artist Hank Willis Thomas is creative director, debuted at the Chicago Architecture Biennal before opening, in spring 2021, for a two-year run at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. As explained by Jha D. Amazi, principal at MASS Design Group, the memorial aims “to communicate the enormity of the [gun violence] epidemic while also honoring the individuals whose lives have been taken.”[9] The design features four houses composed of 700 transparent glass bricks, with each house signifying the weekly human cost—700 lives on average—of gun violence in this country.[10] Families who have lost someone to gun violence have donated remembrance objects from drivers’ licenses to Double Dutch jump ropes, which are displayed within a glass brick along with the victim’s name, date of birth, and date of death. For visitors, these objects humanize the victim, transforming them from a statistic to a person. Additional engaging elements include audio and film clips about the effects of gun violence, which visitors experience as they enter the houses to view their contents.
For the families of victims, the remembrance objects act as visible tributes to their loved ones. Simultaneously, the objects encourage interaction between the families as well as society at large. This begins with the objects’ process of collection, which draws families to given places at designated times; indeed, since opening five years ago, representatives from the Gun Violence Memorial Project have traveled to 14 cities around the country, holding collection events to fill formerly empty glass bricks. At these events, families encounter, and ideally connect with, others in their area who suffer with gun-violence-related tragedies. Then, once the objects populate the glass bricks, the families by default join the memorial’s contributory community—not a formal designation, yet nonetheless meaningful. Finally, the objects connect families with people they may never meet yet who, by experiencing the memorial, will be touched by these individual stories. The Gun Violence Memorial Project, fortified by the assembled remembrance objects, underscores the vast reach of gun violence, a nationwide epidemic the United States has yet to sufficiently accept or address.
In late August 2024, the Gun Violence Memorial Project opened in Boston. As opposed to its tenures in Chicago and Washington, DC, the memorial’s current manifestation involves a citywide collaboration, with displays at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston City Hall, and the MASS Design Group’s gallery. With this shift from a single venue to multiple sites throughout a city, the memorial appears to have leapt in scale, taking a great stride toward its ambition to “foster a national healing process that begins with a recognition of the collective loss and its impact on society.” [11] Unlike static monuments that were conceived to be seen, this contemporary memorial elicits interaction and active engagement. As the Gun Violence Memorial Project illustrates, such a memorial can even be transitory; what persists is the human experience it provides.
*This piece was updated to describe the Equal Justice Initiative as the originator of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.
[1] Rachel Treisman, “Baltimore Protesters Topple Columbus Statue,” NPR, July 5, 2020, https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/07/05/887423624/baltimore-protesters-topple-columbus-statue; and Whittney Evans and David Streever, “Virginia’s Massive Robert E. Lee Statue Has Been Removed,” NPR, Sept. 8, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/09/08/1035004639/virginia-ready-to-remove-massive-robert-e-lee-statue-following-a-year-of-lawsuit.
[2] Eric Höweler, interview with author, June 27, 2024.
[3] Not Set in Stone (National Park Service, National Capital Planning Commission, and Van Alen Institute, 2016), 2, https://future.ncpc.gov/pdf/Key_Findings.pdf.
[4] “Key Findings,” Memorials for the Future, Van Alen Institute, https://www.vanalen.org/project/memorials-for-the-future/#key-findings.
[5]“Competition Winner,” Memorials for the Future, Van Alen Institute, https://www.vanalen.org/project/memorials-for-the-future/#competition-winner.
[6] John Ronan, interview with author, Mar. 25, 2024.
[7] Ibid.
[8] “Penjing,” Work, Studio J. Jih, https://j.jih.studio/work/penjing/.
[9] Jha D. Amazi, “The Gun Violence Memorial Project,” Exhibitions, Institute of Contemporary Art, https://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/gun-violence-memorial-project/.
[10] This average number of 700 gun deaths per week in the United States is based on a statistic from 2018. As of May 2024, the average number of gun deaths per week for the year is 840.
[11] “About,” The Gun Violence Memorial Project, https://www.gunviolencememorialproject.org/about.