Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial
The competition brief for the design of the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial calls for a "living memorial" with a tripartite program: to honor the remarkable achievements of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, to reiterate the message he so clearly and forcefully articulated, and to recognize the multifarious civil rights movement that demanded the extension of full constitutional rights to African-Americans. The memorial must recognize the necessity of commemorating a defining and transformative moment in (recent) American history while, most importantly, encouraging the on-going work to secure equal opportunity, inclusive justice, and extension of constitutional protections to all American citizens. The function of this memorial, its charge in other words, is to provide a place and an encompassing organization that will sustain this as yet unfinished work.
The 1.62 hectare triangular competition site is located in Washington, D.C. on the northwestern side of the tidal basin and just south of the reflecting pool on the Washington mall. The northern site boundary runs east and west along Independence Avenue, which borders the mall, and the western site line runs due south from Independence to the edge of the Roosevelt Memorial site. The promenade along the tidal basin's edge and the famous Japanese cherry trees close the triangle by forming an arc along its hypotenuse. The site would be bisected by a line drawn connecting the Lincoln monument at the west end of the mall and the Jefferson monument at the south end of the tidal basin. The existing topography resembles the form of a shallow amphitheater with a fall of about 3m from the high point at the northwest corner along a line running southeast to the promenade along the basin's edge.
Our proposal calls for extensive fill thereby raising the ground level along this same line to a high point of 5m near the site's centroid, thereby effectively inverting the site's "natural" declination. From the new rise the fill then tapers to the northern and western confines while forming an embankment falling to a long retaining bench backing a traprock paved surface which echoes the arc of the basin's edge and the grove of cherry trees. The two significant structures and the major hard surfaces are, consequently, peripheral leaving the large central grassed area programmatically vacant. The resulting topography and evacuation of programmed use-space at the site's center serves to slough off the obsessively cast network of axial delineations and suppress the normative centripetal monumentalism of Washington. A new road runs along the western edge of the site connecting to Independence and providing for passenger drop-off.
Two continuous rows of tall, fragrant loblolly pines, native to and characteristic of much of the southern US (…Birmingham, Montgomery, Selma, Memphis, Greensboro, Atlanta, and so on) one running along Independence Drive and another along the access road to the define the memorial precinct while providing shade during Washington's torrid summers and color during its drab winters. A row of low dense crabapple trees parallels the loblollies on the west while an existing stand of dogwoods will remain along a section of Independence.
We are proposing two structures; the first of which is a trellis made of lightweight steel and skinned pine poles, heavily planted with wisteria vines that runs along the entire northern edge filtering, with the adjacent loblollies and dogwoods, the movement and traffic noise on Independence while providing for views south across the site to the tidal basin. The second structure, covalent to the trellis, is a low ribbon of very large and solid sections of cast glass running between and beneath the paired rows of loblollies and crabapples north to south along the western side of the site for its entire length. This low wall of glass rises to 1.5 m above grade at the lower southern end and 0.75 m above grade at the northern end near Independence Boulevard. Embedded within the castings are display screens for video and film programming.
The latter structure warrants some further description. The majority of visitors, entering into the memorial from the passenger drop-off (undoubtedly many visitors will enter from the tidal basin promenade as well), will encounter the full length of the opalescent glass structure after passing beneath the line of loblollies. The low, wide run of cast glass, a translucent horizontal counter to the massive vertical opaque materiality of the surrounding monuments, is illuminated by the evanescent video and film images being shown on the embedded screens. The glass sections will be cast off the ground at particular sites that carry great significance to the historical narrative of the movement, thus commemorating in a quiet way its origins in the "local" and the fugitive immediacy of "place".
Dr. King's relationship to similar historical struggles abroad and the continuing importance of his iconic role to current calls for the guarantee of basic human rights on the international stage suggest that his straightforward message and the effects of the civil rights movement in the US still resonate in places far from the anticipated site of this national memorial. One of our chief desires was to extend the function of the memorial beyond the physical borders of the site in Washington, D.C. and to create a multivocal memorial structure, a place where testimony is both given and taken. Monuments are results of a desire (or need) to define and fix societal relationships, especially those concerning the state. Memorials seek to fix sentiments or impressions on an individual plane. Both are traditionally univocal and reductive, if not outright repressive of alternative points of view.
The propagation of Dr. King's message, its dissemination to all segments of American society, regardless of how distant they were from the marchers, the freedom riders, and the many individual acts of courage, was accomplished primarily through the media of television and photo journalism. The by now well-known images on film, whether moving or still, became a powerful agent for the communication of the movement's ideals and the oftentimes brutal, sometimes horrific, responses from people and institutions unwilling to accept the inevitability of a radical and just transformation of American society. Our proposal for the memorial asks for the establishment of a King Memorial Committee, a consortium of representative groups and organizations that will be charged with soliciting and programming films or videos that are documentary, that bear witness, or simply speak to the role of race in the world today. In this way, the organizational structure of the project insures that the memorial becomes one of the key sites, given its location in the national capital only a few minutes walk from the site of the 1963 March on Washington, in the on-going work of constructing the legacy of Dr. King's efforts.
The vast potential of video, both a popular and populist form of image-making, enabled by the profusion of relatively inexpensive camcorders and supported by a plethora of digital editing tools, allows for many diverse productions. Digitization allows work to be submitted from virtually anywhere and from anyone via the Internet. The multiple perspectives and voices, on rotating display in this setting could serve to encourage the public discourse while effectively overwriting the static historical narratives that generally package these significant events in the name of educational programs. And at night when the memorial is free from the expected press of large organized tour groups the softly glowing glass flickering with these beautiful, compelling, by turns heartbreaking, images will provide a quiet antidote to the more spectacular and monumental neighbors.
The project for the King Memorial proposes, in the place of a monumental marker predicated on the fulsome authority of a societal dictate, the "placing" of an essentially fugitive movement, the creation of a site where the reach of Dr. King's message entwine the institutional and the intensely personal. The site of the memorial provides a node where reflection, activism, and testimony intersect. The demand for recognition of constitutionally guaranteed rights, the masterful, persuasive rhetoric used by the leaders of the movement, and the indelible images that recorded them are still vitally important to us as we continue to pursue the idea of "full citizenship" world-wide.
[Ellen Dineen Grimes is an architectural designer and Instructor and Director of the First Professional Master Degree Program, College of Architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology.]
[Timothy B. Brown is an architect and Studio Professor at the College of Architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology.]