Cuantos Obeliscos Portables? Mas, Por Favor!

Have Mexican artists ever met an obelisk they didn't want to make portable and drive to New York? Obelisco Transportable, 2004, Damian Ortega, on view with the Public Art Fund, thru 10/28 [image: Ortega's gallery, kurimanzutto]: Portable Broken Obelisk (for...
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Bombardment Periphery, Rotterdam

As part of Rotterdam 2007 - City of Architecture, the city commemorated the 15-minute-long German bombing on May 14, 1940 that destroyed the city center, precipitated the Dutch surrender in WWII--and ultimately provided the occasion for all that new...
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Memorials: not as content-free as once believed

First, a cautionary tale about the what "just-the-facts"-driven memorials (e.g., victims' tallies, 92 trees for 92 countries, etc.) inadvertently reveal about the times and people who made them. Muschamp, meanwhile, hits some right notes with what symbol-laden memorials inadvertently reveal...
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Pentagon Memorial: S.N.A.F.U.

Peter Max, who presumably made art protesting the Vietnam war during his cosmic 60's hippy days, clearly found alternate paths to self-actualization, paths which lead to becoming The Official Artist for any and every sense-free bureaucracy he could find. With...
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Lessons from Pearl Harbor; Designing the Pentagon Memorial

In today's NYTimes, Sam Roberts looks for Lessons for the World Trade Center Memorial" in the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. I don't know what he finds, though. Opened on Memorial Day, 1962, four years after Eisenhower authorized...
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On Memorials Near The Pentagon

Earlier this month, the Air Force unveiled James Ingo Freed's design for the Air Force Memorial, which will be located on a ridge overlooking the Pentagon and the Pentagon's own recently announced September 11th Memorial. The design is inspired...
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Design Selected For Pentagon Memorial

And the winner is: A proposal by Keith Kaseman and Julie Beckman, two recent Columbia grads, to build 184 "memorial units" in a grove of maple trees. Interesting details: All benches are aligned with the flight path of AA77....
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Irish Hunger Memorial, also at the World Financial Center

On his photo weblog lightningfield, David Gallagher published some photos and reviews of the Irish Hunger Monument which opened this summer in Battery Park City. The Monument is designed by artist Brian Tolle, whose idea was to create a...
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Pentagon Memorial Response -- Update

Proposed Pentagon Memorial Ramp, Greg Allen Thanks to a very talented friend--no stranger to the question of memorials--who can sketch in 3-D modelling programs the way I can...crank out a Powerpoint deck or a term sheet, I guess, I...
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On greg.org on Memorials

After posting my review and response to the Pentagon Memorial Competition, I realized that in addition to writing "about making films, about art," I have written quite a bit about memorials. So I collected those weblog entries in one spot....
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On The Competition for The Pentagon Memorial

In the 45 minutes between reading about it in the Washington Post and seeing the competition exhibition itself at the National Building Museum, I had designed a memorial for the Pentagon in my head. In fact, I debated going...
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My Response to the Pentagon Memorial Proposal Competition

I spent a couple of hours this morning thinking about the Pentagon Memorial, and I made a design in response to those selected by the jury for the Army Corps or Engineers Competition. Click here to see it. To be...
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think about what you're remembering

Martin Filler would have been better off writing for a weblog. The too-long lead time/publication date on his New Republic article about the inherently dismal, unworkable rebuilding "process" forced him to write in a no-man's-land, timing-wise. Writing ahead of its...
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On Maya Lin's ninja-like approach to the WTC Memorial

There's an interesting article by Louis Menand in this week's New Yorker about Maya Lin called "The Reluctant Memorialist." He talks about her early rejection of any WTC Memorial-related requests and about her recent informal advisory work for the decisionmakers...
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