Business
& Labor
Exhibition Explores Phenomenon of Grassroots 9/11 Memorials
(archrecord.construction.com - 10/16/2006)
By Leigh
Batnick
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image to view larger
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| Image © USDA
Forest Service |
Fresh, slender tree trunks and shoots
of young grass cobbled together with gnarled wreckage from
the fallen Twin Towers—as if products from a collective
conscious, these similarly constructed odes to the lives lost
on 9/11 have sprung up across the country. For the past four
years, Living Memorials Project, under the auspices of the
USDA Forest Service at the behest of the US Congress, has
traveled the byways and back roads of the country to record
these homegrown monuments in an effort to create an ongoing
national registry.
The Forest Service has identified 700
works since 2002 and now allows the public to add their own
memorials to the database via the Living Memorials website
(livingmemorialsproject.net). Erika S. Svendsen, social science
researcher of the Living Memorials Project, says that even
though the monuments are born of individual or group motivation,
rather than official response, they nearly universally adopted
colonnades and columns and circles, with the occasional Ground
Zero relic serving as a venerated accent piece. More importantly,
she stresses, “The universal principle was that people
used landscape that was accessible.”
An exhibition of the project’s
work to date is currently on view at the reopened Federal
Hall at 26 Wall Street. Twelve digital journeys organize the
idiosyncratic memorials by themes of mourning they have in
common; the august venue “lends an aspect of respect
and gravitas to the projects,” notes architect Joel Towers,
director and associate provost for environmental studies at
the Tishman Center at the New School. The exhibition is curated
and presented in conjunction with the newly established Tishman
Environment and Design Center at the New School, and will
be on display until October 27.
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