Remembering in bronze & stone

"The most successful monuments evoke a response of reflectiveness," says Carole Blair, professor of American studies at the University of California, Davis. She cited the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C., which "asks you to put together the era narratively, to do it yourself from fragments." The Vietnam Veterans Memorial by Maya Lin also "doesn't ask anyone to pass judgment on the war, just as the Lincoln Memorial doesn't tell you what to think."

Harold Marcuse, associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, agrees that the most effective monuments "have different meanings for different people." By avoiding a narrow message, they remain relevant to future generations, as sentiment and close connection to the events recede.

As failures, he cited heavy-handed monuments in Eastern Europe, like statues portraying the Soviet Army as heroic liberators. When monuments force viewers to swallow propaganda, Professor Marcuse says, "The monument becomes an icon of ridicule."

Although open-endedness is a virtue, lack of unity can sabotage effectiveness. "The Korean War Veterans Memorial," according to Professor Blair, "is a design disaster. People don't get it. It's very incoherent."

Which points to another trait of successful monuments. "The most effective ones," says Professor Griffen, "provide an emotional tug." At the Lincoln Memorial, "People get an idea of the person from the grand, overscaled statue because of the emotion caught in that statue. People are moved by things that are human, not cold slabs of stone."

The Oklahoma City National Memorial on the site of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building succeeds on these terms. It includes 168 chairs, one for each victim (half-sized chairs commemorate children), which are "the most successful part of the memorial," according to Marita Sturken, associate professor at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California. "They evoke a sense of an individual, which is what people respond to, rather than a mass of collective victims."

The symbolism of empty chairs suggests rather than states a message. "The absence left behind invites people to fill the chairs with their own reasons for coming," Young says.

Understatement lends power to Ms. Lin's minimalist design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial - a black wall gradually rising out of the earth, and then subsiding into it. Northwestern's Mr. Yood praises it as "the single most successful public memorial of the 20th century, [which] did more to reconcile our nation's ambiguous feelings about Vietnam than anything else."

In a statement accompanying her proposal, Lin explained, "I had an impulse to cut open the earth ... an initial violence that in time would heal." The abstract design, whose reflective surface is covered with more than 58,000 names of American soldiers killed in the conflict, provided "a place where art can actually begin to heal a nation," Yood says, "the wailing wall of America."

"The Vietnam Veterans Memorial set a new standard for memorials," agrees Griffen. The inscribed names "took it from a monumental to a personal level, from something you look at to something that stirs us."

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