Oregon Humanities Spring/Summer 2007

Cover of Oregon Humanities Spring/Summer 2007
Kathleen Holt
EDITOR
Jennifer Viviano
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Leigh van der Werff
PUBLICATIONS ASSISTANT
Allison Dubinsky
COPY EDITOR
Editorial Advisory Board
Tom Booth
Brian Doyle
Debra Gwartney
Julia Heydon
Marianne Keddington-Lang
Guy Maynard
Win McCormack
Camela Raymond
Kate Sage
Linny Stovall
Rich Wandschneider
Curt Yehnert

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Field Work: Building Memory

A UO lecture series and design competition reveal how and why we should preserve what we might rather forget.

The audience remained, for the most part, silent, as history professor David Luebke showed images of everyday objects on the screen in a darkened University of Oregon lecture room: A collection of forks. A heap of hairbrushes. A pile of scissors. The strongest reaction came from the shoes, amassed in a mound, too many of them to count. Students shook their heads at the sight. A woman gasped audibly. Several people looked away.

The objects, part of an exhibit at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., were confiscated from Jews before they entered Nazi concentration camps. Luebke, who served as staff historian for the museum's permanent exhibition team, says museum designers included these piles of otherwise ordinary items to prompt identification with individual victims. Everyone can imagine using scissors or wearing shoes, but few can comprehend what it must have been like to give up those items, or what might have come next.

"The Holocaust museum is intended to inflict a measure of pain on the people who see it," Luebke said. "It should be morally destabilizing and not allow for complacency."

Luebke was one of seven speakers in the free, public lecture series "Memorials and Museums of Conflict and War," sponsored by the University of Oregon School of Architecture and Allied Arts, the Oregon Humanities Center, and the Carleton and Wilberta Ripley Savage Endowment for International Relations and Peace. Organized by architecture professor Howard Davis, the series is part of a two-year academic program titled "Cities in War, Struggle and Peace: The Architecture of Memory and Life." This year's series deals with the idea of memory; next year it will focus on how cities rebuild after war.

Along with Luebke and Kenneth Helphand, a University of Oregon professor of landscape architecture and author of Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime (excerpted in the Spring 2006 issue of Oregon Humanities), the series featured an international roster of architects, historians, scholars, and museum designers. Speakers gave students firsthand insight into what designers grapple with when creating public memorial sites such as the Holocaust museum, an apartheid museum in South Africa, and the planned memorial at Ground Zero in New York.

Because these lasting reminders hold public significance as well as personal resonance, they're often controversial. Designers must weigh their intentions against possible interpretations every step of the way and remember that they're not just designing structures or arranging objects, they're creating experiences. "You have to think about how you can use powerful architectural techniques to design something inclusive and separate from politics," Davis says. "You have to consider how you can create something that evokes feelings but doesn't tell people what to think."

In conjunction with the lecture series, the UO School of Architecture and Allied Arts held a student memorial design idea competition. With the university campus as their hypothetical site, thirty-five students worked individually and in groups to create plans for public memorials. Although the memorials won't actually be constructed, the process of designing them gave students a chance to think critically about how architectural elements--including building materials, spatial arrangements, and everyday items--become imbued with meaning and open to interpretation in the context of a memorial.

Two entries tied for first place. One, a memorial to the Winnefelly band of Kalapuya Indians, tells the story of the original inhabitants of the southern Willamette Valley. Architecture student Kyle Caldwell designed the memorial, which includes native grasses and the food staple camas lilies to honor the Kalapuya way of life, one hundred mounds of earth to suggest the history embedded in the landscape itself, and nine steel walls to represent the nine waves of epidemics that eventually wiped out the community. The memorial also includes one hundred sculpted figures of Kalapuya people designed to erode over time, a tangible illustration of the loss of a culture, of real people.

"I wanted to provoke thought, to speak to how we have lost these people who were just like us, but I also tried to be as respectful as possible in representing a history we know so little about," Caldwell says. "The biggest challenge was that dance between artistic vision and historical accuracy."

The husband-and-wife team of John Pete, an architecture student, and Nicole Pete, a master's student in education, created the second winning design--a memorial to the Oregon soldiers deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq.

The design features a wall made up of a series of brick columns, which would stand along a campus path of heavy pedestrian traffic. The number of bricks in each column would represent the number of soldiers deployed from Oregon in a particular month. As time passes, the jagged wall of columns would become a visual record of those who are sent off to war as well as a physical barrier to students and pedestrians.

"The memorial is designed to bring the war into our lives, to affect the way we live and the way we move, obstructing our normal paths," John Pete says. The only gaps in the wall would represent months in which no Oregon soldiers head off to war.

Each brick in the memorial would feature a copper plate engraved with an individual soldier's name, hometown, and date of deployment. When soldiers return, their plaques would be removed and given to them in honor of their service. Plates that remain on the wall represent soldiers lost in battle, creating a lasting, evolving record of both the deployment and the death toll of Oregon soldiers.

"We tried not to send a message, and we wanted to avoid the politics around the war," John Pete says. "One thing that stood out for me from the lecture series is that history is written by successive cultures. Without physical records like this one, aspects of history can be erased from memory."

--Sona Pai

Published in the Spring/Summer 2007 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2007 Oregon Council for the Humanities