The Little Red Lighthouse

While we were traveling I got a phone call asking if I would be a godparent for my neighbor’s new baby and needless to say I said yes right away. Unfortunately I wouldn’t be home in time for his baptism but through the wonders of technology I was “Skyped in” along with two of his other godparents.

Experience Informs Design

My set design professor in college always said “action informs design!” meaning your set had to support what the director wanted to have happen. I see this same principle at work in memorial design. The way you interact with a memorial has to support the emotional experience you expect to evoke in the visitor.  In NYC we visited two memorials that couldn’t have been more different in experience and design.

Urban Haiku

These impressions follow the format of the haiku, which contains 17 syllables in 3 lines (5/7/5).  These 2 pairs of sites presented stark contrasts to me—contrasts of meaning, aesthetics, emotions.  These spaces are like Biblical texts that speak to different people in different ways.  So, these are impressions and not judgments.

A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, Goldsworthy’s “Garden of Stones”

 

 

Gray sky    Gray glass                    Gray

saplings perched in granite          Parched

Parched                                             with no beauty

 

 

 

All that Jazz, with riffs

fleet and deep, sleek and sweet.  This

is Louis, Dolly.

The National Sept. 11 Memorial (under construction)

 

 

 

heroes and victims

United Nations Peoples

vengeance, no                 no peace

The African Burial Ground National Monument

 

 

.               lovingly buried

.                         indomitable spirit(s)

.               wailing and walking

And, now that I have mangled an Asian art form, let me do likewise to a Western form.

There once was a class from PSR

Who were immersed in New York with no car

For two weeks they flaneured

They hobbled and blogged and observed

Now back at home

Still counting and twitching

Devin quickly repaired to a bar