Dissecting Transnational Memorials
Book of essay & diagrams 2017-2018 Memorials to transnational events, such as wars, colonial conquest, and global environmental issues, provide sites of study on public feeling across borders. This book traces how the typology’s roots wind through the Renaissance and manifest in colonial-era statuary before surfacing with the global prominence of projects designed in the aftermath of World War Two. Taking a series of projects in the United States and East Asia as locations of study, the book consists of an essay and a set of “memorial dissections,” which seek to take apart the components of a series of monuments in order to understand the histories and conflicts at hand in each symbolic element – and the political actions against them. Though the work explores monuments on a global scale, it proposes a method of analyzing symbolic architecture that can be used to critically examine these emotionally-bound objects on a local scale as well. |