Identity, authenticity and dealing with grief – in this extract from their new book Michèle Woodger and Tszwai So consider the nature of memorials, memory and design
Michele Woodger: Memorials are places of communion between the living and the dead, twilight zones between here and wherever souls reside, one-way portals to the River Lethe. Like tabernacles or shrines, memorial sites are numinous places, borderline sacred ground. The most powerful memorial architecture surmounts unavoidable politics with sensitivity and meaning. But at the centre of it all is that alchemic element called memory.
Identity
Tszwai So: Memorials have a lot to do with identity. Which is why memory loss is destabilising – it entails an erasure of identity. When we erect memorials to ancestors or loved ones we are also doing it for ourselves, for our sense of identity. A gravestone is memorial architecture in its most basic form, and the identifiers on there – ‘our beloved grandmother’ etc – are really important. We want to remember our family members because the personal relationship we had is important to us, sure, but also because our past shapes our identity as the son of someone, the grandson of someone… For public memorials this is scaled up, which is what political scientist Benedict Anderson was getting at in his work on imagined communities. From him we have learned that a community starts as a household, it becomes a village, then a nation; in order to establish and cultivate an identity, so that the collective can work as a unit, you need a narrative. The whole question of narrative building is therefore crucial to nation building. The Chinese author Bo Yang once opined that, although some historians were reluctant to give weight to national myths or narratives, myth was the soul of a nation. ‘If the history of a nation does not include myths, this nation is nothing more than a group of puppets’, he said. Without stories and tales, you cannot have a nation or national identity. Memorials help to fill that space. Memorials bring people together and centre this sense of identity and belonging.
The physicality of grief
MW: Everyone encounters loss in their lifetime, but it is endured alone. On the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, CS Lewis wrote: ‘Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.’ The emotional pilgrimage begins as a series of cul-de-sacs – truncated conversations – yet wends over time towards something more spiritual. A memorial is like a physical marker on this journey towards acceptance. Grief is a bleak state with no apparent prospects; seeking stability, we reach for something tangible. In wars, natural disasters and terror events, loss occurs abruptly, unfairly, arbitrarily, to a large number of people. This shakes us existentially and raises metaphysical doubts on a grand scale, about nihilism, fate and the existence of justice. A public memorial becomes a focal point where open expressions of mourning are acceptable, and stands as a public recognition of an incomprehensible event.
The architect has to put the needs of the client, the public, those being commemorated and the context above creative self-expression
Authenticity, ego and the architect
TS: Art and architecture both have the potential to be a selfish business, where egos reign supreme. As architects we are creating public spaces that people have to live with. The architect has to understand the limitations of self expression and to reconcile that with the public and the clients, really. ‘If you are obsessed with self-expression or with the ego,’ Moshe Safdie beautifully expressed, ‘then your priorities change. So I think it’s a given that a serious architect… will achieve a kind of self-expression because their being is in it, but it’s a by-product rather than an objective’. For an ‘authentic’ memorial, the architect has to understand the needs of the client, and the public, and those being commemorated, and the context, and put those needs above those of creative self-expression.
The nature of memorials, so often associated with tragedy, forces the architect to think about existential philosophies, which aren’t usually a preoccupation of day-to-day practice. Those memorials that have come into being through a rigorous, empathetic, sensitive and intellectual architectural process certainly merit closer consideration and appreciation. Adolf Loos wrote that ‘Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else that fulfils a function is to be excluded from the domain of art.’ Memorials are a rare typology that blurs the distinction between the disciplines of architecture and art, and like art, memorial architecture can mediate between the sayable and unsayable, the knowable and unknowable.