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Conflicting Trends

I start with an observation about what appears to be conflicting trends in recent scholarship. The literature on public space is overwhelmingly a lament on the loss or degradation of public space and the public realm in the latter part of the twentieth century. Studies of the changing character of memorials in the 20th century, however, show a growing pluralism and democracy in the last decades of the last century. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, according to this view, represents a "turning point in the history of public memory." The wall with its names of the dead and missing, plus the later additions of Three Soldiers (one with white features, one Hispanic, and one black) and Women's Memorial (Nurses), represents "a growing acknowledgement that everyone now deserves equal recognition at all times in wholly accessible places."

One can also see this spirit also in the Korean Veterans Memorial's soldiers and its wall etched with faces, and in the recently completed FDR Memorial, which tells the story of the Depression, New Deal, and WWII with statues and reliefs of ordinary Americans from all walks of life. These memorials invite a new kind of memorial experience that is at once personal and therepeutic - visitors touch names and faces etched into walls, see their own reflections in the shiny black surfaces, and interact with life-size and realistic figures. They create in effect a kind of public space that bridges the divide between public memory and private memory, public space and private space.

So is the National Mall really an exception to the lament about the loss of effective public space? Should we see it as a place where pluralism and democracy actually play an increased role rather than destructive one? With regards to the proposed WWII memorial, I argue that the recent trend towards more democratic memorial-making is now being met by an equal and stronger retrograde vision of the Mall. The proposed WWII Memorial represents this anti-democratic trend most graphically.

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