Stelae!

The opening ceremony of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, Germany is being held today, open to the public two days later.

Peter Eisenman's competition-winning design features a gridded field of approximately 2,700 concrete slabs (stelae - a usually carved or inscribed stone slab or pillar used for commemorative purposes) of varying height and an Information Center underneath. The design was approved in June 1999, almost six long years before its opening.



According to Eisenman,

The enormity and scale of the horror of the Holocaust is such that any attempt to represent it by traditional means is inevitably inadequate ... Our memorial attempts to present a new idea of memory as distinct from nostalgia ... We can only know the past today through a manifestation in the present.

In the past couple days, much has been written about the design, either praising or criticizing its abstraction and its author.


Image found here (via Gravestmor).

Grounded in the Maya Lin School of Memorial Design, Eisenman's non-representational design opts for mood over symbolism, striving to impress emotions on the visitor. The difficulty - and popularity - of this method is apparent in the WTC Memorial and other memorials designed since Lin's Vietnam Memorial in D.C., completed over twenty years ago. I like to separate Lin's "School" into two camps: the object and the field camps. Clearly, the Memorial in Berlin falls into the latter, where emotion is derived from the overwhelming number of stelae (similar to many WTC entries that used a large quantity of candles, trees, etc., to achieve the same end) and the visitor's movement across the field. Here that movement is affected by the varying heights of the slabs, at one moment low enough to act as a bench, at other moments towering over the visitor. The combination of regular grid and irregular, undulating tops is an effective combination; one can imagine the endlessly-different routes and sensations as one moves through the grid, glimpsing Berlin's modern context just beyond the memorial's edges.

But ultimately, like Lin's memorial in D.C., Eisenman's memorial must be experienced to be fully appreciated. Only then can one say if it is an effective memorial to the Holocaust and not (also) something else, arising from its abstraction and its concomitant ambiguity.

Update 05.16: Nancy Levinson at Pixel Points weighs in on the memorial design, with her always intelligent criticism as well as some fascinating alternatives proposed for the site.