TranscriptUQ Architecture Lecture Series

Quentin Stevens

Event Date – Tuesday, 14 May 2013

Venue – Auditorium 1, Level 2, State Library of Queensland

Speaker – Quentin Stevens

Convenor – Luis Feduchi, Professor of Architectural Design, UQ Architecture

Discuss Online – facebook.com/slqAPDL & twitter.com/slqAPDL (hashtag #APDLlecture)

Website – apdl.slq.qld.gov.au

Speaker 1–Susan Kukucka, State Library of QueenslandHi everyone. Good evening, I'm Susan Kukucka, Executive Manager here at the State Library of Queensland and I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land, the Turrbal people and the Jagera people, and pay respects to their ancestors who came before them. And I'd like to welcome you all here tonight to the UQ Architecture Lecture which we deliver in partnership with the University of Queensland.

We'll have question time at the end as well and if you do want to ask a question if you could just wait for a microphone because again we'll be recording you and it's how we capture your question. So I'd like to hand over now to Professor John Macarthur. Please welcome him. He's the Dean and Head of School at UQ and over to you John.

Speaker 2–Professor John Macarthur, University of QueenslandThank you. Great thanks for coming and it's a great pleasure to welcome an old friend Quentin Stevens. Quentin's Associate Professor at the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University and he's also a Reader at the Bartlett School of Planning University College London. We know him well because in 2002 and '03 he was a Lecturer in urban design at UQ where he worked in the planning program of the school that we once were and was a great colleague to interact with.

He's got a Bachelor of Architecture and a PhD from the University of Melbourne and a Masters in Urban Planning and Policy from the University of Illinois Chicago. His research interests focus on environment behaviour relations with a particular interest in unplanned uses of public space, public art and urban waterfronts. He's held major grants from the Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation in Germany and the Australian Research Council and he's recently been a Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre at the ANU.

He's the author of a number of books which you might have seen outside. "The Ludic City", he’s co-editor of a collection "Loose Space" and "Transforming Urban Waterfronts". His next book, which we’ll hear something about, tonight I think, co-authored with Karen Franck, is "Memorials as Spaces of Engagement, Design Use and Meaning". Look forward to hearing Quentin's talk, let's welcome him to the podium.

Speaker 3–Quentin Stevens, RMITThank you very much for that John and also to Matthew Aitchison and Luis Feduchi for getting me here and to the State Library for hosting us. Now I have to drive and speak.

Okay well I started looking at public memorials about eight years ago and I thought I'd start by saying something about why it is I find contemporary memorials interesting and why perhaps architects and other designers should also find them interesting as something to learn from.

The first thing that's important I think to note is that memorials are very expensive. As an example the recent Martin Luther King Junior memorial in Washington DC cost well over $100 million. Memorials are very physically prominent in the cityscape. Unlike many other buildings they may in fact last forever. They're the elements of our built environment whose designs engender the most intense public scrutiny and debate, both through public competitions and through the general media. And there are of course very large emotional and political expenditures involved in defining, producing and making use of memorials.

But strangely I think then the decision about the design of important memorials is very much in the hands of a small group of people, a competition jury, which is primarily made up of expert designers not experts in the subject being commemorated, although they do have representation.

Another thing that's particularly interesting about memorials as a building type is that they don't have a function. The project brief is primarily symbolic. Even though they don't have a function public memorials do get used by people and I'll show a lot of illustrations of that. So I think they're interesting case studies of how designed objects are experienced and used by the public because they don't come with these strong preconceptions about what the function might be or should be.

And by trying to study commemoration as I am from a lot of different viewpoints I'm also trying to help us think about the functions of design landscapes more generally and the role that design professionals might have in shaping people's experience of the landscape and that's why I've titled my talk a how to guide.

I'm going to look at the objects, the physical objects of memorials, their uses, how they're regulated and how decisions are made about them.

Now how I became interested in this as John had mentioned the earlier books that I was working on, I was doing a wider study of playful unexpected uses of public spaces with Karen Franck. And then at that time in 2005 I happened to visit these two very large scale, abstract public memorials and I observed a lot of visitors using them. And so I did a lot of research since then exploring different ways the visitors engage with these objects.

Now at traditional memorials visitors feelings are affected primarily through their relatively passive perception of visual images and those images tend to offer a reasonably clear reassuring view about the past. You know they're quite didactic in telling us about the past. At most memorials visitors behaviour is also respectfully limited to slow walking, standing, kneeling and laying tributes, but many visitors to these two memorials, as we can see, don't have their thoughts or their bodies focussed on grieving, remembering or being edified. Many people's actions at these two sites respond to feelings such as curiosity, fear, delight, comfort and excitement. And these feelings are stimulated by a wide range of physiological sensations that are afforded by these settings.

And so what I find interesting about the abstract forms of the Lady Diana Memorial and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is that they shift the focus of attention for us as researchers and designers from the representational to the multi-sensory content of the landscape and from the artwork itself to the visitor who's engaging with it. So I'm going to talk quite a bit now about these kinds of engagement that people have with these settings.

People do not stop and stare at these memorials. Their sensations, their encounters with them are often quite incidental. Because these two particular memorials are very open public landscapes which many people can come across them incidentally when they're going somewhere else as part of their everyday journeys through the city. And both of the designs are intended to mix sacredness with everyday life. They're both very open to their surroundings. Many of the people passing through these sites are walking to work, they're joggers, cyclists, tourists who are on their

way somewhere else, children, and these accidental visitors are primarily affected by the physiological sensations prompted by the landscapes. And a lot of that happens at a very subconscious level, people aren't necessarily thinking about how they're encountering the landscape.

A second point in addition to this incidental nature of our experience is that the stimulus is very rich and varied, or stimuli. It's only in a visual sense that we could say these two memorials are minimal. As people move very close to these memorials and as they move inside them or over the top of them and they sit on them it actually becomes quite difficult to view the memorial and a rich variety of other intense sensations become apparent.

The Diana Memorial's concrete channel has a great variety of geometry in a section of it and that sculpts the water into many different shapes, different textures, different sounds, different speeds of movement and people, as we can see here, immerse their bodies to feel the coolness of the water, to feel the water moving against their bodies.

At the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe the undulating ground surface also has this kind of characteristic of engaging the bodies of visitors. Rather than the ground being something neutral that you don't really notice, as in when we walk around inside most buildings, the ground at this memorial makes visitors aware of their own motion, the risk and the speed and the effort that's required to change direction, to move into different parts of the site.

Now in addition to this wider theme of sensory engagement I also want to focus on the performative aspects of these landscapes, that is what people are doing. Because these are very theatrical settings. The sensory perceptions that people have when they go to these sites are not something that's just passively received from the objects. The visitors themselves are important producers of sensations, they call out, they hit against the surface, they move the water, so through their actions both conscious and unconscious their own perceptions and also those of other visitors are being shaped through the, and that's modulated through the materiality of the objects themselves, the water, the concrete and the audio and physical affects that they have upon our bodies.

A similar sensory richness and performative engagement is also something you can see with many kinds of informal what's often called spontaneous memorials like these ones which we're also studying. In the bottom we see two images of the September '11 temporary commemorations directly after the event and above are two images of collections of flowers and cards after the July seventh bombings in London.

The next theme I want to talk about is the relation that this sensory experience of the sites might have to meanings. And in both of these, both of the previous cases, the designers are conscious of an attempt to form what I would call a sensory analogy between our experience and the historical people and events that are being commemorated.

In the case of the Diana fountain the idea of that landscape is to make children happy by supporting their play and that's supposed to in a way reflect Diana's own affection for children and the charitable works that she did with children. So the memorial is intended to have in a way the same affect that Diana herself had on children rather than being a symbol of those feelings and ideas. And so in a way the bodily and auditory delights of that memorial are its meaning.

With the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe Peter Eisenman notes of his minimalist design that he was not trying to represent the Holocaust. He believes that this is in fact impossible and that representations only trivialise the scale of the events. Instead Eisenman wanted to introduce in memorial visitors physiological feelings which would somehow be similar to that of, to those of Holocaust victims, what Holocaust victims themselves might have experienced. He placed then the rows of dark tall stelae as they're called at this memorial close together so that people walking between them would feel very confined. The aisles are intentionally too narrow for people to walk next to each other so that you're separated from your companions. Some of the stelae lean out over the top of the visitor to make them feel weak and insignificant and in addition to that the

overall concrete mass tends to shield out views and the noise of the surrounding city so you're sort of cut off. People then are supposed to feel this memorial's purpose and act it out rather than reading it. And the physical discomfort of, which subconsciously is supposed to come to your awareness, is supposed to provoke some sort of metaphysical discomfort, thinking why do I feel like this in this site.

A particular illustration of that in the images here is that as the ground plane sinks away when you move towards the centre of the site and the stelae progressively rise up visitors have an incremental sense of moving inside this memorial. Many visitors, as we can see here, linger at the point where the stelae have risen to their eye level and many of them pose for photographs here and I've got I think about 20 different instances of groups of people coming into the site and hesitating and some of them aren't willing to move any deeper inside the field. There seems then to be some kind of existential fear of getting out of your depth and being somehow swallowed up inside the memorial.

Now that's all well and good but I think in the larger picture Eisenman's efforts to make people reflect on the historical tragedies through these perceptual analogies is rather at odds with most people's observed playful responses to the sensory stimuli that this site calls for.

I've just got a couple of slides here that collect together a lot of illustrations of the variety of ways that people position their bodies in relation to these two built environments. So we can see a whole lot of different bodily performances which explore possibilities of location, posture and movement as people feel their way around these sites. And this is why I think there's a link to design in a much broader sense, to look at the ways that an object which isn't designed for function actually serves a lot of different bodily functions in terms of how we move and position ourselves.

At the Diana Memorial for example people walk circuits around the ring of the fountain and the sloping topography provides an enjoyable awareness of the sense of the body's own motion and we see that when people bring inline skates and scooters and move down the path or walk down in the water. They also put their hands or feet into the water to interact with it, sensing and testing its strength, splashing their friends. Similarly at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe people explore the diversity and the challenge of different spatial relationships to the sculpture. The stelae's different heights relate to the human body's capacity for movement, bending, stepping, reaching and grasping. And you can see that children and adults of different sizes find different parts of this field to sort of suit their capacities, either to do things easily or to do them in difficult ways. So people lean against, sit on and lie on the stelae in many different ways but it's not so that they can see the memorial better, it's partly to optimise their own bodily comfort or alternatively to enhance the thrill of engaging with the setting.

Now so that's sort of a picture of one body of work where I've looked at what people do. The next thing I did that's connected with that is to try to understand the ways in which this behaviour is–there are attempts to regulate this behaviour on the sites in the way they're managed. So look, particularly in the case of the Memorial in Berlin, at how people's actions are conditioned by the context, by rules and by the presence of other visitors around them at the site. Because many public activities which are unrelated to commemoration of the Holocaust spill into this site which is very close to many of the major historic landmarks in the centre of Berlin. For example the Football World Cup held in summer of 2006 and also Berlin's well known techno music festival The Love Parade.

The memorials, this memorial's potential to focus visitors thoughts on the Holocaust is also compromised by many tourists attractions that surround the site and in summer 2005 there were actually two small wagons parked on a vacant lot across the street from the memorial. One of them sold souvenirs and the other, which was decorated like a medieval thatched cottage, sold hot sausages and it had tables and umbrellas where people could sit and look across at the memorial.

Now the Foundation who manages the memorial and the media both criticised these intrusions for undermining the moral gravity of the memorial but I think it's quite paradoxical that the Foundation then went on and developed a permanent visitor centre which runs along one full side of the

memorial site. It has cafes, bars, a jewellery store, a souvenir shop, outdoor tables and an upstairs viewing platform with a restaurant.

In terms of managing people's experience and their use of the site there's also in both of these cases rules that are posted and I always find signs posted at a public space as particularly interesting because they're usually pointing out the things that you can not do and that you want to do. If you didn't want to do it or you weren't able to do it there'd be no need to put a sign so it's always interesting to see what the managers of a site understand about its useability in terms of the signs telling you what not to do.

The posted rules here, although they're too small to see, you may guess that all of the images here are people doing things that are forbidden. Now many of these rules aren't about safety, they're strangely I think judgments about socially appropriate ways to behave at a memorial site but again not ways that are actually physically prevented but ways that they don't want you to act. And the same goes here in the memorial in Berlin.

In this case guards are constantly walking around the site perimeter but there are limits on how stringently they enforce the rules and that reflects the particular subject matter because big signs, uniformed guards yelling at people would send the wrong message about contemporary German society.

Contraventions of the written rules at this memorial are very common and very diverse. Why is that? Well the first reason is that visitors don't actually know that particular behaviours are forbidden. They've since gone back and realised that writing the signs just in German probably won't change the behaviour of foreign tourists so they have it in English as well as German. But in any case visitors are frequently surprised and contrite when they're reprimanded for their behaviours. Secondly visitors often transgress the rules against running, yelling, climbing and jumping because this physical setting provides such excellent opportunities and stimulus for behaving in that way and you may have gathered from many of these images that it's very easy to walk incrementally like steps up from flush with the ground to five metres in the air without really thinking too hard about what you're doing. As you can see some illustrations there.

Now all these cases also illustrate a further point about the contextualisation of our experience of these sites which is onlookers responses to other visitors behaviour. Very few visitors to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe have a solitary encounter with the artwork. Even if you go there late at night there will be other people there. Each visitor's experience of the memorial and their own actions are influence by the behaviours of their companions and strangers. Two points about this social context I think are important. One is that when people are passively watching other people they aren't focussed on the artwork and it's meanings, it's just a backdrop to what they see other people doing. The second point is that the visibility of people committing risky asks such as climbing prompts other visitors to copy them and so we see this kind of copycat or even competitive behaviour using parallel rows of the stelae.

In many hours of observation, I think I probably went to this site about 30 times and observed it for about 50 hours, I only once saw a visitor reprimand a stranger. An elderly visitor yelled at a teenager to stop jumping across the tops as we can see there, of the stelae.

On a second occasion a university student that we can see at the bottom right here used two stelae as a work surface for an hour to prepare some artwork. She had masking tape and big sheets of paper laid out. Several visitors watched her, most of them were bemused, one elderly man we can see here looked on in great anger but he still didn't stop what she was doing. Because the memorial is a very open public setting with few official rules there's no firm basis for chastising strangers. And I think again what I said about having guards yelling at people sending the wrong message, both this memorial and the Diana Memorial, really their publicness, part of that is the idea that we should tolerate other people's actions. So one thing that's written on the signs at the Diana Memorial is people come here for different reasons, please respect how other people act.

So maybe one of the lessons here for designers, sponsors and managers of public art is that very large distinctive objects placed in the public realm are actually likely to attract a very broad spectrum of interest and uses especially when these objects are not designed to have a practical use. So it's the very unpracticality of them that makes them such popular things to use.

Okay the next piece, that's really the end of that theme about behaviour and how it's sort of conditioned by rules and by other users. The next thing I'd gone on to do and was inspired by looking at these two memorials and thinking why are they designed this way, why are they in these locations, why are they so open to varieties of public use, was to think well there's a lot of memorials when you look around–London has about 400, Washington has about 150, Canberra has somewhere between 50 and 100. Are there in fact plans and regulations in a broader sense for how memorials should be designed, where they should be put, how they might be encountered.

So I went then to look for cities which have a lot of memorials which might in fact, thinking they might have plans. And I looked naturally enough then at master plan capital cities. The first three examples being Canberra, Washington and Ottawa in Canada. Now these are all post-colonial capitals that are more or less designed from scratch a couple of hundred years ago and the memorials that are placed in these national capitals.

So I looked at whether these cities in fact had any kinds of regulations and interestingly enough all three of these cities just in the last decade have all come up with new master plans for future memorials with a time horizon looking over the next 100 years. Where might they put new memorials, what kind of new memorial themes might they be trying to pursue, what sort of parameters might they have to sort of shape what the future of commemorative space in these capital cities might be.

And now I think it's sort of probably quite evident to people that the memorial landscapes of national capitals have a very important influence on collective identity by telling us who we are and who we were, where we came from and where we're going.

Okay so here's the illustrations of these master plans for Washington, Canberra and Ottawa at the bottom. And I then went on to expand that to look at some examples, I've looked now at six different cities and what sort of master planning they have for commemoration. Apart from those three master plan capitals I've also looked at two other cities which we could call evolved capitals because they've existed for many hundreds of years and their physical form has changed as has their system of government and therefore all the values that are tied into the city form. So here we see an illustration in London of the different centres of power that that city has but most of the commemoration is, as we can see in this highlighted image of the city of Westminster, this is the city of Westminster's own heat map of where all the memorials are clustered. Now 70% of all the current proposals that have come forward for memorials in the city of Westminster are still in those red zones so it's obviously sort of builds on itself that such centres have a lot of symbolic weight to them.

Another example I've looked at is Berlin which is a city which has been monumentally replanned several times. The images at the top are of a site that doesn't exist anymore because since two world wars came and passed Berlin doesn't really have the same reason to have a Victory Avenue anymore. And the largest coordinated memorial complex that Berlin has among its many, many fragmentary histories is the remaining section of the Berlin Wall which in itself was a difficult feat to gather together even though the site was sort of there historically to commemorate in.

And the last example I've looked at which is not actually a national capital although it's a very important city on both the national and the world stage is New York and because New York is in some difference to the master plan capitals is a city governed by a property market it's very difficult for the city to allocate sites for future memorials and so memorial master planning only happens at the scale of small parks and precincts like we see here. Battery Park at the south end of the Manhattan, it has approximately 20 memorials and you can see that all the orange outlined memorials and all the green outlined ones are all going to get relocated to be where these purple dots are because they're going to have a bike path and a pedestrian promenade and you can see

some of what it will look like, that all these existing memorials will be rearranged somatically to be explorers, defenders, settlers. So they're sort of retelling a story with the existing elements.

So that's enough of the illustrations. I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the findings and conclusions that came from looking at these six cases so far. The first being about the sites that were chosen.

Memorials are highly concentrated in all these cities either in one central open space, and that means that lesser memorials are usually shoved out somewhere else, or they're on a few major axes. Memorials in historic cities are more often on sites directly connected with the persons or the events that are being commemorated. Like we can see here in New York City the African Burial Ground where they found the 20,000 black residents of the city in earlier centuries had been buried and of course the World Trade Centre site. This happens more often in historic cities than it does in new master plan capitals where not much of history has actually happened. Although even in these cases it's not, it's surprisingly rare to have memorial sites that are actually historic sites.

Old memorials are seldom removed although as we saw in the illustration of Battery Park they are sometimes rearranged to improve amenity.

Secondly about the design of individual memorials. Many, like these two in Canberra, are, many recent memorials are very wide low forms that create enclosed settings, so called spatial memorials. They define axes to other sites and they also allow more names and information to be displayed where visitors can touch them and that's very important in the case for example as we see at the bottom of police memorials where there's a lot of people who want to come and mourn in relation to relatively recent deaths.

With these kinds of memorials it's relatively hard in a master planning sense to think about how you might rearrange them or integrate them into wider urban streetscapes or into commemorative assemblages. So they tend to either by as we see here dumped into parks or they're integrated into a large scale urban master plan like the World Trade Centre site. And because these memorials are landscape schemes and because they're taking up park space they often have to provide wider open space amenity and they are used by a very broad public. So there are more programmatic requirements that tend to get built into memorials that have these forms.

A third theme is about the nature of the planning aims and tools. For city councils, the people who run and manage these capitals, there's a problem of site supply in relation to increasing demand for memorials. Some of the planning responses have been that it's usually required that you have to wait between 10 and 25 years after an event before you can commemorate it. Another initiative is that some initiatives are channelled into temporary installations rather than permanent memorials. A third approach is to provide enhanced information about potential sites. So in Washington, it's quite small here but you might get a general sense, that in Washington's 2001 plan they evaluated over 400 potential sites for future memorials, provided a detailed analysis like this of the best 100 sites and they promoted reserving 20 visible axial sites, that's the red dots on this illustration, for the most significant future commemorations. It also in doing that defined a new spatial element that didn't exist in the city before this idea of the waterfront crescent on the two riverfronts.

Another much simpler response which comes from planning generally is spatial zoning as there is in Canberra, that certain memorial subjects have to go in certain precincts.

London illustrates the potential of expanding or reorganising existing precincts like this one, Hyde Park Corner. Now this memorial arch when it was built in the 1830s I think originally stood about 60 metres over here and it ran parallel to the arch here by Decimus Burton. And so they moved it so the traffic, once car traffic existed, could more easily move through the corner. And then later on they actually changed the configuration of the intersection into a roundabout and you might see that on the left of the upper image the memorials that have previously been isolated on small traffic island where no-one could go to them became part of this central precinct. And then even more recently with that increased amount of traffic memorials have been added into this site which help

to define it as a precinct by shielding some of the noise and views and fumes of the traffic. So that's the Australian and New Zealand War Memorials at Hyde Park Corner.

New memorial sites often get opened up in existing parks but in some cases they can be produced through landfill as in Washington where the west end of Washington's Mall didn't exist at the time L'Enfant planned it. Or by the demolition of old buildings including the World Trade Centre site.

New precinct scale commemorative schemes can be created like Anzac Parade but since World War II, despite the amount of history that's now wanting to be commemorated, no new precincts have been created in historic cities.

Now with the shoe on the other foot there's also the issue of how commemoration might serve other planning objectives outside of memory. Capital city planning agencies sometimes pursue other strategic objectives by using commemorative proposals. So we see three examples of that in the three master plan capitals. Here in Canberra Reconciliation Place enhanced pedestrian accessibility between the freestanding modernist icons like the National Gallery and the National Library. And then this proposal for an Immigration Bridge was supposed to link the government quarter even further across the lake to the National Museum. Ottawa's Confederation Boulevard, all of the government precinct was on the Ottawa side of the river but the idea of the Boulevard was partly to expand economic development into Gatineau on the Quebec side of the river.

Washington's Navy Memorial which we can see here is a very large plaza for public events so it was specifically set in this form so that there could be events somewhere and it's also a catalyst for economic development in its surroundings.

The fourth theme is about the identities that are being conveyed through commemoration. Is there in fact a single uniform collective identity or to what extent are there differential identities that are being commemorated in national capitals. Which brings the question about whether democracies actually make room for different memories and indeed negative or conflictual memories. So the three illustrations I have here in Canberra sort of speak to that because none of them were built. This is one to women's suffrage, this is one to immigration and this is one to World Wars I and II which most people believe is already commemorated down here. And that in itself speaks to the importance of subject matter in what's commemorated in cities.

The spatial and numerical dominance of military themes in commemoration and the concomitant lack of attention that's been given to civil concepts such as democracy and diversity. The idea of sacrificing oneself for the state keeps on getting extended so it now includes quasi and non-military subjects like peace keeping, the police, emergency services, aid workers and war nurses. Women and minorities in that context are commemorated more for their foreign military service than they are for their domestic struggles for recognition and rights. And as an interesting fact connected with that, among Washington's 150 memorials there's only four of them that are specifically to women.

Policies in all these capitals often express a desire for civic commemorative subjects but they lack strategic mechanisms to promote delivery of them and that's a longstanding problem in planning. You can wish for anything but do you actually have a mechanism for getting it.

So called victims memorials or memorials to sort of other groups can seldom be fitted well into the larger commemorative assemblages of cities as we can see in this case where the Women's Suffrage Memorial was not allowed to go on the main axis. They can't fit in because they're thematically at odds with the overarching positive narratives of culture and national identity under which traditional hero statues and monuments have been gathered.

A further point about another group, and this relates to Reconciliation Place in Canberra, is that for all three post-colonial states their roots and expropriation of indigenous rights remain masks. So one of the tools, or one of the functions of planning as a tool is in fact to defend hegemonic discourse of the nation and its role. So so much for democracy and diversity.

I'm not expecting you to read this but it's just to illustrate that these capitals usually have very sophisticated, very detailed legislation. In Washington the 1986 Commemorative Works Act was introduced to ensure consistency in the decisions that were made about appropriate memorial subject matter, siting and design through a 24-step approvals process. Now there's 24 steps. Getting approval from congress is step number 5 and you've still got 19 more hurdles that you have to jump through. The Amended Commemorative Works Act of 2003 defined the Washington Mall as "A substantially completed work of civic art and no new memorials can be built inside this reserve". You'd have to pass an act of legislation to allow you to do it and then you would have to pass another bill in the congress to specifically get permission for the new memorial you wanted.

So in these kinds of ways planning policies usually protect the existing city plan and the existing commemorative layout. But something that's odd about that is the fact that many of these very cherished commemorative precincts are much more recent than what the city's original plan has had in mind and in fact they're physically very different to what the original designers had in mind. Anzac Parade only dates from 1965 and wasn't part of the Griffin Plan, that would be a commemorative precinct, and the Washington Mall's main memorials only date from the 1920s onwards but Washington of course existed for about 150 years before then.

Berlin by contrast has been replanned with new axes several times and now each individual proposal gets judged more or less just on its own merits. There's not much thought for how it might fit in with other things that have gone on around it.

Another issue connected with authorisation is that it's very difficult to balance the different interests behind the authority to create a memorial. That is to reconcile for example the vocal interests of local residents of the capital with a representative long-term view of what national values might be.

I mentioned before about the idea of temporary commemorations as a planning tool. Supporting temporary commemorations has come to the fore as a means of addressing the immediate needs that people have to remember and to mourn. This also allows more variety without generating so much opposition, it reduces the risk and people can test out more possible forms and possible meanings. Like we see here with the spontaneous commemorations of the September 11 attacks and also the official commemoration, The Tribute In Light, which happens on every anniversary. These kinds of memorials show that not all commemorative planning has to promote permanence because people's memories and feelings are strongest at certain times. And in that context as well I think the decision to keep the fourth plinth of London's Trafalgar Square open and changing rather than lock it down with a new triumphant permanent memorial shows openness to future themes and to future forms of remembrance. For those of you that don't know this is just one of many examples of artworks which have been placed onto this fourth plinth which stood empty for 150 years.

Now my aim with this work by comparing national capitals now that commemorate is to expand it to a more comprehensive set of cases. So the next step is to look at three newly democratic capitals and the examples I have in mind are Seoul, Budapest and Pretoria. These are democracies that have emerged from a range of other regimes, whether it's military dictatorships, communism or apartheid, without having had a significant earlier period of democratic government. So one of my hypotheses there is that these different types of cities and different polities employ very different procurement processes for public memorials which relates in different outcomes and different stories being told.

Okay, I'm not going to talk in much detail about the procurement process because it's a project we're just starting but essentially we're going to look at the mechanisms of what decisions get made, by whom, where and when, under what kinds of conditions those decisions get made and how that then feeds back into the design process. So I won't go through all of the many numbered things here but just to say in conclusion that in summary an object that's designed without a function, like a memorial, often turns out to be very functional in many unexpected ways. If the function of public memorials, and this mostly applies to abstract examples, if their function is not to be didactic and to tell us about history what in fact is their function. What kinds of topics should be memorialised and why and in what ways might we go about expanding the repertoire, the sort of

thematic scope of commemoration. And how can we get the public involved because it seems from a lot of the evidence that the public only engage with commemorative designs once they've been built. The competitions and briefs are usually rather closed, and certainly the decisions themselves are quite closed, but these competition, decisions and briefs need to tackle questions about commemorating what and for whom and what people might actually do when they go to the site.

For designers I think it's also difficult to progress the idea of memorials and you can see that in minimalist examples that come out only decades later that minimalism was a current approach in sculpture. It's difficult to test out ideas when you only have one multimillion project every five or 10 years and that again points to the benefit of having temporary works. Although the question arises of as to whether a temporary work is in fact a memorial, does it really retain and pass on a memory of something.

If you think back to the issue of guards and other people's behaviour at a site, decisions about how memorial sites, as indeed all public space, how these sites will be managed are crucial. Design is not the whole story. All the things that the managers of sites do afterwards have a big influence upon what we think, how we experience, and in connection with that I know this is not something that designers really like to think about but designs often get modified later. They get expanded, history keeps changing, how can that be predicted and guided or is it in fact possible to do that. Which really brings me to the overall conclusion which is it's very hard to plan in advance for commemorating events that haven't even happened yet. Thank you.

Speaker 2–Professor John Macarthur, University of QueenslandWe'll take to these chairs here and leave some time for questions and comments. Can we have the lights up in the auditorium a little bit please? Great, thanks. So there's a question here. Could everyone please wait until we get the microphone so that everyone can hear. People will come with the microphone.

QuestionYeah how can you have a whole city block in Berlin with that many faces of concrete and not have an obvious graffiti problem?

Speaker 3–Quentin Stevens, RMITWell yes this was actually very problematic in this example. They, it was part of the brief that they would have graffiti proofing coating, like a Teflon coating sprayed onto all of these. Some people may know that the company that was, that won the contract to do that was the same company that had created the cyanide gas that was used in the concentration camp. So that sort of put a stop to the works for quite a while until they realised that it was actually quite difficult to find a company that had the expertise to do this that hadn't had those kinds of historical involvements. But it conveniently allows me to mention another point I guess that a lot of these debates and issues around the design and use in fact help people to engage with the memories and the meanings because it brings up these kinds of difficulties and people argue how are we going to do this, what are we trying to commemorate. So the debate is part of remembering.

Speaker 2–Professor John Macarthur, University of QueenslandAnthony?

QuestionYeah I just intrigued the way that you highlighted the play, the aspect of play around some of these memorials, and what about the relationship between the memorial and theme parks? You know the kinds of play that you engage. I mean the Diana Memorial looks like something from Wet N Wild at a certain level so, you know, what is it that differentiates the activities or?

Speaker 3–Quentin Stevens, RMITWell I wonder if the sort of trope of a theme park is something that's better suited to traditional memorials where things are highly scripted. You know we know that we're supposed to move and stop in certain ways at certain points. If anything I'd say that's, you know, maybe less so. I mean I

haven't been to Wet N Wild but I gather that these things are very scripted. Where you go in, you queue up and then you have the experience and then you have the photo opportunities here and there and at least these examples sort of are much more like your 1970s adventure playground where it's sort of more up for grabs. I mean I think it's an interesting theme to think about the ways in which things are or aren't scripted or the sort of, the experiences that are sort of set out and staged for us. But yeah I think that applies across all kinds of examples.

Speaker 2–Professor John Macarthur, University of QueenslandQuentin I wondered about the strong contrast you make between traditional monuments and modern monuments and you talked at one point about the monuments you looked at being spatial monuments and them being low and flat and I guess there's an implication there that the extent that the contrast extends to traditional monuments being vertical and upright and there's a couple of issues that I wonder about there. I mean one I wondered if you've done any studies of the modern use of traditional monuments? Whether the same kind of activities, I mean whether the changes were the design ethos of monument makers or whether it's in the way people enjoy monuments? I mean you showed a slide at Trafalgar Square I was thinking of the kids climbing on the lions around Nelson's feet. I mean did the same kind of behaviours that you observed in Berlin or in the Diana Memorial occur around older monuments where that in the past would have been seen as inappropriate?

Speaker 3–Quentin Stevens, RMITI think the answer's yes. I think it's not black and white. Clearly there are also these varieties of exploration in more figural kinds of memorials. I guess I just find it useful as a contrast to look at the most abstract simplistic settings because they've stripped away so many of those other things and we can look at these other aspects in isolation. But I certainly agree that well within the restrictions that a lot of traditional memorials might have, ie that they're built up onto platforms or there are fences or other kinds of control features, you know that they have verticality which means you can't reach them, that nevertheless many of these other kinds of experiential dimensions are there.

We are perhaps less aware of them because we're focussing, we have, there is something to focus our attention around. So, you know, and I think that the changes to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington are a good case in point there. The people, a lot of people felt that the simple form of the two walls with the names was not enough, maybe it wasn't scripted enough or it didn't meet their expectations, and therefore these more traditional statues were added in so that they could have the experience. And the most generous sort of reading of that is that this is the best of all possible outcomes because it allows the new to happen and also that it conforms to people's more conventional historical ideas of how things are commemorated. And so like a theme park you can go to the part of it that sort of suits your view the best.

Speaker 2–Professor John Macarthur, University of QueenslandYeah I guess I agree that in the more abstract memorials there's less, where does the absence counts I guess, does it count in the observation of other people's use of it or in people's actual bodily interaction with it.

Speaker 3–Quentin Stevens, RMITWell I think a good illustration is the fact that when many people go to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe they step on it without realising that it is the memorial. Like they'll stand up on one of these low stelae at the perimeter in order to have a better view of the rest of it. And I think that in a memorial, I take your point about climbing on the lions at Trafalgar Square, but for the most part people are conscious of where they are and where the memorial is when they're interacting with it and that's sort of been dissolved away so.

Speaker 2–Professor John Macarthur, University of QueenslandJust to be provocative, I mean what would you make of the more art historical aspect that said that, you know, like in many ways the monuments that you're looking at are kind of the trickle down from modern ideas about what sculpture is and some of the things you're talking about are straight forward dictums out of, you know, accounts of minimalism that our perceptual experience a

sculpture is based on the absence of some sort of figuration. I mean I can think about like lots of World War I memorials that like show signs of auteurism or futurism that are sort of like polite acculturations like avant-garde movements into public monuments. I mean could you not make an account that some of the more horizontal minimalist style monuments have the same kind of relationship between, you know, high culture and what's acceptable in the public sphere?

Speaker 3–Quentin Stevens, RMITYes I certainly think, and I tried to mention that it took several decades for these things to go out onto the public stage after they'd been tested out in the more rarefied environment of the gallery. But again I think that this sense of a boundary, whether it's through a pedestal or a platform or a fence, it very much changes the nature of the relationship when one does not presuppose that there is the viewer and there is the thing that is being viewed and instead these things are just placed out into an environment where the users already have their own understanding of what they can do and where they can do it. And placing an object into that setting is not nearly the same as placing the same kind of object here on the stage in the front where we're directed to sort of engage with it in a particular way. So I think that's all, Walter Benjamin probably said it best right, the idea that there is an auratic dimension to these sculptural explorations but not, that's not so much the case in the public realm perhaps.

QuestionI'm just wondering if that was the success of the work though in that it's these things that already exist but they kind of have this opportunity where they kind of bleed into your experience of the city. So rather than being a rarefied object they're something that you're already participating in, just that once you get amongst it or you realise you're standing on it?

Speaker 3–Quentin Stevens, RMITSuccess in what context?

QuestionWhen you're talking about a memorial or public art.

Speaker 3–Quentin Stevens, RMITWell I guess I see it this way. I think that this is a very successful piece of landscape but it's very, very expensive just as a landscape and also very problematic for some people who want it to be something more than just a useful landscape. So it is hard to weight up whose success.

QuestionYeah, yeah. I think that's the role of designers sometimes to not necessarily just meet public's expectations but to challenge them and that challenge might come in hurt for some people, come easily.

Speaker 3–Quentin Stevens, RMITWell I'm assuming these are the kind of conversations that are had in the juries when decisions are made about these things. But again the juries are not the people who are actually putting forward the money or wanting to go and remember. I'm fine with it because I don't have a personal connection to most of these memorials that I'm going and looking at but if I did I might see, I might value all those different kinds of interpretations in a different way.

QuestionJust a last point… like the way you observe other people engaging with the others using it so you see the elderly gentleman go oh you know you shouldn't be behaving that way, like that's where the work resides, it's in the interactions or the challenging? It's not this like monetary thing of oh, you know ...

Speaker 3–Quentin Stevens, RMITYes, yes to a certain extent I agree. But again it's not just what I feel about it that matters in these contexts. There's a lot at stake. I think it's an open question. I don't think there is a right or a

wrong answer but these things do come into conflict with other views of how these things should be done. Perhaps, yeah.

QuestionSo I just had a question about what you thought the design intention was behind some of these monuments because were these effects, you know, where the public engage with the monuments, actually unexpected by the designer or not? Because arguably the Holocaust Memorial could have been a quarter of the size and three times the height and be inaccessible to the public to stand on the top but the designer didn't do that. And they must be aware that that is a potential that someone could walk on it. And it is huge, I mean you couldn't really, really police it at all to control what people do.

Speaker 3–Quentin Stevens, RMITWell we did interview Eisenman about it and he was very I thought a bit disingenuous in saying well that wasn't what I anticipated but that's okay too. Which I think comes back to the last question, the success doesn't necessarily lie in the artist knowing what the outcome will be but in setting these things into play. And he claimed that it never occurred to him, this to me is quite odd for an arch, it never occurred to him that these increments are like steps. I don't know if he never looked at a section drawing and had any people in the section drawing but it seems more or less, you know, usable whether it was planned ergonomically or not. Now whether an architect is fulfilling sort of the brief in the very wider sense in sort of dismissing themselves from any kind of accountability for how things might get used. I also find interesting as a response to the idea of how do we commemorate, you know, one of the worst events that ever happened. It's not to say it's wrong I just find it unusual that things could sort of turn out that way. But yeah so it is hard to sort of pin the designers down to say they were wrong or they definitely thought it was going to be such and such a way.

QuestionYeah why on earth did they change Vietnam Memorial in Washington? I find it the most incredible memorial I've ever seen anywhere else in the world and I'm not, I was never part of the war. Why did they do it?

Speaker 3–Quentin Stevens, RMITI feel like I'm being asked to defend or attack individual memorials a lot. So I think I'll just agree with you and say yes I also find it very moving even though I had no direct involvement in the Vietnam War. It's maybe important to take into account that the additions that were made were in a way a compromise which in a political sense that enabled the design to get done in the first place. So without the additions that were made relatively soon after the memorial it was a lot less likely that such a scheme would have been the one awarded.

QuestionThis very recent change?

Speaker 3–Quentin Stevens, RMITNo the first statues were put there I think in 1984 only two years after the original memorial had opened. And in fact they had, the proponents of the statues had wanted them to be at the apex, sorry at the junction of the two walls, so that the walls would become a backdrop to that thing and that was sort of stopped. And there was also going to be a flagpole on the vertex. So there were a lot of compromises even to get it to the, you know, relatively relaxed sort of relationships that they have now. But, you know, the constituencies for these kinds of projects are incredibly complex and very seldom well represented in all of the debates and decision that go on and so I want to, in this larger project we want to get to the bottom hopefully, or get towards the bottom, of how some of these problems emerge and how best to resolve them when and through what means.

QuestionI guess do you believe the importance of monuments has remained fairly constant throughout history or is it slowly on the wind down? Just because like when I went to the States Memorial in Washington there just seemed to be a heap of monuments stood up for when the American

revolution and all that sort of stuff then ever since those big events, you know, there's not that much stuff. And for me monuments only get put up by the people who care about them and about the money and most of the time monuments in the generalistic sense don't affect most people if you know what I mean. Depending on what event it is or what it's trying to signify or remember.

Speaker 3–Quentin Stevens, RMITWell I try to avoid using the word monuments unless I'm talking about something that I think of as positive. So if we're talking about memorials which are often about very bad things and not necessarily things that everyone supports. Yes I think it comes and goes. There was a phase of memorial mania or statue mania around 100 years ago in the late 19th century which a lot of people have linked to the rise of mass production because it became very cheap to, basically to buy and assemble brass, bronze sorry, bronze or cast iron statues, and so there was this huge glut of proposals in cities like New York where every community group said we want to build a memorial to our hero.

Things did wane but when we talk about, you know, who the constituency or who the sponsors are behind a memorial it's interesting to think about the big gap that exists between when the events happened and when they're commemorated. We're building a memorial in Canberra very soon to the Boer War. This was 120 years ago that this event happened, we're talking about the great, great grandchildren of some of the people who fought in that war. So what the chain of connection is between the events that happened then and how we feel about ourselves now, you know, is not straight forward. The World War II Memorial in Washington was only built a few years ago and one of the main proponents in the media behind that was Tom Hanks who was actually born after the war finished but he also, partly because he was born in the baby boom straight after, saw it as an event of monumental significance to the whole of American history not just to him as an individual.

So they're clearly used to paint pictures, you know to develop understandings of who we are and who we were and who we will be. But not in any simple way of saying we're building a memorial to us or building a memorial to me and the people like me who have some direct connection to this event.

One argument is in fact that people build memorials when they're least confident and self assured about their identity as a way of sort of shoring up sort of weaknesses in their sense of sense.

QuestionQuentin I was struck at the planning aspects of it that you bought out which I thought was very interesting. The way that the placing of monuments is often used as a pretext for discussing and resolving other kind of problems in city planning. But I was also struck about how much the schemes you showed in Canberra and Washington, and even Ottawa, were very much about the monument and the axis. So they have this kind of implicit memory of baroque, you know ROM point and axial city planning which seems very conservative in relation to ideas that we might have about the form of cities and archaising really. So I wonder what you had to say about that and whether there are examples where the placement of monuments speaks to a different kind of idea about city form than the axis and the fixed point?

Speaker 3–Quentin Stevens, RMITWell I think you're right and it goes back even further than the baroque probably to ancient Rome and after the baroque it probably has, I guess it's more current relevance from the city beautiful movement that was really, the more I look at it, the world's Columbian exposition in Chicago in the 1890s that created this model of what a great modern capital city should look like even though we wouldn't refer to the detailing of the buildings and sculptures then as modern. But the idea that you could abstractly represent the nation and its progress through looking back to historical forms. And I still think that strangely the baroque which was not a particularly democratic period of history has become de facto the model for how we see democratic societies.

In answer to your question there are I think some interesting other models and one of the papers that I recently did with a couple of other authors was about what's called counter memorials, that is memorials that counter pose themselves in formal terms and in terms of the meanings and

histories that they're representing to these conventions in order to say history is more complicated than that and these things have their limitations and their errors about them. And so memorials like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington that is not on axis, which is sunken instead of raised up, which is dark rather than white, which is very abstract rather than very figurative and descriptive, there is sort of an alternative vocabulary that's developed, especially in Germany but I think Reconciliation Place in Canberra is another example of that, that history might be about broken shards of knowledge about the past and how it relates to the present which is what Reconciliation Place is supposed to in a sense represent. And then we might not see it as one grand narrative but as a series of partial stories told by different groups that are, that are not fitting together. And I guess I was indirectly trying to hint to that by saying that not all memorials do fit together into these big pictures.

Speaker 2–Professor John Macarthur, University of QueenslandWell it's been a very stimulating discussion and unless there's another question I think we should thank Dr Quentin Stevens very much for his talk tonight.