Who Owns Grief?

Architectural Record, July 2002

Edward T. Linenthal, a professor of religion and American culture at the University of Wisconsin, in Oshkosh, has long studied how America comes to terms with tragic events. In books such as Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum, and, most recently, The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory (Oxford, 2001), he has also studied the role of architecture and art in commemorating these tragic events. Linenthal recently spoke with Record’s James S. Russell, AIA.

Record: What does the response to the Oklahoma City bombing and the terror attacks of September 11th tell us about how we remember and how we commemorate?

Edward T. Linenthal: In many ways, the response to the attacks was similar in Oklahoma City, in 1995, to that of the attacks of September 11th, in 2001. One of the similarities was the sense that design can almost resolve these horrors for us, can lead us through the horrific mysteries of such an event.

The Oklahoma City experience is not a template, but there are lessons to be learned from the development of an inclusive process. There’s an inevitable hierarchy of memorializing that must be sorted out–an appropriate means of locating the voices of family members, rescuers, and so on. They may not come up with the same answers in New York, in Washington, or in Pennsylvania, but Oklahoma City helps us be mindful of how an American city responded to a horrendous act of mass disaster.

Record: But does not the most recent tragedy present us with a much broader and more complex range of issues, especially in lower Manhattan? After all, the attacks not only destroyed so many peoples’ lives, they targeted the towers as a symbol of America’s importance in world finance and crippled the nation’s third largest downtown.

ETL: I think that makes a process like the one in Oklahoma City even more important. What are the agendas? How do you include a variety of voices? You need to be mindful of the hierarchies that exist, to find a way to consider the difference in feeling, in sacrifice, and of grief experienced by survivors or rescuers compared to people who lost, say, business colleagues. I understand that there are a number of different groups with different agendas representing different bereaved communities. You can’t act on every group’s agendas, but you can understand the web of grief and conviction and concern.

After Oklahoma City, no one should be surprised that these kinds of events bring people together and tear them apart. No one should be surprised that firemen didn’t want to leave the site when Mayor Giuliani tried to pull them off. No one should be surprised about concerns that someone got more relief money than someone else. No one should be surprised that some people object to rubble being transformed into tomato cans. Or that the site is regarded as ground too sacred to be built upon.

In Oklahoma City, family members were concerned that an influential person’s personal taste would triumph over community conviction or that the process would be hijacked by the powers that be. In New York, many of the bereaved feel similarly and this must be addressed. Will we see family members chain themselves to bulldozers when they start construction on the site of 7 World Trade Center?

Record: You found much to admire in the way Oklahoma City faced the aftermath of the bombing.

ETL: In the Oklahoma City memorial process, I found the democratic arts to have been practiced in a majestic kind of way. They didn’t start with design, they began by developing a mission statement. Writing that mission statement and developing the criteria for the memorial competition incorporated grieving and mourning as part of the work. It gently moved people over time from the sense of individual ownership of a commemorative idea–that this eternal flame, or this cross or this heart is all that can represent my loved one–to a wider vision of what the disaster meant. The memorial expression of that was magnificent. People gained a public voice in the process and felt enfranchised.

Record: Paul Spreiregen, the first competition advisor, was quite firm in his conviction that the jury judging memorial-design entries comprise solely professionals, and not include family members and other survivors. Did the process prove him wrong?

ETL: That seemed a moment of truth. The family members had been involved all the way and there was a strong sense that they had to continue to be involved. Design professionals did work with survivors and they worked together beautifully. Family members didn’t try to be designers, but were able to bring an immediacy to the discussion. It became a great interaction, and, the memorial is, I think, an eloquent statement. With the right process and the right people, there is no reason that family members are too close by definition to make judicious and aesthetically enlightened choices.

Record: How did the designers selected in Oklahoma City (Hans and Torrey Butzer, with Sven Berg) work with the community?

ETL: I suspect that the designers found this to be an incredibly important and moving experience. They didn’t just do the design and leave. They moved to Oklahoma City and were critical in working through issues with families and survivors. They were sensible and flexible. They were willing to add to their design more of the commemorative fence that was around the site, for example. For many of the families, this was the memorial. The designers and others did firmly say no to the conviction by some family members that the site was a cemetery and not for memorialization because unrecoverable remains were buried there.

Record: Can greatness possibly result when so many people are involved?

ETL: Architects can in effect go off and do their own thing, but the process of selection was done wisely in Oklahoma City with a plurality of family members. The jury decision on the Oklahoma competition was blind and unanimous, so family members were not going off in one direction while the professionals went in another.

As processes are democratized, though, they become compellingly honest but also problematic. You are dealing with volatile memories and volatile issues, ones that test the durability of the process and the talents of the people involved. If not mindfully and carefully done, such a process could very well not succeed.

Record: Would you advocate the creation of a mission statement involving all the communities and groups that have a stake in what happened in Lower Manhattan?

ETL: It doesn’t seem to make sense to ghettoize memorialization, so whatever is done and however it is done should fit into a philosophy about the place. What to remember, how to remember, and how it fits into a whole.

Record: After September 11th, people brought flowers, banners, candles, and so on to fire houses and police stations all over New York City. The same thing happened in Washington, D.C., and in Pennsylvania. You saw a similar process take place in Oklahoma City. Are these also memorials, ones that are taking new form?

ETL: Even from afar these offerings seemed very human. It is an example of a kind of democratizing of memorialization. It began when the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was so eloquently transformed by the touching things people left behind. In Oklahoma City, a fence was erected, initially to protect a crime scene, later to protect the footprint of the bomb damage. The fence became a site for memorial creation. Within days, people began sending toys, poems, drawings, letters, flowers, banners, and quilts. It’s a way people have of entering into the event, of registering emotion.

Record: How would you explain this phenomenon?

ETL: Media enfranchises us to be part of bereavement communities and that is such a powerful and unifying feeling. People get a sense of what is acceptable and doable. They see prayer cards and teddy bears and so they bring or send those things. It’s not new; there’s a long history of people leaving things at tragic sites–in African-American history, for example. It has become an accessible, popular way to register emotion, and enter the event and imagine oneself as part of a larger bereaved community.

Record: Does this plethora of imagery, much of it clichéd or naïve, suggest that Americans don’t know how to express themselves as a community?

ETL: There is a spiritual allure to being part of an event, because of the horror, because some people need to connect to people who went through tragedy. A whole range of emotions are involved, from the most heartfelt to the most voyeuristic.

We’re united in an almost effervescent feeling and exhilaration. Now something horrible has brought us together. Bereavement may be the only way Americans imagine themselves as one. It trumps all the ways we’re separate, as if tragedy opens a window to an ideal community so far from the day-to-day reality. And it may be true in a fleeting kind of way. The harsh reality is that it doesn’t last.

Record: Does this trend suggest that people no longer trust designers to powerfully represent the meaning of such tragedies?

ETL: I would put it more positively. As social history has restored ordinary peoples’ voices, we pay more attention to survivors and the testimony of witnesses. It’s not a distrust of artists or architects. But hiring someone to create a memorial is inadequate by itself.

At the Oklahoma City memorial, people dip their hand in the pool and then place it on the gateway, which leaves a handprint on the metal. The designers did not intend this–people just figured it out. They are physically connecting. We often underestimate the power the material world has on us.

Record: Does our era demand a new kind of expression entirely? Is the monumental commemoration obsolete?

ETL: No, it can still be eloquent. The discomfort is not just with monumental form, or even singular form, We have seen a trend to what I call activist memorial environments, like the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. It’s a museum as well as a commemorative place, and it reaches out. Oklahoma City also includes a museum. Places like this respond to the sense that memorials need to do more than just be placid places to go and remember. They need to have a role in the community. People want these memorials and museums to be rich, transforming civic spaces, where we remember and immerse ourselves in expertly fashioned environments and emerge born-again citizens, and act on what we have learned. Maybe memorials are becoming more than just temples because of the poverty of our public life. I wonder about this, but hesitate to suggest it is the case.

Record: What can memorials do for the bereaved?

ETL: People can hope for too much. If people expect a memorial to resolve the grief and emotions that they feel, I think they are in for a tremendous disappointment. For me, the most profound and mindful memorial would engage the struggle of coming to terms with the event. It’s not about resolving it or coming to “closure.” It’s about enduring.

Record: What makes memorials last over generations?

ETL: Jay Winter, who has written very good stuff about World War II memorials, talks about how some suffer a “trajectory of decomposition.” Not all hold their meaning. In some ways, it seems that the erection of a memorial is an implicit admission that the overpoweringly important meaning of a shattering event–one that is at the heart of one generation’s life–is not at the heart of another’s. The Civil War generation would be stunned if it saw the disrepair and invisibility of so many of its memorials. It’s hard for me to imagine the World Trade Center tragedy as forgotten, but in my darker moments I do see that, just as I see the September 11th events as transcending the tragedy in Oklahoma. In my worst nightmares, something comes down the road that diminishes the World Trade Center disaster.