The Architect’s Newspaper — have you subscribed yet? See, if you don’t, good things like this, you know, go away; unlike the less good things, us, namely, who stick around well past our welcome — has started posting their lead article online. This issue, they take a look at the sadder than even we presumed tale of the African Burial Ground memorial. The finalists we re-reported on last week were announced in May (the Trib article was apparently in response to a couple public feedback sessions that were held after the announcement), nearly seven years after the RFP was opened. A timeline is provided that details the relative progress of other high profile memorials (the Oklahoma City bombing and the projected WTC Memorial schedule) showing the relative efficacy of each program, and it ain’t pretty. The GSA claims the lag is relative to research being done at Howard University, which is now complete. There is a construction completion date, but no intermediary milestones that might be relevant (such as the date a winner will be picked and commission awarded). And no accomodation for revising the budget (which stands at $1 million, the figure proposed seven years ago). Considering that the GSA supports a percent for art program in many of their projects, and the cost of the project that led to the discovery of the remains (290 Broadway) was $276 million, raising the budget to at least $2.76 million doesn’t seem unreasonable. But it is of course unlikely. And you don’t even want to start drawing comparisons with budgets under review down the street, where, depending on how much sitework you want to assign, maybe 300 times as much is being allocated at the WTC.
There are also far better renderings of the proposals, but our original conclusions still stands: the modestly of the site mitigates the impact of any complex structure, and the formal gestures, which generally embrace the symoblic modernism that is the predominant memorial aesthetic seen in the this country since Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial, beg for more space to express what, in some cases, appear to be striking and effective concepts. The one element that seems left out, which potentially could transform the space, is some physical manfiestation of the actual size of the burial ground (which extends well beyond the site boundaries) which would make more apparent the impact of this community at the time the area was in ‘active’ use — estimates are that 10 to 20% of the population was of African descent at the time, a drastically different picture than we are typically allowed in the whitewashed images of colonial America.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.
ABG: Longer than you think.
The Architect’s Newspaper — have you subscribed yet? See, if you don’t, good things like this, you know, go away; unlike the less good things, us, namely, who stick around well past our welcome — has started posting their lead article online. This issue, they take a look at the sadder than even we presumed tale of the African Burial Ground memorial. The finalists we re-reported on last week were announced in May (the Trib article was apparently in response to a couple public feedback sessions that were held after the announcement), nearly seven years after the RFP was opened. A timeline is provided that details the relative progress of other high profile memorials (the Oklahoma City bombing and the projected WTC Memorial schedule) showing the relative efficacy of each program, and it ain’t pretty. The GSA claims the lag is relative to research being done at Howard University, which is now complete. There is a construction completion date, but no intermediary milestones that might be relevant (such as the date a winner will be picked and commission awarded). And no accomodation for revising the budget (which stands at $1 million, the figure proposed seven years ago). Considering that the GSA supports a percent for art program in many of their projects, and the cost of the project that led to the discovery of the remains (290 Broadway) was $276 million, raising the budget to at least $2.76 million doesn’t seem unreasonable. But it is of course unlikely. And you don’t even want to start drawing comparisons with budgets under review down the street, where, depending on how much sitework you want to assign, maybe 300 times as much is being allocated at the WTC.
There are also far better renderings of the proposals, but our original conclusions still stands: the modestly of the site mitigates the impact of any complex structure, and the formal gestures, which generally embrace the symoblic modernism that is the predominant memorial aesthetic seen in the this country since Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial, beg for more space to express what, in some cases, appear to be striking and effective concepts. The one element that seems left out, which potentially could transform the space, is some physical manfiestation of the actual size of the burial ground (which extends well beyond the site boundaries) which would make more apparent the impact of this community at the time the area was in ‘active’ use — estimates are that 10 to 20% of the population was of African descent at the time, a drastically different picture than we are typically allowed in the whitewashed images of colonial America.