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Home , War memorial

28 H 1 no .�EW YORK TIMBS, SUNDAY, JULY 1�

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ARCHITECTURE VIEW /Vincent Scully The Terrible Art Of Designing A War Memorial

HE WASHINGTON FINE ARTS "These names," she wrote, "seemingly infi· Commission has again rejected a nite in number, carry the sense of over· design for a to the veter· whelming numbers, while unifying those indi· Tans of the .This is not viduals into a whole ... Brought to a sharp surprising. are not awareness of such a loss, it is up to each indi· easy to design, especially today, when Vic· vidual to resolve or come to terms with this tory, a goddess for the Greeks, shows us an loss. For death is in the end a personal and ambiguous face. The most successful memo­ private matter, and the area contained with· rials of modern times have therefore not in the memorial is meant for personal reflec· been about victory as such but about the sin· tion and private reckoning." gle, incontrovertible truth of war: that it kills a lot of people. • From that point of view, Maya Lin's Viet· This is Maya Lin's memorial but not nam Memorial in Washington com· Lutyens's.His is about Death the Victor, eat· memorates something still fresh in our con· er of the slain.It may be said to dominate the sciousness, and is in all likelihood America's whole north of France, where the richest har· greatest such monument- if we except the vest of young dead anywhere on earth is still battlefields themselves that have been so to be found.North of Amiens the land rises movingly shaped by the National Park Serv· slowly in rolling open fields leading toward ice: Antietam with its bucolic killing fields, the heights of the Somme. There, hundreds of Gettysburg with its Union all thousands of British and French soldiers mustering higgledy-piggledy while the Con· were killed during the summer of 1916, liter­ federate guns come out of the woods in line. ally for nothing so far as military advantage But Maya Lin's memorial has an ancestor was concerned. perhaps even greater, certainly of a different As always, the infantry was heading for the cast from hers, though it, too, deals wholly high ground. We can follow their track across with the dead.It is Sir 's me· the open fields today.Lutyens's memorial moria! to the dead of the Somme, built at looms indistinctly far ahead of us on the Thiepval in France in 1924. Lutyens had al· height. We move toward it.There is no cover. ready built the most complete modern monu· We imagine the machine guns sweeping the ment to Empire and the Nation State in his gentle slopes. We turn toward the little folds design of the city of New Delhi.At Thiepval in the earth that open to left and right of the he designed the complementary monument road and seem to offer a refuge from that to modern war. Maya Lin, then a senior at fire: it is made apparent to us that the infan­ Yale College, had not yet seen Lutyens's me· try did exactly the same before us.They are moria! when she designed her entry in the still there, many of them, laid out neatly in enormous competition that was held for the small cemeteries where the found Vietnam Memorial in 1980, but the statement them. We arrive at the height, the objective. of intention that was required to accompany The monument looms over us, stepping it remained to be written. mountainously up and back in brick and white trim like one of the Amencan sky­ • scrapers of the 1920's. All at once we see that At that moment she happened to hear a lec- it is in fact an enormous monster. The tight ture about Thiepval illustrated by a number circles of its tondi become demonic eyes; its Dedication of the memorial at Thiepval, Fn of slides, some of which she later duplicated high arch screams.It is the open mouth of to use in Washington in defending her own death that will consume us all. names. We approach the sarcophagus, but b memorial from the "gash of shame" accusa­ It rises behind a carpet of grass. There is we see that a view opens up beyond it on the c' tion that had been leveled against it.She read no path for us. To approach it we must violate other side. Then we see the men. f1 Lutyens's monument in her own terms and the grass. Closer to, we are enveloped by the Out there at a measured distance from the VI sha,..,edit to her own gentle, sorrowful vision. creature's great gorge. It is all empty maw. monument two thin companies of soldiers G One sarcophagus like a palate lies low within stand silent at parade, French on the left, 11 Scully is Sterling Professor of the it, far under the arch. We must go left or right English on the right. It is a cemetery. Nation- p Histu. > of Art Emeritus at Yale University. up diagonal stairways to climb to it. The al characteristics are well to the fore. The f1 His book "Architecture: The Natural and the white stone panels are covered with the French graves of the unknown are marked SJ Man-made" will be published in November. names of the dead, untold thousands of by rough concrete crosses bearing little b1 :w YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, JULY 14, 1991

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now. No one is exempt. It is this that does it: the terrible courage of human beings advanc­ ing in the open toward pain, nothingness, the void: insatiable, unimaginable Death. There is no victory over it. But there they come, the men, unbroken, across the open ground. It is not to be borne. It is much to the point that Lutyens clearly used the neo-grec pilgrimage church Notre­ Dame-de-Brebieres, in the town of Albert, just out of sight in the valley below, as the model for his memorial. He adopted its red brick and stone trim and abstracted their re-

The most successful tributes address the single, Incontrovertible truth about war: that it kills a lot of people.

lationship and clarified and magnified their forms.The church, after repeated bombard­ ment, had an unintended cross vault in the side of its tower, and Lutyens incorporated that, too, in his monument. Albert had been sung by all the poets in the British ranks because, by yet another fluke of bombardment, a statue of the Virgin and Child that crowned the tower hung perpen­ dicular to the ground for many months, lean­ ing over the street, as if Mary were about to dash the Saviour to the ground, driven mad by compassion for the marching men below. These Lutyens gathered up to sleep at Thiep­ val under the round eyes of Death and in his silent scream. And Death ferociously guards them. He is marked with their names, and men and the landscape alike lie under his horrific mask, his Aeschylean glare. Maya Lin's memorial is not so terrible. She leads us gently into the ground, enveloping us slowly in the war. We can touch the names on the wall, cool to our fingertips. Then she brings us out of it. The dead become fewer and we are led up from the tomb toward, on the one side, Lincoln's Olympian temple and, on the other, Washington's obelisk rising to the sun- suggesting "a unity between the nation's past and present," Maya Lin wrote. ,. Central Press Her memorial is hopeful, personal, as she Dedication of the memorial at Thiepval, France, in 1932-Its high arch screams. says, but profoundly communal, too. We, the living, commune with the dead, are with names. We approach the sarcophagus, but bronze plaques saying only, toughly, "ln­ them, love them. They have their country we see that a view opens up beyond it on the connu." The English graves are marked by still. That is why this monument so broke the other side. Then we see the men. flat white limestone slabs inscribed with the hearts of the veterans of this war- who felt Out there at a measured distance from the words: "A soldier of the great war, known to that their count.·y had cast them out forever. monument two thin companies of soldiers God." Not so at Thiepval. No communion is possi­ stand silent at parade, French on the left, We descend from the monument, ap­ ble there. The dead are alone. They are sepa­ English on the right. It is a cemetery. Nation­ proaching the graves. Now they seem to be rated from us forever by their terror, their al characteristics are well to the fore. The facing the arch, advancing across the open courage and their pain, and by Death's mon­ French graves of the unknown are marked space toward it. It should be said that every­ strous fact. He is their Fatherland, and in by rough concrete crosses bearing little body who visits the monument is weeping by what state they lie, confronting the empty rhetoric of things. 0

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