Franklin Roosevelt captured a nation's outrage with his ringing denunciation of the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor as "a date which will live in infamy." But after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center Sept. 11, no one has yet come up with eloquent words to sum up our national anguish.

Instead, we look to art to convey what words cannot. Debate has begun as to what form a memorial to the victims should take.

"Architecture can help us cope with tragedy," says Robert A.M. Stern, dean of the school of architecture at Yale University. "There's an architecture of reassurance and an architecture of provocation. In the case of a tragedy like this, we want architecture to reassure us, to define who we are and our place in this moment."

A tall order, considering that memorials "have a troubled history," according to Bill Lacy, president of Purchase College, State University of New York, who is executive director of the Pritzker Prize in architecture. "As my mentor, Charles Eames, said, 'We've been in trouble with memorials ever since generals stopped riding horses.' "

Architects who design monuments (usually vertical structures or statues to honor heroes or events) and memorials (horizontal forms, which provide a more contemplative space, often for grieving) traditionally followed an accepted code. "We used to have a one-size-fits-all" aesthetic, says James Yood, assistant chair of art theory and practice at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

"Some people still think monuments should be monumental, with classical architectural references - big and white and grand," says Craig Griffen, assistant professor of architecture at Philadelphia University.

Others say the extreme nature of the tragedies of the 20th - and now 21st - century renders classical style and symbols, connoting consolation and stability, obsolete.

"A new generation of artists and architects has grown skeptical of traditional monumental form," says James Young, head of the department of Judaic and Near Eastern studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

"This generation questions the assumption that big, concretized forms can tell people how to think and remember," he says. For them, the forms are "redolent of fascist authority." They've responded with "counter-monuments, conceived to challenge conventional premises," he says.

The idea that a monument can somehow repair a wound is passé in these circles. "They would rather remember events as irredeemable," Professor Young says, by creating "a place where we can feel the great void."

"Some people think horror should be represented with horror," says Julian Bonder, associate professor at Roger Williams University School of Architecture in Bristol, R.I. Mr. Bonder says memorials "should not be storytelling. They should leave memory as an enigma."

The consensus among architects and historians surveyed is that effective memorials embody this reticence, stimulating the viewer's own thoughts.

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