From Montgomery to Bilbao

On August 16, 2016, the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal rights organization, unveiled its plans for the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which would be constructed in Montgomery, Alabama. Today, less than two years later, it opens to the public, and the timing could hardly seem more appropriate, in ways that even those who conceived of it might never have imagined. As Campbell Robertson writes for the New York Times:

At the center is a grim cloister, a walkway with eight hundred weathered steel columns, all hanging from a roof. Etched on each column is the name of an American county and the people who were lynched there, most listed by name, many simply as “unknown.” The columns meet you first at eye level, like the headstones that lynching victims were rarely given. But as you walk, the floor steadily descends; by the end, the columns are all dangling above, leaving you in the position of the callous spectators in old photographs of public lynchings.

And the design represents a breakthrough in more ways than one. As the critic Philip Kennicott points out in the Washington Post: “Even more remarkable, this memorial…was built on a budget of only $15 million, in an age when major national memorials tend to cost $100 million and up.”

Of course, if the memorial had been more costly, it might not exist at all, and certainly not with the level of independence and the clear point of view that it expresses. Yet if there’s one striking thing about the coverage of the project, it’s the absence of the name of any one architect or designer. Neither of these two words even appears in the Times article, and in the Post, we only read that the memorial was “designed by [Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan] Stevenson and his colleagues at EJI in collaboration with the Boston-based MASS Design Group.” When you go to the latter’s official website, twelve people are credited as members of the project design team. This is markedly different from the way in which we tend to talk about monuments, museums, and other architectural works that are meant to invite our attention. In many cases, the architect’s identity is a selling point in itself, as it invariably is with Frank Gehry, whose involvement in a project like the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is consciously intended to rejuvenate an entire city. In Montgomery, by contrast, the designer is essentially anonymous, or part of a collaboration, which seems like an aesthetic choice as conscious as the design of the space itself. The individual personality of the architect departs, leaving the names and events to testify on their own behalf. Which is exactly as it should be.

And it’s hard not to compare this to the response to the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1981. The otherwise excellent documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick alludes to the firestorm that it caused, but it declines to explore how much of the opposition was personal in nature. As James Reston, Jr. writes in the definitive study A Rift in the Earth:

After Maya Lin’s design was chosen and announced, the public reaction was intense. Letters from outraged veterans poured into the Memorial Fund office. One claimed that Lin’s design had “the warmth and charm of an Abyssinian dagger.” “Nihilistic aesthetes” had chosen it…Predictably, the names of incendiary antiwar icons, Jane Fonda and Abbie Hoffman, were invoked as cheering for a design that made a mockery of the Vietnam dead…As for the winner with Chinese ancestry, [donor H. Ross] Perot began referring to her as “egg roll.”

If anything, the subject matter of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice is even more fraught, and the decision to place the designers in the background seems partially intended to focus the conversation on the museum itself, and not on those who made it.

Yet there’s a deeper lesson here about architecture and its creators. At first, you might think that a building with a singular message would need to arise from—or be identified with—an equally strong personality, but if anything, the trend in recent years has gone the other way. As Reinier de Graaf notes in Four Walls and a Roof, one of the more curious developments over the last few decades is the way in which celebrity architects, like Frank Gehry, have given up much of their own autonomy for the sake of unusual forms that no human hand or brain could properly design:

In partially delegating the production of form to the computer, the antibox has seemingly boosted the production of extravagant shapes beyond any apparent limits. What started as a deliberate meditation on the notion of form in the early antibodies has turned into a game of chance. Authorship has become relative: with creation now delegated to algorithms, the antibox’s main delight is the surprise it causes to the designers.

Its opposite number is the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which was built with simple materials and techniques that rely for their impact entirely on the insight, empathy, and ingenuity of the designer, who then quietly fades away. The architect can afford to disappear, because the work speaks for those who are unable to speak for themselves. And that might be the most powerful message of all.