[Image via Pentagon Memorial Fund.]
Today is the opening of the 9/11 memorial at the Pentagon in Arlington, VA. The major news agencies are all carrying the story and are depicting the whole emotional and nationalist side of this event. What interests me here is the architecture. The memorial consists of a field of trees with “light benches” folding out of the ground. These folded planes are each dedicated to a person who died in the pentagon and the plane that crashed there.
The imagery here strikes a chord with me. This method of landscape design, stitching lines in the ground and then folding planes, is something that I feel quite versed in. This is a design strategy that I employed in two different projects in design school. On that note, I have to say that from the photos I’ve seen I think this jobs has been well thought out and implemented. This method of landscape structuring has become more common since its use in the Vietnam memorial by Maya Lin, but in this project it has been brought down in scope from one large gesture to many small personal gestures. Though I wish there was no reason for it to exist, I look forward to visiting this memorial some day soon.
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