October 16, 2006

click image to view larger Image © USDA Forest Service

Fresh, slender tree trunks and shoots of young grass cobbled together with gnarled wreckage from the fallen Twin Towers—as if products from a collective conscious, these similarly constructed odes to the lives lost on 9/11 have sprung up across the country. For the past four years, Living Memorials Project, under the auspices of the USDA Forest Service at the behest of the US Congress, has traveled the byways and back roads of the country to record these homegrown monuments in an effort to create an ongoing national registry.

The Forest Service has identified 700 works since 2002 and now allows the public to add their own memorials to the database via the Living Memorials website (livingmemorialsproject.net). Erika S. Svendsen, social science researcher of the Living Memorials Project, says that even though the monuments are born of individual or group motivation, rather than official response, they nearly universally adopted colonnades and columns and circles, with the occasional Ground Zero relic serving as a venerated accent piece. More importantly, she stresses, “The universal principle was that people used landscape that was accessible.”

An exhibition of the project’s work to date is currently on view at the reopened Federal Hall at 26 Wall Street. Twelve digital journeys organize the idiosyncratic memorials by themes of mourning they have in common; the august venue “lends an aspect of respect and gravitas to the projects,” notes architect Joel Towers, director and associate provost for environmental studies at the Tishman Center at the New School.  The exhibition is curated and presented in conjunction with the newly established Tishman Environment and Design Center at the New School, and will be on display until October 27. 

Leigh Batnick