Anna Bernardi, Architettura e politiche della memoria

The process of the construction of memory that the volume seeks to examine takes the form of a layered and complex examination of the political and social issues leading to the failure to build two important projects devoted to the traumas of World War II: the Memorial to the Six Million Jewish Martyrs designed by Louis I. Kahn, which was to have been built in New York (1967-1973), and Peter Zumthor’s design for the Topography of Terror Documentation Centre in Berlin (1993-2004).
A retrospective study of the history of commemorative architecture in the twentieth century clearly reveals the lack of importance attributed to unbuilt or unfinished memorials, of which, in most cases, only the documentation remains. However, as the American professor of English and Judaic Studies James E. Young suggests, the history of an unbuilt memorial could conceivably be more instructive than an account of one that has been built.
The history of the construction of a memorial is a task of excavation underpinning the complex process of visualising and materialising the intention of memory expressed by a specific group of individuals, in a given place and historical time. A memorial, in fact, is an architectural work conceived to  belong to the public space: a highly stratified social, political and aesthetic place, to which the community at the same time assigns a fundamental cultural value. Seen in this perspective, investigating the historical and political dynamics, as well as the aesthetic and architectural factors that presided over the design of a memorial is an act of great historical awareness, since it helps reveal the way a community interprets its own past, in particular its memory of traumatic events.