The evocative and timeless landscape

Republication from our "Crescent of Embrace" post "Reading the landscape" of September 2005: The Three Soldiers (right) by Frederick Hart caught us off guard two falls ago when we walked up the rise after taking in Maya Lyn's once controversial but now much loved polished marble Vietnam Veterans' Memorial Wall on the Mall in D.C., engraved with all the names of the war dead (left).  Overcome with emotion as we followed the three soldiers' gaze back to the wall, we recalled our elitist disdain from years before when we first heard that the pristine wall would be "contaminated" by a realistic grouping.  How wrong we were. The lifelike but universal soldiers breathe life into the cool, abstract wall with their humanity, and the wall, in turn, lends historical resonance to the immediacy and concreteness of the soldiers.  The whole, never anticipated by individual planners nor artists, was so much greater than the sum of its parts. Landscapes are like that. Their evocative power grows over time.

"Mark Steyn's commemorative block set on an acre or two of greensward surrounded by a cluster of iconic buildings does not translate well to an immense, windswept field of 2,200 acres surrounded at vast distances by forested hills. The large scale demands large landscape gestures," we blogged back in September of 2004, bucking the tide of an angry right blogospheric frenzy amongst our usual philosophical allies -- a Judeo-Christian version of the Mohammed-cartoons hysteria? -- over perceived Islamic iconography in the landscape architect's design for the Flight 93 crash site. We've flogged the topic here early and often. Now Mr. Steyn is at it again, determined that the naturalistic landscape of wetlands and surrounding woods proposed for the site is "the precise opposite of what Flight 93 embodies":

A true Flight 93 memorial would honor courage, action and improvisation, but reflection, healing and wetlands are the best we can manage. Go to any Civil War memorial on any New England common, and marvel at how they managed to honor their dead without wetlands and wind chimes.

We don't know about the wind chimes, but a rationally ordered, human-scaled New England common is totally the wrong model for the Shanksville field where Flight 93 went down as the forces of light and darkness wrestled in the aisles. As we wrote back during the initial controversy, think Gettysburg:

We've never visited Gettysburg National Military Park. According to the NPS website, it "incorporates nearly 6,000 acres, with 26 miles of park roads and over 1,400 monuments, markers, and memorials." But in our mind's eye it is not the touchingly sentimental, old-fashioned memorials so much as the evocative and timeless landscape itself -- the "passive beauty," in Lileks's words, of its vast, empty battlefields -- that moves us to contemplate the human condition. Again to borrow Lileks's words, these "muted things" do not seem "at odds with the events they describe."

Are Mark Steyn & Company blinded by an agenda they signed up for in the wake of Shanksville street evangelist Ron McRae's initial sighting of the virgin the Islamic crescent and star in the site plan for the Flight 93 memorial? Have they strayed so far from their roots that they have forgotten Thoreau's insight that "The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him."

Update: Michelle Malkin, who led the charge last time, begs to differ for reasons of her own, of course:

A proper war memorial stirs to anger and action . . .

Memorial architect Paul Murdoch, whose firm emphasizes "environmental responsibility and sustainability," did not return calls and e-mails seeking comment, but he did emphasize to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that his creation was about "healing" and "contemplation." He is also proud of his idea to hang a bunch of wind chimes in a tall tower at the site as a "gesture of healing and bonding."

No Fred Thompson, the architect obviously has no idea what to make of this new-fangled blogosphere thing. You don't not return Michelle Malkin's calls. But as we emailed Michelle, forget about what the architect says -- gestures of "healing and bonding" are mainly for other architects' ears anyway -- and look at the work itself:

I continue to think you're reading all the wrong things into the Shanksville design. As a landscape architect myself, I tend to bypass the bloated prose of architects to look at the work itself and try to imagine myself in the space.

If a landscape architect blogs in the 'sphere and no one is around to hear, does it make a sound?

Update: A way-cool blog we discovered in our Site Meter stats, Archinect links.

Comments

[goomp]

The nature of humans varies. For those with imaging ability the emptiness of a battlefield is what relates to the timelessness of what occurred there. For others the statue of the men themselves is easier to understand. Different strokes for different folks.

[Jacob C.]

It seems to me Mark Steyn can't help but feel that a wide-open space would seem somehow *vacant*. It's as if he needs to see something more specific in order to feel any connection to what actually happened at the site

[hnav]

i love those photos and the subject of the debate.
not certain Ms. Malkin is someone who can judge everthing, from politics to memorials.
but who is?
many sites - memorials in the past, were objected to, and then embraced as the site, a place in which something memorable happens, becomes familar and later dear.
right now the WTC is still a hole, and it has more meaning than the Statue of Liberty at times.
i tend to think, some cynics have too much time on their hands, and should be forced to try to create something on their own, just so they have a more reasoned approach next time.
i guess i really tire of ego.

[Teresa]

As hnav says, many Memorials had strenuous objections before they were erected (I remember all the criticism of "The Wall").

That being said. There is something in what Mark has to say about a single "concrete" piece that people can focus on. You are a landscape architect which gives you a totally different perspective, you have to remember that 99.999% of the people in this country don't have your background, so while it might be naturally beautiful - it lacks the focus for memorializing those who have gone before us with tremendous courage.

Most people need something specific to focus on - to concentrate their thoughts. Mother Nature is too vast for that. Can't we have both? A beautiful area and a set memorial piece? Does one preclude the other? A beautiful peaceful area with a point of focus... why is that a bad thing?

[B Dubya]

The thing about the Gettysburg Battleground is that there are little or large markers (stone monuments, if you will) that force the visitor to stand and look at the same ground where once 350 ploughboys from Oswego, New York stood shoulder to shoulder with the dreaded Iron Brigade at the railroad cut on the first day. The High Water Mark, at the stone fence where Armbruster died of wounds while asking after his friend W.S.Hancock. The jumbled slope of Little Round Top where Chamberlain and the 20th Maine held the end of the Union line against all comers. The place under the trees across the open fields where Picket's Charge mustered while the Confederate artillery hammered the Union positions in the early afternoon, the last time that the South could honestly feel that they could win it, that they would win.
Gettysburg brings that to the visitor because the markers are understated against the sweep of the place. I do not see markers, I see farm boys in blue uniforms, limbered guns racing to a new firing position, normal men engaged in a titanic contest about ideas so much larger than they were that it still rings in our ears.
What those people did on Flight 93 was like that. We need to remember them as they were, incredibly brave and determined not to allow the intended horror of their captors visit any further harm to their countrymen. As Gettysburg cannot be made more meaningful by the addition of gaudy memorials, neither can that field in Pennsylvania.

[Mitch]

From Beowulf, lines 1384 ff:
"Do not grieve, wise lord. It is always better
To avenge your friends than to mourn them."

[Sissy Willis]

"Leave here troll, or stay and meet your doom!"

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0402057/quotes