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Architecture, Media,
and Memory
ii
Architecture, Media,
and Memory
Facing Complexity in Post–9/11 New York
JOEL MCKIM
BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA
BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published in Great Britain 2019
Copyright © Joel McKim, 2019
Joel McKim has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as Author of this work.
For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. vi constitute an extension of this copyright page.
Cover design: Eleanor Rose

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McKim, Joel, 1975- author.
Title: Architecture, media, and memory: facing complexity in post-9/11 New York / Joel McKim.
Description: New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018030760 | ISBN 9781350037663 (hardback: alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781350037632 (epdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Memorials–New York (State)–New York. | September 11
Terrorist Attacks, 2001–Social aspects–New York (State)–New York. |
Collective memory and city planning–New York (State)–New York. |
New York (N.Y.)–Buildings, structures, etc.
Classification: LCC NA9350.N5 M39 2018 | DDC 720.9747/1–dc23 LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2018030760
ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-3766-3

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Contents
Acknowledgments vi
List of figures vii
Introduction 1
1 Mourning and protest: Spontaneous memorials at Union Square 17
2 Absence and exposure: The National September 11 Memorial & Museum 39
3 Algorithmic memory: The interaction designs of Jake Barton
and Local Projects 61
4 Secrets, false targets, and social media: Confronting conspiracy theories 77
5 Creative recall: Digital design, architecture, and the challenge of memory 97
6 Landfills and lifescapes: The transformation of New York’s Fresh Kills 115
Conclusion 137
Bibliography 141
Index 155
Acknowledgments
L ike many academic works, this book’s research and writing was completed over many years and
across multiple locations. It was made possible by funding support from the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the British Overseas Research Scholarship, and
the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences’ Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of
Pittsburgh. There have been many friends, mentors, and colleagues who have generously offered
their insights and comments along the way. In Montreal at Concordia and McGill, Peter C. van Wyck,
Will Straw, Brian Massumi, and Erin Manning provided both support and intellectual stimulation.
In London, at Goldsmiths, a vibrant community of friendship and ideas served as the foundation
for much of this work. I would like to thank in particular Jennifer Gabrys, Howard Caygill, Angela
McRobbie, James Burton, Sean McKeown, Laura Cull, Theresa Mikuriya, Craig Smith, Daisy Tam,
Susan Schuppli, Lucia Vodanovic, Shinji Oyama, John Hutnyk, and Scott Lash. And at the University
of Pittsburgh my postdoctoral colleagues and mentors provided yet another rich environment for
discussion and debate. I would like to especially acknowledge Alice Mattoni, David Kim, Frans
Weiser, Benjamin Kahan, Jocelyn Buckner, Kristen Tobey, Logan Dancey, Raymund Ryan, Fred
Evans, Drew Armstrong, Josh Ellenbogen, Barbara McCloskey, Terry Smith, and Kirk Savage. A
thank you as well to my wonderful present-day colleagues at Birkbeck, University of London.
This book also greatly benefited from many interviews and conversations with members of
the New York art, design, and architecture community, including Jesse Reiser, Bill Talen (Reverend
Billy), Michael Shulan, Rem Koolhaas, Katerina Lucas (Park51), and Doug Elliott (Freshkills Park).
I’m very appreciative of Donald Lokuta, SOMA Architects, and Jake Barton and Local Projects
for generously providing images for inclusion in the book. And thank you to the editorial and
production team at Bloomsbury for seeing the project through to final print.
Thank you most of all my loving and supportive family, particularly my parents Myrna and Jerry.
A special thanks to my sister-in-law Sarahmay Wilkinson who hosted me on many research trips
to New York. And finally, to Judith for being there with me through it all.
List of figures
Figure 1.1 Union Square Memorial. Donald Lokuta 18

Figure 1.2 Thomas Hirschhorn Mondrian Altar (1997)—installed in Queens, NY, in 2011.
Joel McKim 27
Figure 2.1 President Obama at National September 11 Memorial (10th Anniversary of 9/11).
Local Projects 40
Figure 2.2 Public Patriotism on Display at 10th Anniversary of 9/11. Joel McKim 41
Figure 2.3 Public Protests at 10th Anniversary of 9/11. Joel McKim 42
Figure 2.4 National September 11 Memorial. Local Projects 50
Figure 2.5 Flower Left at National September 11 Memorial. Local Projects 51
Figure 2.6 National September 11 Museum Foundation Hall. Joel McKim 54
Figure 2.7 National September 11 Museum Memorial Exhibition. Local Projects 55
Figure 2.8 National September 11 Museum Historical Exhibition. Local Projects 56
Figure 3.1 National September 11 Museum Timescape Exhibition. Local Projects 68
Figure 3.2 National September 11 Museum Last Column Exhibition. Local Projects 72
Figure 3.3 MCNY Future City Lab Map Table. Local Projects 74
Figure 4.1 9/11 Truth Movement at 10th Anniversary of 9/11. Joel McKim 81
Figure 4.2 Park51 Rendering. SOMA Architects 93
Figure 6.1 Fresh Kills Landfill, Staten Island, NY, in 2011. Joel McKim 124
Figure 6.2 Fresh Kills Landfill, Staten Island, NY, in 2011. Joel McKim 124
viii
Introduction
N o more than 200 meters from the site of the National September 11 Memorial, along the bank
of the Hudson, lies another monument to a devastating historical event. The episode this
memorial seeks to narrate is historically and geographically very far removed from what occurred
here in 2001. This space, constructed with relatively little public attention or discussion, is the Irish
Hunger Memorial commemorating the Great Famine1 that devastated the population of Ireland
and led to mass emigration between 1845 and 1852. The memorial, designed by the New York–
born artist Brian Tolle, is a quarter acre of simulated Irish landscape touching down to meet the
pavement on its east side and gently ramping up twenty-five feet above the ground on its opposite
edge. The imported tract of rural Ireland, complete with indigenous vegetation and the remains
of a ruined stone cottage brought from County Mayo, appears to have been wrenched from its
proper context and dropped down from above into the New York cityscape. Tolle’s intention is
to create a “living” monument, both in the sense of the memorial’s verdancy and its ability to
link past events to current global conditions (Johnson 2003: 55). The dulcet and measured voice
of Bob Geldof emanates from the memorial’s base, drawing connections between this specific
historical disaster and the present state of famine worldwide. I first visited the site during a
typically scorching July day in New York, and a battalion of sprinklers attempted, in vain, to keep
the landscape from passing from its intended green hue to various shades of burned yellow. It
seemed that this grafted transplant from another continent and another time was not settling in
easily to its new environment.
When the memorial was dedicated in the summer of 2002, it became the latest addition to an
expanding archipelago of monuments and statuary spread over the surface of Lower Manhattan.
From the Irish Hunger Memorial you can venture due east to the corner of Duane and Elk Street,
the location of the even more recent African Burial Ground National Monument—a site earmarked
for the construction of a US Federal office building, but found in 1991 to contain the remains of
more than 400 free and enslaved Africans buried during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
A memorial designed by the Haitian-American architect Rodney Leon was opened to the public in
2007; it features a sunken circular “Ancestral Libation Court,” the floor of which is inscribed with
a map tracing the routes of the African diaspora. If you instead walk south past the North Cove
Marina you’ll find the New York City Police Memorial, a fountain and reflecting pool dedicated in
1997 to officers fallen in the line of duty. Continuing south along the Battery Park City brings you
to the Museum of Jewish Heritage (itself described as a living memorial to the Holocaust) and
its Garden of Stones. The garden, designed by the British artist Andy Goldsworthy and opened
in 2003, features eighteen boulders each with a single oak sapling growing out from its craggy
surface. Here you also find the entrance to Battery Park, which is home to more than twenty
memorials alone, including the American Merchant Mariners’ Memorial completed by the Pop
Art sculptor Marisol Escobar in 1991; the New York Korean War Veterans Memorial dedicated the
same year; the 1963 East Coast Memorial for World War II serviceman who died in the coastal
2 ARCHITECTURE, MEDIA, AND MEMORY
waters of the Atlantic; and the 1955 Coast Guard Memorial. Commanding more attention than
any of the other memorials in the park is the battered, but otherwise intact Koenig Sphere, the
imposing metallic form sculpted by the German artist Fritz Koenig that once stood in the middle
of Austin Tobin Plaza, occupying a prominent position between the Twin Towers of the World Trade
Center. Originally intended as a symbol of world peace, the sculpture is far more appreciated now
than it ever was in its first incarnation. The sphere was recovered from the Ground Zero rubble and
moved to Battery Park six months later to serve as a temporary memorial to the 9/11 victims and
a monument to its own survival.
And still other locations could be added to this memorial list (the Battery Labyrinth which
also commemorates those who died on September 11, New York’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial
dedicated in 2001, the Stone Wall National Monument to LGBT rights and history established
in Greenwich Village in 2016, Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf’s Gardens of Remembrance
opened in 2003, to name a few more), clearly establishing Lower Manhattan as the city’s preferred
repository for monuments and sites of remembrance. Not all New Yorkers welcome the tendency;
the opening of the Irish Hunger Memorial led Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin to remark that
while uptown has its Museum Mile, downtown now has a Misery Mile and many residents of the
area feel that the neighborhood is beginning to cater more to the dead (and the tourists who come
to pay their respects to them) than to its living inhabitants (Iovine 2003).2
Certainly, this area of New York appears to have succumbed to the contemporary cultural
phenomenon Erika Doss has termed “memorial mania,” which she defines as “an obsession with
issues of memory and history and an urgent desire to express and claim those issues in visibly
public contexts” (2010: 2). Yet Doss also reminds us that America has had previous iterations of this
memory obsession and she points to the “statue mania” of the 1870s to the 1920s that emerged
in response to the divisiveness of the Civil War (2010: 20). One material consequence of this
“statue mania,” the vast number of confederate monuments erected across the Southern United
States during this period, was the subject of one of this year’s most significant and disturbing
political confrontations. The struggle over whether these monuments should be preserved or
dismantled came to a head in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August when a statue to Robert E. Lee
slated for removal became the focal point for a white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally and a
clash with counterprotesters that produced over thirty injuries and the death of thirty-two-year-old
Heather D. Heyer (Astor, Caron, and Victor 2017 and McKim 2017). These events have motivated
New York’s own process of memorial questioning with monuments to Theodore Roosevelt (on
horseback flanked by a standing Native American and an African), Christopher Columbus, and
Nazi-collaborator Philippe Pétain, all accused of representing the ideas and history of white
supremacism (Cotter 2018).
Writing in the 1930s, Robert Musil famously noted that despite their attempts at conspicuousness,
there is nothing as invisible as a monument: “they are impregnated with something that repels
attention, causing the glance to roll right off, like water droplets off an oilcloth, without even
pausing for a moment” (1995: 61). The recent enthusiasm for memorial construction and the
passionate calls for the removal of historical monuments would seem to contradict Musil’s claims.
In light of current events, Michael Taussig’s suggested adjustment to Musil’s theory, that it is not
until a monument is destroyed that it succeeds in drawing our attention, appears to be a necessary
alteration. Taussig reminds us that the monument is often the first symbolic object of attack in
INTRODUCTION 3
times of struggle and it is through negation that its hidden power is revealed. “With defacement,”
he writes, “the statue moves from an excess of invisibility to an excess of visibility” (1999: 52).3
It is in this mnemonically crowded and emotionally charged landscape that the rebuilding
projects at Ground Zero have taken their place. By most conceivable measures—sheer size,
public attention, symbolic importance—the new World Trade Center and the National September
11 Memorial & Museum eclipse the Lower Manhattan memory locations that surround them. In
an area of New York becoming increasingly defined by its connections to the past, the ongoing
reconstruction of Ground Zero, perhaps the most colossal and complicated architectural project
ever to contend with considerations of remembrance, remains the undisputed locus of memory
culture.
The dense accumulation of memorials in Lower Manhattan and recent confederate monument
debates are only some of the tangible manifestations of the widespread memory boom that has
taken place over the past several decades in America and elsewhere. In addition to their position
within a congested urban setting, New York’s post–9/11 architectural projects occupy an important
place within an equally crowded field of memory scholarship, literature, philosophy, and artwork.
This book seeks to better comprehend the interaction of memory and architecture that has occurred
on this highly charged sixteen acres of Manhattan land and emanating beyond it. The planned
reconstruction of Ground Zero and other post–9/11 architectural projects are significantly altering
the New York cityscape, but they are also having a profound impact on our wider understanding of
cultural memory, its conjunction with the built environment, and how it may or may not help foster
new forms of political communication and ethical engagement. What does it mean to construct a
site of remembrance in the Financial District of one of the world’s most culturally and economically
dynamic cities? What happens when discourses of memory overlap with the rhetoric of urban
development and revitalization? How do our prevailing notions of mourning and loss apply in the
context of global events that are still in the process of unfolding? What role does memory play in
relation to a war on terror now in its seventeenth year and with no end in sight? The first central
premise of this book is that the challenge of rebuilding in post–9/11 New York introduces a level of
complexity to memory-oriented architecture that requires a considerable expansion of our current
thinking and design practice.
The second major premise of this book is that the decades following September 11, 2001, have
seen an increasingly intertwined relationship between architecture and media. As Terry Smith
notes, the attacks themselves were of course “designed as a media event . . . [creating] the most
spectacular effect within a spectacle-saturated world” (2006: 140). But the events of 9/11 can
also be viewed as occurring in the historical interval between two different digital media eras or
moments, the dot-com bubble that fuelled the growth of internet technology in the 1990s had just
burst and the “social media revolution” of Web 2.0 was on the brink of occurring. The rebuilding and
memorial projects in New York take place against the backdrop of these broader media changes
and the gradually expanding role of digital technologies within architectural design practice more
specifically. A number of significant media and architecture intersections thus characterize this
period: a growing popular awareness of architectural projects via online circulation; new digitally
enabled forms of public participation in architectural discussions and debates; the embedding
of media screens and interfaces into the physical environments of museums, memorials, and
other city spaces; the emergence of distinctly digital design movement within architecture. This
“mediatization” of architecture in the years following 9/11 contributes to the overall complexity of
memory aesthetics and politics involved. It also, I believe, requires that we incorporate into our
thinking currents of media theory, digital culture, and political communication that currently sit
outside the existing cannon of memory studies. Before outlining the specific topics addressed
in the chapters of this book, I would first like to introduce a brief account of some of the central
debates within the field of memory studies and memorial design. I do this in order to both provide
a conceptual and material context for the post–9/11 projects in contemporary New York and to
indicate some of the ways in which the complexity of architecture in the city requires a rethinking
of much of this terrain.
A short history of contemporary memory

The challenge of how to rebuild New York appears in some way to be a point of culmination for the
culture of commemoration developing through the 1980s and 1990s, yet the specific configuration
of memory and politics in New York does not always sit comfortably within these pre-established
theories and models. Few subjects have garnered more intellectual and popular attention in recent
years than the subject of memory. This contemporary memory obsession has expressed itself
in a plurality of forms from a burgeoning mass media nostalgia industry (Jameson 2006, Boym
2002), to questions concerning the science of memory storage and retrieval (Hacking 1996), to
the popularization of museums and proliferation of monuments and memorials (Young 2000; Weil
1990). In his seminal 1995 text Twilight Memories, Andreas Huyssen tries to take stock of this
developing social fixation. He astutely points out the paradoxical nature of a culture simultaneously
experiencing a waning of historical consciousness (epitomized by the circulation of post–Cold
War claims for the “end of history”) and an unprecedented explosion of interest in concepts and
practices of memory. According to Huyssen, the current shift in prioritization from authoritative
history to cultural memory is not strictly analogous with earlier attacks on archival history and its
oppressive teleology carried out by Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, and other modern thinkers. Far
from being overwhelmed by the burden of official historicism, he suggests the present cultural
moment is afflicted with an acute anxiety over the possibility of finding itself historically adrift.
Huyssen explains that “the difficulty of the current conjuncture is to think memory and amnesia
together rather than simply to oppose them” (1995: 6). The recent memory turn must then be
considered in relation to worries over the dwindling of generational memory and the rapid pace
and information overload brought on by technological change. From the vantage point of the mid-
1990s, Huyssen saw in the memory boom “a potentially healthy sign of contestation” (1995: 9)—it
presented a burgeoning interdisciplinary academic field, a form of resistance to the unfettered
growth of “informational hyperspace” and a way of re-establishing more human-oriented structures
of temporality.
Perhaps the most intense discussion provoked by the threat of fin de siècle cultural amnesia
identified by Huyssen has been a wide-ranging debate over how best to remember the atrocities
of the twentieth century, so as to not slip into a disastrous cycle of repetition. The fear of forgetting
these human disasters is heightened by the fact that the survivors of these events are in the
process of passing away. Holocaust remembrance is a primary imperative in this respect, but
INTRODUCTION 5
other occurrences of genocidal ethnic cleansing this century, in Armenia, the Balkans, and
Rwanda, as well as mass-scale state terror campaigns in the Soviet Union, Argentina, Chile, and
elsewhere, have also underlined the importance of keeping memory alive and active. There has by
no means been any easy consensus concerning how best to accomplish this goal, and memory
studies have been in part defined by fervent debates within the field. The French historian Pierre
Nora’s distinction between lieux de mémoire (historical sites of memory) and milieux de mémoire
(collective environments of memory) has been one important touchstone in considerations of
what may or may not constitute an effective process of memory in the present. Nora argues that
milieux de mémoire, anchored in ritual and the living practices of communities, are being replaced
in contemporary society by a compulsive archiving of history that transforms the past into a static
representation, a document to be filed away or a location to be visited on a tourist route4. Our
accelerated culture, he claims, is being confronted with “the brutal realization of the difference
between real memory—social and unviolated, exemplified in but also retained as the secret of
so-called primitive or archaic societies—and history; which is how our hopelessly forgetful modern
societies, propelled by change, organize the past” (1989: 8). Nora’s writing has been interpreted as
an appeal to respond to the contemporary “crisis of memory,” but it has also engendered its share
of criticism. Some scholars accuse Nora of presenting a largely mythologized and dematerialized
image of memory, a move that diminishes the technological aspects and institutional, social,
and political organization of remembrance. John Frow, for example, claims that Nora’s theory
“cannot account for the materiality of the signs and the representational forms by which memory
is structured” (1997: 224). Rather than nostalgically lamenting the loss of traditional, unmediated
memory, Frow suggests we must envision new and innovative ways of establishing vital
connections with the past.
Debates over the limits of historical representation and the critical need for remembering past
atrocities extend into another important discussion within memory studies, one that revolves
around the psychoanalytically informed concepts of trauma, testimony, and witnessing. The
work of American comparative literature scholars Cathy Caruth (1995, 1996) and Shoshana
Felman (1992, 2002) has had a strong influence in bringing notions of traumatic memory into
the domain of the humanities. Drawing on their readings of Freud, Caruth and Felman share the
view that an event of trauma is one that is not capable of being fully experienced or assimilated
into consciousness. Instead, the event returns belatedly and involuntarily to the victim in the
fullness, urgency, and literalness of its original form. Caruth writes, “To be traumatized is precisely
to be possessed by an image or event” (1995: 4). Traumatic memories thus operate outside the
bounds of representation, testifying to an event that is historically unknowable and beyond the
narrative scope of language. Felman sees in Claude Lanzmaan’s Holocaust testimony film Shoah
a demonstration of the traumatic event’s resistance to comprehension and incorporation at both a
personal and collective level. She suggests the film enacts “the Holocaust as the event-without-
a-witness, as the traumatic impact of a historically ungraspable primal scene which erases both
witness and its witnessing” (1992: 224, italics in original).5 Caruth and Felman’s scholarship
focuses on the fundamental aporia that exists around historical traumas, making them incapable
of being understood through the methods of official historiography. Other notable thinkers,
including Ruth Leys (2000) and Dominick LaCapra (1994, 2001), take issue with this depiction
of traumatic memory as an unmediated return of the past. Leys insists that traumatic memory
appears in Freud’s writings as something that is “inherently unstable or mutable” (2000: 20)
rather than veridical, while LaCapra criticizes this literary strand of trauma studies for severing
the connection between historical events and the socio/political/ethical responses they demand.
LaCapra suggests that this line of thought unwittingly fosters a melancholic cycle of repetition
and he promotes instead forms of mourning that might break this cycle by encouraging a critical
“working-though” of past traumas (2001: 186).6
The architecture of contemporary memorial and museum design has developed alongside these
theoretical debates, often attempting to answer in material form the challenges and dilemmas
expressed in scholarly discussions. A turn away from archival history and toward forms of cultural
memory has thrown the role of monuments and museums, the physical storehouses of official
history, into question. Suspicions regarding the role of monuments as transmitters of history extend
back considerably further, however, than the most recent wave of memory studies. Since at least
the 1960s, contemporary art has taken on the project of defacing the traditional monumental form,
often through lampooning or deriding its pretensions to grandeur. We may think, for example, of
Robert Smithson’s photo series titled Monuments of Passaic which depicts the modest remnants
of his New Jersey birthplace’s industrial heritage or Claes Oldenburg’s irreverent pop-monuments
of household items—clothespins and garden trowels enlarged to monstrous proportions.7
In post–World War II Germany, addressing the problem of public memory has necessarily
taken a different path; simply doing away with or mocking conventional monuments seems an
inappropriate strategy for a nation struggling to confront its troubling past. A tradition has developed
within Germany of building memorials that seek to efface their own problematic monumentality
while still affirming the need to inscribe the events of history on the landscape. The national
practice of constructing what James E. Young (1992) has termed “counter-monuments” has closely
mirrored academic discussions of traumatic memory. Works such as Jochen Gerz and Esther
Shalev-Gerz’s Monument Against Fascism (1986) in the Hamburg suburb of Harburg and Horst
Hoheisel’s “negative form monument” (1987) in Kassel shift the burden of memory away from the
memorials themselves and toward the communities in which they reside, attempting to foster a
contemporary milieu de mémoire where only silence previously existed. The Harburg Monument
Against Fascism was a twelve-meter high column designed to gradually descend into the ground
as it accumulated signatures on its surface (each one a sign of commitment against fascism). The
monument eventually erased its own presence by disappearing entirely into the earth. Hoheisel
answered a call to restore Kassel’s Aschrott Brunnen monument (a neo-Gothic fountain built as a
gift to the city by a local Jewish entrepreneur and then destroyed by Nazis in 1939) by constructing
a replica of the original fountain in negative form and inserting it, top-down, twelve-meters into the
ground. These artists, and others following in the same tradition, have established a sophisticated
and a subtle aesthetic for representing the nation’s many traumatic absences. The memorials
attempt to acknowledge the impossibility of bearing witness to the atrocities they reference (the
distance of time and Germany’s position as the perpetrator of these acts foreclose this possibility),
while at the same time refusing to disavow the responsibility of remembering. It is a difficult
philosophical and ethical balancing act that few examples from German culture have accomplished
as well as these early counter-monuments.
The scene for an emerging German architecture of memory shifted to Berlin in the late 1990s as
two projects of a much larger scale promised to significantly alter the face of the newly reunified
city. The much-heralded Jewish Museum designed by Daniel Libeskind, a striking jagged form
extending out from the eighteenth-century Prussian courthouse that houses the Berlin Museum
INTRODUCTION 7
of history, was completed in 1999 in the Kreuzberg neighborhood of Berlin. A far cry from Musil’s
invisible monument, the museum’s architecture, with its gleaming metallic surfaces interrupted
by erratic cuts and slashes of glass, became an instant public attraction (even though it would
not be filled with exhibitions for another two years). The same year that Libeskind completed
his Jewish Museum, Peter Eisenman’s design for a Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
was granted final construction approval. After a drawn out and highly contested selection
process that lasted over ten years (the winning design of the first competition was vetoed by
then chancellor Helmut Kohl), Eisenman’s proposal to transform the vacant 4.7 acre plot of land
near the Brandenburg Gate into an undulating field of 2,700 stone pillars was set in motion and
eventually completed in 2005.8
Both of these projects draw from the aesthetic precedent of the counter-monument and the
psychoanalytic vocabulary of trauma studies, while also overtly referencing Jacques Derrida’s self-
reflexive philosophy of deconstruction. The two architects endeavor to convey the ungraspable
and inexpressible nature of the Holocaust and the absences it has left behind, attempting to
represent through material means the fundamental unrepresentability of this traumatic event.
Libeskind named his design for the Jewish Museum “Between the Lines” and envisaged the
project as an architectural dialogue between “two lines of thinking, organization, and relationship.
One is a straight line, but broken into many fragments; the other is a tortuous line, but continuing
indefinitely” (in Young 2000: 164). The irregular lines of the museum form a relationship with a
constellation of sites throughout the city, the architect having mapped out the former residences
of great Jewish composers, philosophers, and poets. The structure itself is cut through with an
empty space signifying the expulsion and absence of the Jewish culture formerly an integral part
of Berlin. Referred to as “the Void,” this spatial interruption creates a series of gaps within the
museum that reflect the broken narrative of Jewish history in the city; these spaces may be seen
by visitors, but are otherwise inaccessible. The museum also contains a twenty-five-meter high
“Holocaust Tower,” a vacant and unheated concrete silo, lit only by the sunlight passing through a
small slit near the ceiling. The tower acts as a spatial metaphor for the horrific enclosures produced
by the Third Reich, the deportation cars and gas chambers that effectively severed the connection
between Jewish and German history.
Visitors to Eisenman’s Jewish Memorial are intended to walk between its rows of blank pillars
in silent contemplation. The memorial, employing a similar visual discourse of vacuity and loss
to Libeskind’s museum, produces an unheimlich or uncanny experience for those that enter its
sacred space (Young 2000: 206).9 Eisenman explains his design in the following way: “It is a field
of pillars that attempts to decontextualize the Holocaust, in the sense of trying to see it as a cut
in the history of Germany. . . . Not to try to locate it, not to try to make it a thing of nostalgia, not
to try and make it able to be rationalized, but to be able to be unrationalized” (2001: R1). With the
realization of these two projects, the aesthetics of absence first developed within the tradition of
German counter-monuments had now assumed national and monumental proportions in Berlin.
These large-scale German memory sites are certainly not impervious to their own share of
criticism. The Berlin Jewish Museum and Jewish Memorial are now destination points on an
expanding circuit of trauma tourism (Lennon and Mitchell 2007) and their techniques for partially or
metaphorically replicating the experience of the Holocaust are viewed by some as sensationalistic
or kitsch. Other commentators contend that processes of memorializing that favor aesthetic
abstraction over historical detail may risk blurring the distinction between the trauma of the
victims and the trauma of the perpetrators (Friedlander 1992). And coming as they do shortly after
German reunification and at the brink of a new century, the memorial and museum also have the
potential to function as receptacles of German guilt, problematically absolving the nation of its
past transgressions and allowing it to move forward unhindered by its difficult history (McKim
2003). Yet despite these cautionary readings, there can be little doubt that the visibility of these
memorial projects has helped generate an important national discussion regarding Germany’s
relationship to its own troubling past. The fact that the country’s memory struggles have so often
been carried out in public through architectural form has made Germany an important reference
for other national efforts to give material presence to past traumas.
Just days after Libeskind’s Jewish Museum was officially opened to the public on September
9, 2001, two planes were flown into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York and
the scene of architecture’s convergence with memory shifted once again. It was not long after
the attacks that the question of how to rebuild first surfaced in the public sphere. The process of
determining an appropriate architectural response to this devastating event would occur while the
trauma it had produced was still raw. The New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp
offered the following explanation for the popular interest in the rebuilding process: “After the
catastrophe of 9/11, who wanted to think about the aesthetics of architecture? Many people, it
turned out. Buildings were the targets of the terrorist attacks. Fantasies of new buildings became
a form of recovery: signs of the city's resilience in the face of unprecedented enemy assault”
(2002). The collapsing of the Twin Towers was broadcast live on countless television screens and
the reconstruction of the World Trade Center would in turn become the world’s most visible urban
redevelopment project (Sagalyn 2005: 23). The scale of the initiative and the fact that it would take
place on American soil, in the center of one of the world’s most recognized cities contributed to the
sense of epic importance surrounding the reconstruction. There is of course a certain obscenity in
comparing an event that resulted in the violent death of 3,000 people to past atrocities that resulted
in the systematic extermination of millions and yet, in the months after September 11, there was
a common impression that the memory scholarship and memorial efforts of the previous decades
had somehow led up to this specific historical moment and architectural challenge. This feeling
of continuity was reinforced by the participation of both Libeskind and Eisenman in the Lower
Manhattan Development Corporation’s official competition for the Ground Zero master plan.10
It would be Libeskind that would eventually capture the spotlight, winning the LMDC competition
and becoming an international celebrity in the process. The architect opens his autobiography
Breaking Ground, published in 2004, by suggesting that “a great building . . . can tell the story of
the human soul” (2004: 4), and during the run up to the LMDC’s decision Libeskind cast himself
in the role of master storyteller, recounting his own experiences as an immigrant arriving in New
York Harbor in 1959 to look in awe at the Statue of Liberty. Rather than simply including a memorial
at the site, his winning “Memory Foundations” design proposed to fashion the entire area into
a place of remembrance, while simultaneously accommodating the need for office space, public
places, and retail stores. The penchant for architectural metaphor Libeskind demonstrated in his
design for the Berlin Jewish Museum was also in evidence in his plan for Ground Zero. The design
featured a glass spire extending 1,776 feet into the air, evoking both the upraised torch of Lady
Liberty and the date of the signing of the US Declaration of Independence. Libeskind named this
reassertion of the New York skyline, “Life Victorious.” Other key components of the plan included
the preservation of the exposed concrete retaining wall of the original foundations that still kept
INTRODUCTION 9
the Hudson River at bay and descended seventy feet down to bedrock. At the public unveiling of
the plan (which took place at the World Financial Center’s Winter Garden across the street from
Ground Zero) Libeskind described it as: “the great slurry wall, the most dramatic element which
survived the attack. . . . The foundations withstood the unimaginable trauma of the destruction and
stand as eloquent as the Constitution itself asserting the durability of democracy and the value of
individual life” (Goldberger 2004: 8). The public spaces included in the master plan possessed such
descriptive titles as the “Park of Heroes” and the “Wedge of Light.” The former was designed
so that each September 11, sunlight would enter the memorial space between 8:46 a.m. and
10:28 a.m., marking the time between the first plane collision and the falling of the second tower.
Libeskind’s proposal was heavily endorsed by then New York state governor George Pataki, who
is considered to have greatly influenced the LMDC’s selection process (Goldberger 2004: 168).
Just as the rural landscape of the Irish Hunger Memorial is an uneasy fit within its new
surroundings, the aesthetics of trauma that Libeskind sought to migrate from Berlin to New York
was not an entirely welcome transplant. Despite its success in the LMDC competition, the project
raised serious doubts as to whether an architecture of remembrance that had to this point been
confined to memorial sites and museum projects could or should be magnified to the level of urban
planning. Would the crystalline structures and exposed foundations of Libeskind’s design preserve
a city committed to change within a perpetual moment of disaster, a melancholic repetition of
9/11 in architectural form? Can a site design founded on traumatic memory also function as a
place to work, to relax, to shop? Some commentators found the metaphoric design elements
of Libeskind’s previous work to be amplified to an unbearable level of kitsch in his Ground Zero
proposal. Techniques and language that felt authentically invested and thoughtfully considered in
his Berlin-based work were now read by many as opportunistic and saccharine. Responding to the
selection of the design in the London Review of Books, Hal Foster remarked, “The real pessimists
glimpse a Trauma Theme Park in the making, with Libeskind a contemporary cross between
Claude Lanzmann and Walt Disney, the perfect maestro for an age when historical tragedy can
become urban spectacle” (2003: 17). The Pataki-inspired decision to rename the 1,776-foot spire,
the “Freedom Tower,” did nothing to alleviate the heavy-handedness of the site’s symbolism and
foreshadowed the project’s susceptibility to being articulated to the jingoism of a nation at war.
Muschamp, who had originally praised the design, now described it as “an aggressive tour de
force, a war memorial to a looming conflict that had scarcely begun” (2003). As the United States
commenced its “Operation Enduring Freedom” in Afghanistan and its military occupation of Iraq,
patriotic calls to remember 9/11 lost any political innocence they might have once possessed.
Libeskind’s design, which had won over New Yorkers by integrating a discourse of mourning
with a celebration of American life, could no longer disavow its connection to global events in
the process of unfolding. UC Davis professor David Simpson saw in the architect’s trademark
“soporific doublets” a certain consistency with the language used to justify these acts of war;
Libeskind’s “Park of Heroes” and “Wedge of Light” occupied a position within the same semantic
chain as such political aphorisms as the “axis of evil” and the “coalition of the willing” (2006: 64).
Libeskind’s Ground Zero proposal was not the only project to raise doubts about the conjunction
of memory and architecture being staged in New York post-9/11. The competition for the National
September 11 Memorial produced hundreds of designs that drew directly from the particular
aesthetics of absence that had developed within the German counter-monument tradition. The
winning proposal by the young architect Michael Arad titled “Reflecting Absence,” a plan to turn the
footprints of the Twin Towers into two voids bordered by walls of cascading water, made this link
quite explicit. There are, however, many important differences between these two contexts, and
grafting elements of a memorial practice addressing the memory of the Holocaust onto Ground
Zero has numerous implications. While the counter-monuments devised by Hoheisel and the
Gerzs attempt to provoke a sense of accountability for the atrocities committed in Germany, the
voids and absences in New York may in fact facilitate a denial of political responsibility. Discourses
of trauma, in other words, have the capacity to instigate either processes of reconciliation or
acts of retribution. Even Huyssen, who had seen such promise in the scholarly and artistic
explorations of the topic, was motivated to write that memory culture in post–9/11 America had
reached an impasse. He states: “The 9/11 memorial debate may be the best example to date of
how memorialization and forgetting can enter into an unholy alliance that betrays both past and
present” (2009: 152).
How then are we to respond to the memory impasse that revealed itself in New York after
September 11? One possible reaction is to turn away from what has become a fraught conceptual
and aesthetic terrain and forego considerations of memory altogether. Numerous proposals for
post–9/11 architectural projects sought to do just this, embracing the future rather than fixating
on the past. The destruction at Ground Zero was viewed by many architects as an opportunity for
innovation, a chance to infuse creativity into a city that had become overly conservative in its vision
of urban planning and design. Yet simply sidestepping the question of memory risks inhibiting
architecture’s ability to critically engage with its own historical and political conditions. As Felicity
D. Scott remarks, the architectural response to rebuilding at Ground Zero “missed an occasion to
problematize the discipline’s imbrication within complex and shifting historical, social, institutional,
and geopolitical contexts” (2003: 76). The avoidance of memory does not change architecture’s
potential complicity with the economic and military forces shaping the post–9/11 world.
Responding to complexity
This book will propose a different response to the complexities of rebuilding in New York. Rather
than dismissing considerations of the past, it will explore the possibility of establishing an alternative
configuration of architecture, memory, and media. Such a project will necessarily entail rethinking
many of the existing theories of trauma and remembrance, but the need to establish a productive
and politically engaged connection to history remains nonetheless. In her essay collection titled
Precarious Life Judith Butler offers one of the most cogent and eloquent acknowledgments of
the double imperative of memory and political action that exists after 9/11. She argues against the
notion that grieving is a private and thus depoliticizing activity, insisting instead that mourning may
involve a recognition of the vulnerability of oneself and others that brings to the fore “the relational
ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility”
(2006: 22). Mourning and memory have the capacity, according to Butler, to foster new forms
of political community and “effect a transformation in our sense of international ties that would
crucially rearticulate the possibility of democratic political culture here and elsewhere” (2006: 40).
By examining a number of architectural projects and media examples, sites and case studies, this
INTRODUCTION 11
book will attempt to highlight the moments and places in New York after September 11 when the
possibility of such forms of political community emerged.
It must be said that significant changes have occurred within memory studies itself over the
past several years and the discipline is attempting to account for the increasing global complexities
of contemporary cultures of remembrance. Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney, for example,
express the need for a conception of “transnational memory” that accounts for the “‘frictions’
caused by the interlocking social fields of the local, the national and the global” (2014: 3). Michael
Rothberg has put forward an influential theory of “productive, intercultural [and] dynamic . . .
multidirectional memory” with “the potential to create new forms of solidarity and new visions of
justice” (2009: 5). Aleida Assman and Ines Detmers have turned from a consideration of memory
to one of empathy, “an overlooked and . . . highly important social resource in a world faced with
the challenges of globalization and the limitations of an endangered eco system” (2016: 21). Amir
Esthel has even attempted to shift scholarly focus from the topic of memory to a concept of
“futurity,” one that is “tied to questions of liability and responsibility, to attentiveness to one’s own
lingering pains and to the sorrows and agonies of others” (2013: 5). While occasionally referencing
these encouraging developments in memory studies, this book will draw primarily from a range
of thinkers that appear less often in existing memory discussions. Many of these philosophers
and theorists are more commonly associated with media theory, political communication, and
digital culture, yet memory often also plays a significant role within their writing. The primary
sources for this examination of architecture, media, and memory include figures such as the
philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the political and media theorist Bernard Stiegler, the philosopher of
science Isabelle Stengers, and the digital theorist Wendy Chun. The assertion of this book is that
the complex intersection of architecture, memory, and media involved in the rebuilding of New
York necessitates an engagement with this more expansive philosophical terrain.
It should also be noted that this book is not a systematic account of the rebuilding of Ground
Zero. Others have done this historical work much thoroughly and effectively than I ever could,
from the early journalistic accounts offered by Paul Goldberger (2004) and Philip Noble (2005)
to the more recent scholarly works of Elizabeth Greenspan (2014) and Lynn B. Sagalyn, whose
800-plus page Power at Ground Zero (2016) is impressively exhaustive in its detail. This book is
instead an attempt to highlight a number of specific sites or situations that provoke particular
philosophical, ethical, or political dilemmas that require consideration. The pages ahead also do
not presume to offer a solution to the complex global political difficulties we currently face, from
the still present threat of terror to an ongoing war against it waged on multiple international fronts.
Rather than put forward an inevitably simplistic political position it more modestly seeks instead to
introduce a (hopefully) productive hesitation in thought and a reorientation of the current grounds
of discussion.
The book begins by examining the small spontaneous memorials that appeared throughout
New York immediately after the attacks and gradually moves up in scale to a consideration of
one of the largest development projects to ever take place in the city, the transformation of the
Fresh Kills landfill (containing the debris from the World Trade Center) into a public park. Chapter
1 of the book thus addresses the sites of remembrance that materialized in New York long before
the formation of official committees and the commencement of authoritative decision-making
processes. Within hours of the Twin Towers collapsing, small memory shrines began appearing
in public spaces throughout the city. These spontaneous memorials—chaotic assemblages of

photographs, flowers, cardboard placards, and small objects—have become familiar sights at
places of tragedy. In New York they were some of the first expressions of grief from a population
still reeling from the shock of the attacks. There has been an ambivalent scholarly reaction to
this popular memory phenomenon. Some critics claim that, in New York and elsewhere, the
memorials present an example of mass mobilization with considerable political importance. Other
scholars are more skeptical about these forms of public outpouring, claiming they are products
of a consumer society in which emotions are channeled through material objects and drained of
their political content.
This chapter considers the merits of these opposing positions by focusing on one spontaneous
memorial site in particular, the brief, but significant gathering that took place in Union Square in
the days following September 11. The Union Square memorial was simultaneously a space for
mourning and one of the first locations where New Yorkers could gather to discuss the likely
political repercussions of the events that had just occurred. As such, it was a remarkable example
of a political community in formation within a site of memory. In order to better understand
the social and material dynamics involved at Union Square, the chapter turns to a number of
philosophical and aesthetic reference points that fall outside of the current scholarship addressing
the spontaneous memorial phenomenon: the artwork of Thomas Hirschhorn (sprawling installations
attempt to harness the social potential of popular memory practices) and the philosophical writing
of Paolo Virno and Bernard Stiegler, both of which attempt to consider how emotions, memory,
and media and communications intermix within our contemporary economic and political climate.
Considered together, the thought of Hirschhorn, Virno, and Stiegler helps us acknowledge the
fragile yet potent political force residing within spontaneous memorials in general and the Union
Square gathering in particular.
Chapter 2 shifts focus from these unsolicited and dispersed sites of remembrance to the official
site of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. The chapter opens with the unveiling of
Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s Reflecting Absence memorial on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 and
begins by questioning current assumptions of what precisely a contemporary memorial such as
this one is intended to be and do. What is its perceived social function? What kinds of activities are
expected to occur there? Can an official memorial be a space for discussion or interaction rather than
simply silent contemplation? The chapter seeks to re-open this critical discussion by turning to the
philosophy of aesthetics, poetics, and language developed by Giorgio Agamben. Agamben reminds
us of the classical Greek association of art to poiesis, a passive act of bringing into being, rather
than praxis, the active expression of the artist’s creative will. Taking this distinction as his starting
point, Agamben suggests the possibility of an art concerned not with transmission of any particular
content, but with the task of transmission or communication itself, the ground, in other words, for
our common belonging in the world. The chapter next discusses the eventual opening of the National
September 11 Museum which introduces a problematic and tightly confined historical narrative to
the more open memorial above ground. It concludes by introducing the ethics of exposure endorsed
by the philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers and offers the example of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s City
of Refuge proposal as an alternative vision of an institution that seeks to bring the presence of the
other connected global conflicts and victims into the space of mourning and remembrance.
Chapter 3 looks more specifically at the interactive design work of Jake Barton and Local Projects,
who were entrusted with media design at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.
INTRODUCTION 13
The intersection of architecture, digital media, and memory is a consistent refrain throughout
Barton’s career, and the chapter looks closely at Local Projects’s pioneering work in interaction design
via three thematic topics and by highlighting a number of different 9/11-related projects produced
by the studio. The first section of the chapter examines the idea of “intimacy and involvement
through mediation,” the notion that digital media technologies may produce a sense of closeness
and togetherness, despite the communities they produce often operating across distance. Next,
the chapter examines the potential of “algorithmic memory”—the specific ways in which forms
of computational logic and information processing are impacting memorial and museum design.
And finally, it discusses Local Projects as a leading example of “digital engagement,” the ways
in which digital media are significantly transforming the surfaces and interfaces of the memory
museum experience. The chapter suggests that the media interventions into the museum space
produced by Local Projects present the possibility of a more promising confrontation with the
complexities of memory, but it also acknowledges that Barton’s overall vision for a collaborative
and even contested engagement with the past is only partially realized at Ground Zero.
Chapter 4 attempts to contend with some of the more troubling intersections of media
and architecture that have emerged in the aftermath of September 11. One of the most vocal
organizations to appear in the aftermath of the attacks in New York is the 9/11 conspiracy or “Truth
Movement,” a loose network of activists united by the belief that information regarding what
really occurred on that day is being withheld from the public. Architecture features prominently
within the movement’s claims. The manner in which the buildings in New York and Washington
were damaged or destroyed is scrutinized, frequently leading to suggestions that 9/11 was an
“inside job.” Cultural studies and critical theorists have exhibited an uneasy position in relation
to this populist movement, often finding grounds for solidarity in its spirit of resistance (despite
its paranoiac tendencies). The chapter questions the shared politics of suspicion that creates a
strange alliance between the 9/11 conspiracy movement and cultural theory. It next introduces
Jacques Rancière’s philosophy of equality in the hopes that it might help shift the grounds of
evaluation from a politics of suspicion to one of democratic appearance and visibility. While finding
the productive grounds of a reformulated democratic politics in Rancière’s thought, the chapter
will conclude by introducing two New York examples that indicate both the promise and possible
limitations of this philosophical perspective: the public intervention into the early architectural
proposals for the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan and the far more troubling protest movement
against the building of a so-called Ground Zero Mosque.
Chapter 5 looks more closely at how the architecture community responded to the call to rebuild
Lower Manhattan, paying particular attention to a faction of designers who stressed structural
innovation and creativity over concerns with the past. A number of proposals in official and
unofficial competitions envisioned the empty sixteen acres in Lower Manhattan as an opportunity
to bring New York to the forefront of digital design and material experimentation. One point of
connection for this diverse group of architects is a shared interest in the writing of Gilles Deleuze,
whose philosophy of movement, vitalism, and the new is often positioned as an antidote for the
contemporary obsession with traumatic memory. This Deleuze-inspired architecture has, however,
been accused of being both ahistorical and apolitical, moving relentlessly toward the future rather
than confronting the problems of the present.
This chapter will resist the temptation to draw a neat dividing line between an architecture of
memory and future-oriented Deleuzian design practices. Despite Deleuze’s clear aversion to the
stultifying and conservative forces of the past, concepts of history and memory actually play an
important role in the philosopher’s thought. A close examination of Deleuze’s idea of repetition
and his engagement with the thinking of such figures as Henri Bergson and Søren Kierkegaard,
reveals a conception of memory within the philosopher’s writing that is at once creative and
politically committed. The chapter concludes by considering how Deleuze’s notion of creative recall
might help in the task of envisioning a rebuilding project at Ground Zero that is both innovative and
historically engaged.
The sixth and final chapter of this book examines an architectural project that is even more
monumental than the reconstruction project in Lower Manhattan. A process is underway to
transform New York’s Fresh Kills landfill, formerly the largest garbage dump in the world, into a
public park and wetlands conservation area. Once receiving over 29,000 tons of New York’s garbage
daily, the landfill’s mounds of waste have been covered over in preparation for the conversion
of the site into a 2,200-acre public park. The ambitious “Lifescape” design by James Corner’s
Field Operations landscape architecture firm is the most prominent example of a recent design
movement that seeks to renew architecture’s engagement with infrastructural concerns and the
life processes of the city. Also drawing inspiration from the philosophy of Deleuze, landscape
urbanism views the change, mutability, and emergent properties of natural and biological systems
as a potential paradigm for architectural practice as a whole. Referencing large-scale, city-altering
projects like the Fresh Kills transformation, proponents of landscape urbanism also suggest the
movement marks architecture’s return from the aesthetic to the political.
Yet the political consequences of the Fresh Kills Lifescape are far from straight forward. The
site’s post–9/11 role as the containment and processing site for the World Trade Center debris
and the implications of the landfill closing for New York’s expanding program of waste exportation
complicate the project’s celebratory narrative of renewal and revitalization. This chapter will seek
to question the political assumptions of both the Lifescape design and the landscape urbanism
movement more broadly. In order to do so, it will draw upon the discussions of protection and
vulnerability that appear in the later texts of Jacques Derrida. The concepts of immunity and
autoimmunity play an increasingly important role in Derrida’s post–9/11 writing and bring the
philosopher into a distinctly biopolitical terrain. Here they serve as guiding terms for thinking
through the complexity of the Fresh Kills conversion and whether or not the project offers the
promise of a landscape immune to its own history of abuse.
Notes
1 The Irish prefer the more accurate term the Great Hunger, acknowledging the role of British
policy, rather than natural causes, in the mass starvation that occurred.
2 Helen Zucker Seeman, a founder of the Battery Park City United residents group, has noted the
dearth of recreational and family-oriented spaces in the neighborhood, commenting, “They’re
taking up every last bit of open land. . . . While everyone’s crying out for open space, we’re
building memorials” (Iovine 2003).
3 The art historian Thomas Stubblefield adds that it is actually the act of photographing the
monument’s destruction, giving it “the kind of spectacular death that only the media can grant,”
that finally provides it visibility (2015: 149).
INTRODUCTION 15
4 In so doing, Nora enters into discussions of collective memory and public ritual that lead back to
the sociological thought of Maurice Halbwachs and Émile Durkheim.
5 Lanzmann himself echoes this sense that the trauma of the Holocaust defies attempts at
interpretation in his one-page manifesto titled “Hier ist kein Waum” (Here There Is No Why), in
which he describes the “absolute obscenity in the very project of understanding” (1995: 204).
6 This is of course only a small sample of the vast number of academic texts dealing with the
subject of memory in recent years. Other important areas of discussion include, but are not
limited to: the importance of intergenerational post-memory (Hirsch 1997), the performative
aspects of memory (Bal et al. 1999), and the continued interest in historical mnemonic systems
inspired by Frances A. Yates’ canonical study The Art of Memory (1966).
7 See Mark Godfrey’s October essay “The Artist as Historian” (2007) for an excellent account of the
role of historical representation in contemporary art.
8 Young’s At Memory’s Edge (2000) provides a thorough account of the lengthy memorial process
initiated by television personality Lea Rosh. Horst Hoheisel’s submission to the same competition
was a very literal interpretation of Taussig’s theory of critical defacement; rather than building
another monument, he proposed the detonation of the Brandenburg Gates.
9 The commonality between the architects has produced some frictions in the past. When
Eisenman first unveiled the design for his memorial, Libeskind complained that it too closely
resembled the memorial garden adjacent to his Jewish Museum (Bernstein 2005).
10 Libeskind was the sole principal involved in his design while Eisenman entered the competition
as a member of the New York “dream team” along with Richard Meier, Steven Holl, and Charles
Gwathmey.
16
1
Mourning and protest:
Spontaneous memorials
at Union Square
W ith their modest scale, the temporary memorials that materialized throughout New York in the
weeks that followed September 11 offered a visual counterpoint to the massive destruction
at Ground Zero. Appearing almost immediately after the attacks, these fragile memorials were
the first additions to New York’s changed topography1 and, as media playback of the collapsing
towers waned, the next iconic images to circulate on television screens and in the pages of
newspapers. In Washington Square and Tompkins Square, at the Brooklyn Heights Promenade
overlooking Lower Manhattan, at the multiple fire stations around the city, gatherings of votive
candles, poems, banners, flowers, and keepsakes formed in similarly chaotic arrangements.
Battered placards reading “We Will Never Forget,” baseball hats, family snapshots of the missing,
and wilting bouquets clinging to metal railings and wired fences became a frequent, yet powerful,
sight around the city.
Perhaps the most prominent of the temporary memorial sites was also one of the shortest
lived. Located just north of the Fourteenth Street police cordon and the closest accessible public
space to the World Trade Center (WTC) site, Union Square became a natural gathering point for
those attempting to locate lost family members, for people in search of information regarding
the still developing state of emergency, and for many who simply wished to be in the presence
of others in the days following the attacks (Kimmelman 2001). Documentation of this brief, but
important occurrence is now distributed across hundreds of amateur photography websites and
Flickr photostreams. In this dispersed digital archive we can still see crowds of people gathered
day and night around the aggregation of candles, flowers, and American flags that spread out
to surround the park’s statuary and lamp poles. Specific objects stand out from the colorful
background of melted wax: a child’s painting of two towers embracing, a rescue worker’s knee
pad, a cardboard sign that reads “Killing More Will Not Honor,” and a pair of shoes still in their box.
These and thousands of other individual contributions combined to transform Union Square into
something unplanned and unrehearsed—a place for grieving, but also a place for discussion and
deliberation over what had just happened and what was likely to occur in response (see Figure 1.1).
The distinctive aesthetics of the memorials that appeared throughout New York in the days
following September 11 make them participants in the larger cultural phenomenon of the
FIGURE 1.1 Union Square Memorial. Donald Lokuta.
spontaneous memorial. Often emerging in the direct aftermath of a tragedy, long before official
memory responses are established, spontaneous memorials mark a need to remember that is
immediate, improvised, and perhaps instinctual. Although increasingly common occurrences at
sites of tragedy, whether small-scale traffic accidents or large-scale disasters, the social and political
significance of these impromptu memorials is a source of some debate among memory scholars,
folklorists, and social historians. From one vantage point, the rituals of mourning are interpreted
as forms of popular political expression and seen as exemplary cases of mass mobilization, a
developing vernacular aesthetic and the unsolicited occupation of public space. From another
perspective they represent a suspicious fusion of media-intensified emotions channeled through
the kitsch materialism of consumer product goods. What then are we to make of these popular
sites of memory and the complex intersection of affect, political communication, and materiality
they embody?
In this chapter I wish to explore the wider ambivalent or mixed reaction to spontaneous
memorials by considering the specific events that unfolded in Union Square after 9/11. The Union
Square memorial was remarkable both in terms of its size—the sight of the square overflowing with
memory objects was a visually arresting one—and in terms of the unusual diversity of messages
and sentiments communicated at the site. It is my contention that the existing interpretations
of temporary memorials, both celebratory and skeptical, fall short of fully explaining the type of
MOURNING AND PROTEST 19
community that took form in the park in the short ten-day period of the memorial’s existence—one
that attended to the immediate and personal need to grieve and gather, but also to the desire to
connect to and acknowledge a wider political context for the events that had just occurred. As this
book will frequently demonstrate, in post–9/11 New York, the imperatives of personal memory
and collective politics are often kept apart or even placed in deliberate conflict. The spontaneous
memorial at Union Square was, I argue, one early example of resistance to this false opposition
between memory and responsible politics.
Before turning to this specific example in New York, the chapter will provide a brief cultural
history of the emerging spontaneous memorial phenomenon in America and Europe and an outline
of the contrasting academic perspectives concerning its social and political implications. With this
context established, the particular history of the Union Square gathering and the manner in which
it complicates some of the critical assumptions about improvised memorials will be considered. I
wish to suggest that voices remaining outside current academic discussions of memorial culture
might offer a different interpretation of this terrain and it is with this hope that the chapter will bring
forward a number of alternative philosophical, political, and aesthetic perspectives. The first is the
work of Thomas Hirschhorn, a contemporary Swiss artist who frequently draws from the popular
aesthetics of public altars and other mass rituals in his sprawling sculptural practice. Hirschhorn’s
art explores the political possibilities that exist at the intersection of material excess and popular
forms of communication. Next I’ll look to two philosophers, Paolo Virno and Bernard Stiegler, who
attempt to contend with the inherently ambivalent emotional and communicative situation of the
contemporary mass populace. Both thinkers highlight the current economic conditions that pattern
and restrict the political forms available to the contemporary multitude, while placing emphasis
on the role of collective memory as a possible site of resistance. Together these examples help
establish another framework for evaluating the underlying affective and political potential of
spontaneous memorials in general and the Union Square memorial in particular.
Cultural history of spontaneous memorials

Like most cultural phenomena, unauthorized public memorials and their particular aesthetics of
impermanence do not spring from a single point of origin. In order to roughly trace the emergence
of the practice, we’re faced with the task of assembling a number of possible sources of influence.
In the United States, the grieving rituals that have developed around Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans
Memorial in Washington, D.C., are one commonly cited visual precedent. Lin’s memorial features
two black granite walls, gradually sinking into the ground and engraved with the names of the
American soldiers who died in the Vietnam War. Immediately following the completion of the
memorial in 1982, visitors began depositing objects beneath the names of specific individuals:
flowers, messages, cards, flags, and possessions belonging to the deceased (Kristin Ann Hass’
Carried to the Wall provides a detailed account of the custom). The minimalist surface of Lin’s
memorial seems to invite the addition of these eclectic and personal contributions. The items
left behind, objects ranging from “bubble gum wrappers [to] wedding rings” (Hass 1998: 22),
are collected by the National Parks Service staff and added to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
Collection (VVMC). These memory objects, common items now made sacred, are preserved in the
Museum and Archaeological Storage facility (MARS) in Lanham, Maryland, where over 250,000
objects (excluding flowers and flags) had been collected by 1993 (Hass 1998: 23).
Similar unplanned collections of mementos and flowers emerged at numerous sites of trauma
in the United States in the 1990s. The security fence surrounding the Alfred P. Murrah Federal
Building, site of the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, became an impromptu memorial wall,
adorned with bouquets of flowers, teddy bears, flags, and posters. Large spontaneous memorials
also emerged at the sites of such violent incidents as the Columbine High School shooting in
Littleton, Colorado, in April of 1999 and the bonfire collapse at a Texas A&M University student rally
in November of the same year (Girder 2006: 254).
In the UK, comparable rituals of public grieving have followed the tragedies of the Hillsborough
soccer stadium disaster in Sheffield in 1989 (Walter 1991) and the Dunblane school massacre
(Jorgensen-Earp and Lanzilotti 1998). The death of Princess Diana in the summer of 1997
brought the phenomenon of the spontaneous memorial to a heightened scale and level of media
exposure (Kear and Steinberg 1999). Within hours of the first reports of the accident, the gates
of Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace were blanketed in floral tributes, photographs, and
trinkets. By the end of the public outpouring, 10,000–15,000 tons of flowers had been removed
from the various royal sites (Greenhalgh 42). The Liberty Torch monument at the Place de l’Alma,
nearby the accident site in Paris, was also refashioned into a surrogate Diana memorial and yet
another place for the depositing of flowers and keepsakes.
An additional chain of influence connects American spontaneous memorial practices to Roman
Catholic, particularly Latin American, traditions and rituals for the public commemoration of death.
Holly Everett, for example, traces the custom of placing roadside crosses or altars at the site of
traffic deaths in the Southwest to the long-standing Mexican cultural traditions in these states.
She points to the Catholic Descansos (resting places for the souls of travelers who died en
route) that peppered the region as far back as the 1700s (2002: 27). Regina Marchi considers the
contemporary rituals of El Dia de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead) in America as a form of recurring
spontaneous memorial. And Celeste Olalquiaga, comments on the process of “Latinization” of
the United States in the 1980s and charts the influx of Catholic religious trinkets in New York’s
Fourteenth Street markets, the interest in Latin American altares (home altars) within the New
York City art scene and the prevalence of Latino Catholic iconography in the club culture of the
period (1992). Spontaneous memorials, particularly in Latino-influenced cities, such as New York,
are perhaps a translation of these aesthetic sensibilities and cultural practices into the modes of
expression employed by the general public.
Many of the scholars who have sought to understand this developing phenomenon detect
a clear form of social engagement and even political expression within these rituals of public
mourning. Jack Santino, whose principle objects of study are the “spontaneous shrines” of
Northern Ireland, suggests that the memorials have both a commemorative and a “performative”
quality, adapting J. L. Austin’s linguistic theory of “performative utterances” to the materiality
of these popular memory practices. While Austin used the designation to refer to statements
that cause the effect they declare (the marriage pronouncement “I do” being a prime example),
Santino extends the meaning of the term “to events that attempt to cause social change” (2006:
9). He suggests that every memorial, however modest, possesses a degree of this performative
quality in that it brings a specific issue into the public realm through the insistence of its very
presence. This is certainly true of the shrines marking the sites of sectarian killings in Northern
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for fear to make an enemy. But, on the other hand, it was
complained that he was bitter and harsh, that his zeal burned with
too hot a flame. It is so difficult, in evil times, to escape this charge!
for the faithful preacher most of all. It was his merit, like Luther, Knox
and Latimer, and John Baptist, to speak tart truth, when that was
peremptory and when there were few to say it. But his sympathy for
goodness was not less energetic. One fault he had, he
overestimated his friends,—I may well say it,—and sometimes vexed
them with the importunity of his good opinion, whilst they knew better
the ebb which follows unfounded praise. He was capable, it must be
said, of the most unmeasured eulogies on those he esteemed,
especially if he had any jealousy that they did not stand with the
Boston public as highly as they ought. His commanding merit as a
reformer is this, that he insisted beyond all men in pulpits—I cannot
think of one rival—that the essence of Christianity is its practical
morals; it is there for use, or it is nothing; and if you combine it with
sharp trading, or with ordinary city ambitions to gloze over municipal
corruptions, or private intemperance, or successful fraud, or immoral
politics, or unjust wars, or the cheating of Indians, or the robbery of
frontier nations, or leaving your principles at home to follow on the
high seas or in Europe a supple complaisance to tyrants,—it is a
hypocrisy, and the truth is not in you; and no love of religious music
or of dreams of Swedenborg, or praise of John Wesley, or of Jeremy
Taylor, can save you from the Satan which you are.
His ministry fell on a political crisis also; on the years when
Southern slavery broke over its old banks, made new and vast
pretensions, and wrung from the weakness or treachery of Northern
people fatal concessions in the Fugitive Slave Bill and the repeal of
the Missouri Compromise. Two days, bitter in the memory of Boston,
the days of the rendition of Sims and of Burns, made the occasion of
his most remarkable discourses. He kept nothing back. In terrible
earnest he denounced the public crime, and meted out to every
official, high and low, his due portion.[159] By the incessant power of
his statement, he made and held a party. It was his great service to
freedom. He took away the reproach of silent consent that would
otherwise have lain against the indignant minority, by uttering in the
hour and place wherein these outrages were done, the stern protest.
But whilst I praise this frank speaker, I have no wish to accuse the
silence of others. There are men of good powers who have so much
sympathy that they must be silent when they are not in sympathy. If
you don’t agree with them, they know they only injure the truth by
speaking. Their faculties will not play them true, and they do not wish
to squeak and gibber, and so they shut their mouths. I can readily
forgive this, only not the other, the false tongue which makes the
worse appear the better cause. There were, of course, multitudes to
censure and defame this truth-speaker. But the brave know the
brave. Fops, whether in hotels or churches, will utter the fop’s
opinion, and faintly hope for the salvation of his soul; but his manly
enemies, who despised the fops, honored him; and it is well known
that his great hospitable heart was the sanctuary to which every soul
conscious of an earnest opinion came for sympathy—alike the brave
slave-holder and the brave slave-rescuer. These met in the house of
this honest man—for every sound heart loves a responsible person,
one who does not in generous company say generous things, and in
mean company base things, but says one thing, now cheerfully, now
indignantly, but always because he must, and because he sees that,
whether he speak or refrain from speech, this is said over him; and
history, nature and all souls testify to the same.
Ah, my brave brother! it seems as if, in a frivolous age, our loss
were immense, and your place cannot be supplied. But you will
already be consoled in the transfer of your genius, knowing well that
the nature of the world will affirm to all men, in all times, that which
for twenty-five years you valiantly spoke; that the winds of Italy
murmur the same truth over your grave; the winds of America over
these bereaved streets; that the sea which bore your mourners
home affirms it, the stars in their courses, and the inspirations of
youth; whilst the polished and pleasant traitors to human rights, with
perverted learning and disgraced graces, rot and are forgotten with
their double tongue saying all that is sordid for the corruption of man.
The sudden and singular eminence of Mr. Parker, the importance
of his name and influence, are the verdict of his country to his
virtues. We have few such men to lose; amiable and blameless at
home, feared abroad as the standard-bearer of liberty, taking all the
duties he could grasp, and more, refusing to spare himself, he has
gone down in early glory to his grave, to be a living and enlarging
power, wherever learning, wit, honest valor and independence are
honored.[160]
XIII
AMERICAN CIVILIZATION
To the mizzen, the main, and the fore

Up with it once more!—
The old tri-color,
The ribbon of power,
The white, blue and red which the nations adore!
It was down at half-mast
For a grief—that is past!
To the emblem of glory no sorrow can last!
AMERICAN CIVILIZATION
Use, labor of each for all, is the health and virtue of all beings. Ich
dien, I serve, is a truly royal motto. And it is the mark of nobleness to
volunteer the lowest service, the greatest spirit only attaining to
humility. Nay, God is God because he is the servant of all. Well, now
here comes this conspiracy of slavery,—they call it an institution, I
call it a destitution,—this stealing of men and setting them to work,
stealing their labor, and the thief sitting idle himself; and for two or
three ages it has lasted, and has yielded a certain quantity of rice,
cotton and sugar. And, standing on this doleful experience, these
people have endeavored to reverse the natural sentiments of
mankind, and to pronounce labor disgraceful, and the well-being of a
man to consist in eating the fruit of other men’s labor. Labor: a man
coins himself into his labor; turns his day, his strength, his thought,
his affection into some product which remains as the visible sign of
his power; and to protect that, to secure that to him, to secure his
past self to his future self, is the object of all government. There is no
interest in any country so imperative as that of labor; it covers all,
and constitutions and governments exist for that,—to protect and
insure it to the laborer. All honest men are daily striving to earn their
bread by their industry. And who is this who tosses his empty head
at this blessing in disguise, the constitution of human nature, and
calls labor vile, and insults the faithful workman at his daily toil? I see
for such madness no hellebore,—for such calamity no solution but
servile war and the Africanization of the country that permits it.
At this moment in America the aspects of political society absorb
attention. In every house, from Canada to the Gulf, the children ask
the serious father,—“What is the news of the war to-day, and when
will there be better times?” The boys have no new clothes, no gifts,
no journeys; the girls must go without new bonnets; boys and girls
find their education, this year, less liberal and complete.[161] All the
little hopes that heretofore made the year pleasant are deferred. The
state of the country fills us with anxiety and stern duties. We have
attempted to hold together two states of civilization: a higher state,
where labor and the tenure of land and the right of suffrage are
democratical; and a lower state, in which the old military tenure of
prisoners or slaves, and of power and land in a few hands, makes an
oligarchy: we have attempted to hold these two states of society
under one law. But the rude and early state of society does not work
well with the later, nay, works badly, and has poisoned politics, public
morals and social intercourse in the Republic, now for many years.
The times put this question, Why cannot the best civilization be
extended over the whole country, since the disorder of the less-
civilized portion menaces the existence of the country? Is this
secular progress we have described, this evolution of man to the
highest powers, only to give him sensibility, and not to bring duties
with it? Is he not to make his knowledge practical? to stand and to
withstand? Is not civilization heroic also? Is it not for action? has it
not a will? “There are periods,” said Niebuhr, “when something much
better than happiness and security of life is attainable.” We live in a
new and exceptionable age. America is another word for
Opportunity. Our whole history appears like a last effort of the Divine
Providence in behalf of the human race; and a literal, slavish
following of precedents, as by a justice of the peace, is not for those
who at this hour lead the destinies of this people. The evil you
contend with has taken alarming proportions, and you still content
yourself with parrying the blows it aims, but, as if enchanted, abstain
from striking at the cause.[162]
If the American people hesitate, it is not for want of warning or
advices. The telegraph has been swift enough to announce our
disasters. The journals have not suppressed the extent of the
calamity. Neither was there any want of argument or of experience. If
the war brought any surprise to the North, it was not the fault of
sentinels on the watch-tower, who had furnished full details of the
designs, the muster and the means of the enemy. Neither was
anything concealed of the theory or practice of slavery. To what
purpose make more big books of these statistics? There are already
mountains of facts, if any one wants them. But people do not want
them. They bring their opinion into the world. If they have a
comatose tendency in the brain, they are pro-slavery while they live;
if of a nervous sanguineous temperament, they are abolitionists.
Then interests were never persuaded. Can you convince the shoe
interest, or the iron interest, or the cotton interest, by reading
passages from Milton or Montesquieu? You wish to satisfy people
that slavery is bad economy. Why, the Edinburgh Review pounded
on that string, and made out its case, forty years ago. A democratic
statesman said to me, long since, that, if he owned the state of
Kentucky, he would manumit all the slaves, and be a gainer by the
transaction. Is this new? No, everybody knows it. As a general
economy it is admitted. But there is no one owner of the state, but a
good many small owners. One man owns land and slaves; another
owns slaves only. Here is a woman who has no other property,—like
a lady in Charleston I knew of, who owned fifteen sweeps and rode
in her carriage. It is clearly a vast inconvenience to each of these to
make any change, and they are fretful and talkative, and all their
friends are; and those less interested are inert, and, from want of
thought, averse to innovation. It is like free trade, certainly the
interest of nations, but by no means the interest of certain towns and
districts, which tariff feeds fat; and the eager interest of the few
overpowers the apathetic general conviction of the many. Banknotes
rob the public, but are such a daily convenience that we silence our
scruples and make believe they are gold. So imposts are the cheap
and right taxation; but, by the dislike of people to pay out a direct tax,
governments are forced to render life costly by making them pay
twice as much, hidden in the price of tea and sugar.
In this national crisis, it is not argument that we want, but that rare
courage which dares commit itself to a principle, believing that
Nature is its ally, and will create the instruments it requires, and more
than make good any petty and injurious profit which it may disturb.
There never was such a combination as this of ours, and the rules to
meet it are not set down in any history. We want men of original
perception and original action, who can open their eyes wider than to
a nationality, namely, to considerations of benefit to the human race,
can act in the interest of civilization. Government must not be a
parish clerk, a justice of the peace. It has, of necessity, in any crisis
of the state, the absolute powers of a dictator. The existing
administration is entitled to the utmost candor. It is to be thanked for
its angelic virtue, compared with any executive experiences with
which we have been familiar. But the times will not allow us to
indulge in compliment. I wish I saw in the people that inspiration
which, if government would not obey the same, would leave the
government behind and create on the moment the means and
executors it wanted. Better the war should more dangerously
threaten us,—should threaten fracture in what is still whole, and
punish us with burned capitals and slaughtered regiments, and so
exasperate the people to energy, exasperate our nationality. There
are Scriptures written invisibly on men’s hearts, whose letters do not
come out until they are enraged. They can be read by war-fires, and
by eyes in the last peril.
We cannot but remember that there have been days in American
history, when, if the free states had done their duty, slavery had been
blocked by an immovable barrier, and our recent calamities forever
precluded. The free states yielded, and every compromise was
surrender and invited new demands. Here again is a new occasion
which heaven offers to sense and virtue. It looks as if we held the
fate of the fairest possession of mankind in our hands, to be saved
by our firmness or to be lost by hesitation.
The one power that has legs long enough and strong enough to
wade across the Potomac offers itself at this hour; the one strong
enough to bring all the civility up to the height of that which is best,
prays now at the door of Congress for leave to move. Emancipation
is the demand of civilization. That is a principle; everything else is an
intrigue. This is a progressive policy, puts the whole people in
healthy, productive, amiable position, puts every man in the South in
just and natural relations with every man in the North, laborer with
laborer.
I shall not attempt to unfold the details of the project of
emancipation. It has been stated with great ability by several of its
leading advocates. I will only advert to some leading points of the
argument, at the risk of repeating the reasons of others. The war is
welcome to the Southerner; a chivalrous sport to him, like hunting,
and suits his semi-civilized condition. On the climbing scale of
progress, he is just up to war, and has never appeared to such
advantage as in the last twelvemonth. It does not suit us. We are
advanced some ages on the war-state,—to trade, art and general
cultivation. His laborer works for him at home, so that he loses no
labor by the war. All our soldiers are laborers; so that the South, with
its inferior numbers, is almost on a footing in effective war-population
with the North. Again, as long as we fight without any affirmative step
taken by the government, any word intimating forfeiture in the rebel
states of their old privileges under the law, they and we fight on the
same side, for slavery. Again, if we conquer the enemy,—what then?
We shall still have to keep him under, and it will cost as much to hold
him down as it did to get him down. Then comes the summer, and
the fever will drive the soldiers home; next winter we must begin at
the beginning, and conquer him over again. What use then to take a
fort, or a privateer, or get possession of an inlet, or to capture a
regiment of rebels?
But one weapon we hold which is sure. Congress can, by edict, as
a part of the military defence which it is the duty of Congress to
provide, abolish slavery, and pay for such slaves as we ought to pay
for. Then the slaves near our armies will come to us; those in the
interior will know in a week what their rights are, and will, where
opportunity offers, prepare to take them. Instantly, the armies that
now confront you must run home to protect their estates, and must
stay there, and your enemies will disappear.
There can be no safety until this step is taken. We fancy that the
endless debate, emphasized by the crime and by the cannons of this
war, has brought the free states to some conviction that it can never
go well with us whilst this mischief of slavery remains in our politics,
and that by concert or by might we must put an end to it. But we
have too much experience of the futility of an easy reliance on the
momentary good dispositions of the public. There does exist,
perhaps, a popular will that the Union shall not be broken,—that our
trade, and therefore our laws, must have the whole breadth of the
continent, and from Canada to the Gulf. But since this is the rooted
belief and will of the people, so much the more are they in danger,
when impatient of defeats, or impatient of taxes, to go with a rush for
some peace; and what kind of peace shall at that moment be easiest
attained, they will make concessions for it,—will give up the slaves,
and the whole torment of the past half-century will come back to be
endured anew.
Neither do I doubt, if such a composition should take place, that
the Southerners will come back quietly and politely, leaving their
haughty dictation. It will be an era of good feelings. There will be a
lull after so loud a storm; and, no doubt, there will be discreet men
from that section who will earnestly strive to inaugurate more
moderate and fair administration of the government, and the North
will for a time have its full share and more, in place and counsel. But
this will not last;—not for want of sincere good will in sensible
Southerners, but because Slavery will again speak through them its
harsh necessity. It cannot live but by injustice, and it will be unjust
and violent to the end of the world.[163]
The power of Emancipation is this, that it alters the atomic social
constitution of the Southern people. Now, their interest is in keeping
out white labor; then, when they must pay wages, their interest will
be to let it in, to get the best labor, and, if they fear their blacks, to
invite Irish, German and American laborers. Thus, whilst Slavery
makes and keeps disunion, Emancipation removes the whole
objection to union. Emancipation at one stroke elevates the poor-
white of the South, and identifies his interest with that of the Northern
laborer.
Now, in the name of all that is simple and generous, why should
not this great right be done? Why should not America be capable of
a second stroke for the well-being of the human race, as eighty or
ninety years ago she was for the first,—of an affirmative step in the
interests of human civility, urged on her, too, not by any romance of
sentiment, but by her own extreme perils? It is very certain that the
statesman who shall break through the cobwebs of doubt, fear and
petty cavil that lie in the way, will be greeted by the unanimous
thanks of mankind. Men reconcile themselves very fast to a bold and
good measure when once it is taken, though they condemned it in
advance. A week before the two captive commissioners were
surrendered to England, every one thought it could not be done: it
would divide the North. It was done, and in two days all agreed it
was the right action.[164] And this action, which costs so little (the
parties injured by it being such a handful that they can very easily be
indemnified), rids the world, at one stroke, of this degrading
nuisance, the cause of war and ruin to nations. This measure at
once puts all parties right. This is borrowing, as I said, the
omnipotence of a principle. What is so foolish as the terror lest the
blacks should be made furious by freedom and wages? It is denying
these that is the outrage, and makes the danger from the blacks. But
justice satisfies everybody,—white man, red man, yellow man and
black man. All like wages, and the appetite grows by feeding.
But this measure, to be effectual, must come speedily. The
weapon is slipping out of our hands. “Time,” say the Indian
Scriptures, “drinketh up the essence of every great and noble action
which ought to be performed, and which is delayed in the
execution.”[165]
I hope it is not a fatal objection to this policy that it is simple and
beneficent thoroughly, which is the tribute of a moral action. An
unprecedented material prosperity has not tended to make us Stoics
or Christians. But the laws by which the universe is organized
reappear at every point, and will rule it. The end of all political
struggle is to establish morality as the basis of all legislation. It is not
free institutions, it is not a republic, it is not a democracy, that is the
end,—no, but only the means. Morality is the object of government.
[166] We want a state of things in which crime shall not pay. This is
the consolation on which we rest in the darkness of the future and
the afflictions of to-day, that the government of the world is moral,
and does forever destroy what is not. It is the maxim of natural
philosophers that the natural forces wear out in time all obstacles,
and take place: and it is the maxim of history that victory always falls
at last where it ought to fall; or, there is perpetual march and
progress to ideas. But in either case, no link of the chain can drop
out. Nature works through her appointed elements; and ideas must
work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or
they are no better than dreams.
Since the above pages were written, President Lincoln has

proposed to Congress that the government shall coöperate with any
state that shall enact a gradual abolishment of slavery. In the recent
series of national successes, this message is the best. It marks the
happiest day in the political year. The American Executive ranges
itself for the first time on the side of freedom. If Congress has been
backward, the President has advanced. This state-paper is the more
interesting that it appears to be the President’s individual act, done
under a strong sense of duty. He speaks his own thought in his own
style. All thanks and honor to the Head of the State! The message
has been received throughout the country with praise, and, we doubt
not, with more pleasure than has been spoken. If Congress accords
with the President, it is not yet too late to begin the emancipation; but
we think it will always be too late to make it gradual. All experience
agrees that it should be immediate.[167] More and better than the
President has spoken shall, perhaps, the effect of this message be,
—but, we are sure, not more or better than he hoped in his heart,
when, thoughtful of all the complexities of his position, he penned
these cautious words.
XIV
THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION
AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN BOSTON IN

SEPTEMBER, 1862
To-day unbind the captive,

So only are ye unbound;
Lift up a people from the dust,
Trump of their rescue, sound!
Pay ransom to the owner

And fill the bag to the brim.
Who is the owner? The slave is owner,
And ever was. Pay him.
O North! give him beauty for rags,

And honor, O South! for his shame;
Nevada! coin thy golden crags
With freedom’s image and name.
Up! and the dusky race

That sat in darkness long,—
Be swift their feet as antelopes,
And as behemoth strong.
Come, East and West and North,

By races, as snow-flakes,
And carry my purpose forth,
Which neither halts nor shakes.
My will fulfilled shall be,

For in daylight or in dark,
My thunderbolt has eyes to see
His way home to the mark.
THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION

In so many arid forms which states encrust themselves with, once
in a century, if so often, a poetic act and record occur. These are the
jets of thought into affairs, when, roused by danger or inspired by
genius, the political leaders of the day break the else insurmountable
routine of class and local legislation, and take a step forward in the
direction of catholic and universal interests. Every step in the history
of political liberty is a sally of the human mind into the untried Future,
and has the interest of genius, and is fruitful in heroic anecdotes.
Liberty is a slow fruit. It comes, like religion, for short periods, and in
rare conditions, as if awaiting a culture of the race which shall make
it organic and permanent. Such moments of expansion in modern
history were the Confession of Augsburg, the plantation of America,
the English Commonwealth of 1648, the Declaration of American
Independence in 1776, the British emancipation of slaves in the
West Indies, the passage of the Reform Bill, the repeal of the Corn-
Laws, the Magnetic Ocean Telegraph, though yet imperfect, the
passage of the Homestead Bill in the last Congress, and now,
eminently, President Lincoln’s Proclamation on the twenty-second of
September. These are acts of great scope, working on a long future
and on permanent interests, and honoring alike those who initiate
and those who receive them. These measures provoke no noisy joy,
but are received into a sympathy so deep as to apprise us that
mankind are greater and better than we know.[168] At such times it
appears as if a new public were created to greet the new event. It is
as when an orator, having ended the compliments and pleasantries
with which he conciliated attention, and having run over the
superficial fitness and commodities of the measure he urges,
suddenly, lending himself to some happy inspiration, announces with
vibrating voice the grand human principles involved;—the bravos
and wits who greeted him loudly thus far are surprised and
overawed; a new audience is found in the heart of the assembly,—
an audience hitherto passive and unconcerned, now at last so
searched and kindled that they come forward, every one a
representative of mankind, standing for all nationalities.
The extreme moderation with which the President advanced to his
design,—his long-avowed expectant policy, as if he chose to be
strictly the executive of the best public sentiment of the country,
waiting only till it should be unmistakably pronounced,—so fair a
mind that none ever listened so patiently to such extreme varieties of
opinion,—so reticent that his decision has taken all parties by
surprise, whilst yet it is just the sequel of his prior acts,—the firm
tone in which he announces it, without inflation or surplusage,—all
these have bespoken such favor to the act that, great as the
popularity of the President has been, we are beginning to think that
we have underestimated the capacity and virtue which the Divine
Providence has made an instrument of benefit so vast. He has been
permitted to do more for America than any other American man. He
is well entitled to the most indulgent construction. Forget all that we
thought shortcomings, every mistake, every delay. In the extreme
embarrassments of his part, call these endurance, wisdom,
magnanimity; illuminated, as they now are, by this dazzling success.
When we consider the immense opposition that has been
neutralized or converted by the progress of the war (for it is not long
since the President anticipated the resignation of a large number of
officers in the army, and the secession of three states, on the
promulgation of this policy),—when we see how the great stake
which foreign nations hold in our affairs has recently brought every
European power as a client into this court, and it became every day
more apparent what gigantic and what remote interests were to be
affected by the decision of the President,—one can hardly say the
deliberation was too long. Against all timorous counsels he had the
courage to seize the moment; and such was his position, and such
the felicity attending the action, that he has replaced government in
the good graces of mankind. “Better is virtue in the sovereign than
plenty in the season,” say the Chinese. ’Tis wonderful what power is,
and how ill it is used, and how its ill use makes life mean, and the
sunshine dark. Life in America had lost much of its attraction in the
later years. The virtues of a good magistrate undo a world of
mischief, and, because Nature works with rectitude, seem vastly
more potent than the acts of bad governors, which are ever
tempered by the good nature in the people, and the incessant
resistance which fraud and violence encounter. The acts of good
governors work a geometrical ratio, as one midsummer day seems
to repair the damage of a year of war.
A day which most of us dared not hope to see, an event worth the
dreadful war, worth its costs and uncertainties, seems now to be
close before us. October, November, December will have passed
over beating hearts and plotting brains: then the hour will strike, and
all men of African descent who have faculty enough to find their way
to our lines are assured of the protection of American law.
It is by no means necessary that this measure should be suddenly
marked by any signal results on the negroes or on the rebel masters.
The force of the act is that it commits the country to this justice,—
that it compels the innumerable officers, civil, military, naval, of the
Republic to range themselves on the line of this equity. It draws the
fashion to this side. It is not a measure that admits of being taken
back. Done, it cannot be undone by a new administration. For
slavery overpowers the disgust of the moral sentiment only through
immemorial usage. It cannot be introduced as an improvement of the
nineteenth century. This act makes that the lives of our heroes have
not been sacrificed in vain. It makes a victory of our defeats. Our
hurts are healed; the health of the nation is repaired. With a victory
like this, we can stand many disasters. It does not promise the
redemption of the black race; that lies not with us: but it relieves it of
our opposition. The President by this act has paroled all the slaves in
America; they will no more fight against us: and it relieves our race
once for all of its crime and false position. The first condition of
success is secured in putting ourselves right. We have recovered
ourselves from our false position, and planted ourselves on a law of
Nature:—
“If that fail,
The pillared firmament is rottenness,
And earth’s base built on stubble.”[169]
The government has assured itself of the best constituency in the

world: every spark of intellect, every virtuous feeling, every religious
heart, every man of honor, every poet, every philosopher, the
generosity of the cities, the health of the country, the strong arms of
the mechanic, the endurance of farmers, the passionate conscience
of women, the sympathy of distant nations,—all rally to its support.
Of course, we are assuming the firmness of the policy thus
declared. It must not be a paper proclamation. We confide that Mr.
Lincoln is in earnest, and as he has been slow in making up his
mind, has resisted the importunacy of parties and of events to the
latest moment, he will be as absolute in his adhesion. Not only will
he repeat and follow up his stroke, but the nation will add its
irresistible strength. If the ruler has duties, so has the citizen. In
times like these, when the nation is imperilled, what man can,
without shame, receive good news from day to day without giving
good news of himself? What right has any one to read in the journals
tidings of victories, if he has not bought them by his own valor,
treasure, personal sacrifice, or by service as good in his own
department? With this blot removed from our national honor, this
heavy load lifted off the national heart, we shall not fear
henceforward to show our faces among mankind. We shall cease to
be hypocrites and pretenders, but what we have styled our free
institutions will be such.[170]
In the light of this event the public distress begins to be removed.
What if the brokers’ quotations show our stocks discredited, and the
gold dollar costs one hundred and twenty-seven cents? These tables
are fallacious. Every acre in the free states gained substantial value
on the twenty-second of September. The cause of disunion and war
has been reached and begun to be removed. Every man’s house-lot
and garden are relieved of the malaria which the purest winds and
strongest sunshine could not penetrate and purge. The territory of
the Union shines to-day with a lustre which every European emigrant
can discern from far; a sign of inmost security and permanence. Is it
feared that taxes will check immigration? That depends on what the
taxes are spent for. If they go to fill up this yawning Dismal Swamp,
which engulfed armies and populations, and created plague, and
neutralized hitherto all the vast capabilities of this continent,—then
this taxation, which makes the land wholesome and habitable, and
will draw all men unto it, is the best investment in which property-
holder ever lodged his earnings.
Whilst we have pointed out the opportuneness of the
Proclamation, it remains to be said that the President had no choice.
He might look wistfully for what variety of courses lay open to him;
every line but one was closed up with fire. This one, too, bristled with
danger, but through it was the sole safety. The measure he has
adopted was imperative. It is wonderful to see the unseasonable
senility of what is called the Peace Party, through all its masks,
blinding their eyes to the main feature of the war, namely, its
inevitableness. The war existed long before the cannonade of
Sumter, and could not be postponed. It might have begun otherwise
or elsewhere, but war was in the minds and bones of the
combatants, it was written on the iron leaf, and you might as easily
dodge gravitation. If we had consented to a peaceable secession of
the rebels, the divided sentiment of the border states made
peaceable secession impossible, the insatiable temper of the South
made it impossible, and the slaves on the border, wherever the
border might be, were an incessant fuel to rekindle the fire. Give the
Confederacy New Orleans, Charleston, and Richmond, and they
would have demanded St. Louis and Baltimore. Give them these,
and they would have insisted on Washington. Give them
Washington, and they would have assumed the army and navy, and,
through these, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. It looks as if the
battle-field would have been at least as large in that event as it is
now. The war was formidable, but could not be avoided. The war
was and is an immense mischief, but brought with it the immense
benefit of drawing a line and rallying the free states to fix it
impassably,—preventing the whole force of Southern connection and
influence throughout the North from distracting every city with
endless confusion, detaching that force and reducing it to handfuls,
and, in the progress of hostilities, disinfecting us of our habitual
proclivity, through the affection of trade and the traditions of the
Democratic party, to follow Southern leading.[171]
These necessities which have dictated the conduct of the federal
government are overlooked especially by our foreign critics. The
popular statement of the opponents of the war abroad is the
impossibility of our success. “If you could add,” say they, “to your
strength the whole army of England, of France and of Austria, you
could not coerce eight millions of people to come under this
government against their will.” This is an odd thing for an
Englishman, a Frenchman or an Austrian to say, who remembers
Europe of the last seventy years,—the condition of Italy, until 1859,
—of Poland, since 1793,—of France, of French Algiers,—of British
Ireland, and British India. But granting the truth, rightly read, of the
historical aphorism, that “the people always conquer,” it is to be
noted that, in the Southern States, the tenure of land and the local
laws, with slavery, give the social system not a democratic but an
aristocratic complexion; and those states have shown every year a
more hostile and aggressive temper, until the instinct of self-
preservation forced us into the war. And the aim of the war on our
part is indicated by the aim of the President’s Proclamation, namely,
to break up the false combination of Southern society, to destroy the
piratic feature in it which makes it our enemy only as it is the enemy
of the human race, and so allow its reconstruction on a just and
healthful basis. Then new affinities will act, the old repulsion will
cease, and, the cause of war being removed, Nature and trade may
be trusted to establish a lasting peace.
We think we cannot overstate the wisdom and benefit of this act of
the government. The malignant cry of the Secession press within the
free states, and the recent action of the Confederate Congress, are
decisive as to its efficiency and correctness of aim. Not less so is the
silent joy which has greeted it in all generous hearts, and the new
hope it has breathed into the world. It was well to delay the steamers
at the wharves until this edict could be put on board. It will be an
insurance to the ship as it goes plunging through the sea with glad
tidings to all people. Happy are the young, who find the pestilence
cleansed out of the earth, leaving open to them an honest career.
Happy the old, who see Nature purified before they depart. Do not let
the dying die: hold them back to this world, until you have charged
their ear and heart with this message to other spiritual societies,
announcing the melioration of our planet:—
“Incertainties now crown themselves assured,

And Peace proclaims olives of endless age.”[172]
Meantime that ill-fated, much-injured race which the Proclamation

respects will lose somewhat of the dejection sculptured for ages in
their bronzed countenance, uttered in the wailing of their plaintive
music,—a race naturally benevolent, docile, industrious, and whose
very miseries sprang from their great talent for usefulness, which, in
a more moral age, will not only defend their independence, but will
give them a rank among nations.[173]

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Textbook Architecture Media and Memory Facing Complexity in Post 9 11 New York Joel Mckim Ebook All Chapter PDF

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Architecture Media and Memory Facing

Complexity in Post 9 11 New York Joel

Memory and Monument Wars in American Cities New York

Where Truth Lies Digital Culture And Documentary Media

Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age Survivorsa Stories

Poetry Architecture and the New York School Something

Complexity Heterogeneity and the Methods of Statistical

What Remains: The Post-Holocaust Archive In German

New York City 4th Edition Coll.

Complexity in Chemistry and Beyond Interplay Theory and

First published in Great Britain 2019

Copyright © Joel McKim, 2019

Cover design: Eleanor Rose

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-3766-3

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Figure 1.1 Union Square Memorial. Donald Lokuta 18

A short history of contemporary memory

in public spaces throughout the city. These spontaneous memorials—chaotic assemblages of

FIGURE 1.1 Union Square Memorial. Donald Lokuta.

Cultural history of spontaneous memorials

To the mizzen, the main, and the fore

Since the above pages were written, President Lincoln has

AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN BOSTON IN

To-day unbind the captive,

Pay ransom to the owner

O North! give him beauty for rags,

Up! and the dusky race

Come, East and West and North,

My will fulfilled shall be,

THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION

The government has assured itself of the best constituency in the

“Incertainties now crown themselves assured,

Meantime that ill-fated, much-injured race which the Proclamation

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