Charlie McCann in The Economist:
It’s been done before. In 1983, the same year that Siefert and Lovejoy planted their garden, a young Asian-American grad student called Maya Lin created a memorial in Washington, DC, for the American victims of the Vietnam war. It is composed of two long, slanting panels of black granite, which join at a wide angle. At its deepest, the wall sinks ten feet into the ground, resembling, as Lin put it, “a cut into the earth”. Inscribed are the names of 58,000 American soldiers, listed in the order that they died. As visitors walk through the memorial, they see the years pass, the death toll rise – and themselves, reflected in the polished stone. By building an experience and not an object, like the triumphant arches or statues of old, Lin reinvented the memorial for the modern age. Others have tried to replicate the emotional force of her wall. The Holocaust memorial in Berlin, an undulating field of large concrete slabs, makes visitors feel as if they are wandering through a strange cemetery. Passing through the six illuminated glass towers of Boston’s Holocaust memorial, each etched with “prisoner numbers” to represent the six million Jews who died, is similarly haunting.
Picture: Evoking the death camps
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