Sacred Spaces: Curbing Memorial Sprawl

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
By Catesby Leigh

An earlier proposal by Frank Gehry for the Eisenhower Memorial raised objections from members of Ike's family. Associated Press

In prehistoric times, when people wanted to commemorate something or someone, they erected a monument—even if it was nothing more than an upright slab or heap of stones. Elaborating on those origins, traditional architecture would come to embrace an array of monumental forms readily recognizable for their symbolic import. But more recently we have seen a remarkable shift from the vertical to the horizontal, with a significant number of major memorials designed as places rather than objects. They are symptomatic of a civic-art disease: memorial sprawl. Historically, memorials have communicated their significance through a combination of mass, verticality and symbolism: the qualities we think of as monumental. When you lose monumentality's conceptual and spatial compactness, you're apt to wind up with a poorly resolved memorial.

Mr. Leigh writes about public art and architecture.