In June 2012, 49 people were killed and 53 injured in a shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida.  The site now hosts a temporary memorial to the victims - but this is set to be replaced by a multi-million dollar monument that will encapsulate the damaged remains of the original building.  A white, circular canopy will wrap the building and will provide covered seating for visitors, among 49 trees planted for the victims.  

However, the planned monument has divided opinions among the victims' families and the wider public.

Learn more here.

The memorial to the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center is a thought-provoking combination of built and natural elements.  It was conceived to commemorate the 2,977 people who died when two planes crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center on 11th September 2001, as well as the six who lost their lives in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.  

It consists of a bronze parapet with laser-cut names of victims surrounding a 30-foot high waterfall enclosure of steel, marble and concrete.  These are located in a memorial site with over 460 planted trees.

The architect who designed the memorial tells the story of its creation here.

Three hypothetical Covid-19 monuments 

America is yet to commemorate its Covid 19 victims in an official monument.  This precedent explores three concepts for a monument put forward by three different artists.

"Unlike a war, a pandemic is invisible and diffuse. It’s everywhere and nowhere. Its death toll is ultimately unknowable. That makes a virus difficult to mark with physical tributes. Few memorials mark the 1918 Spanish flu; one is a modest granite bench built in Vermont two years ago, underwritten by a local restaurant also marking its own centennial. 

The coronavirus pandemic is not over, either. Not even close. A third wave of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths is lashing the nation from coast to coast. More than 12 million Americans have contracted COVID-19, and more than 250,000 of them have died...

So this might seem like a strange time to imagine memorializing the pandemic in a formal way. A premature time. Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial was conceived in 1981, six years after the United States had withdrawn from the conflict. Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s 9/11 memorial broke ground at the site of the World Trade Center in 2006, almost five years after the attacks.

But there are downsides to waiting... The feelings, facts, and ideas available during a calamity dissipate as it ebbs. The temptation arises to contain tragedy in a tidy box, closing the book on its history.

Rather than await a design competition for a real memorial, we wanted to see, in the brutal heaviness of the moment, how some of the nation’s most exciting designers might memorialize this time. We commissioned three pieces from artists who straddle the lines between art and architecture, design and social justice, technology and manufacturing to speculate on the question What might a COVID-19 memorial be? These are the results." 

Learn more about the 3 visions for a Covid-19 memorial here. 

The Oklahoma City National Memorial was completed in 2001 to commemorate the 168 victims of the bombing of a Federal building in 1995.  It comprises 168 bronze and stone chairs with translucent glass bases that honour each victim individually.  It was designed by Hans and Torrey Butzer and Sven Berg.

The chairs are arranged in nine rows, representing the nine floors of the building that was attacked.  Each individual's chair is placed in the row the corresponds to the floor they worked on.

Photosensors are installed so that the chairs start to glow as darkness falls, turning them, in the words of the designers, into "168 beacons of hope".

Learn about this and other elements of the memorial site here.

Through the middle years of the 20th century, the former Soviet Union saw the construction of some of the largest and most imposing statues and monuments in the world, glorifying Soviet leaders - in particular Lenin and Stalin - and celebrating all aspects of life under Communist rule, from collective farming and national industrial effort, to the early successes of manned space flight.  Today, these triumphalist monuments celebrating a past regime divide opinion across post-Communist and post-Soviet society.  While many monuments remain as a vivid reminder of the country's history, others have been toppled in protest or quietly dismantled.

Discover the fate of some of these monuments here.

The Heidentor, in modern-day Austria - also known as Heathens' Gate or Pagans' Gate - is a partially-reconstructed ruin of a Roman triumphal arch, situated in modern-day Austria.  In an ingenious display, a line diagram of the rest of the structure has been etched onto a sheet of perspex, allowing visitors to stand in front of it and line it up with what still stands in front of them, to appreciate the triumphal arch would have looked in its full glory.

Learn more about the Heidentor and some other examples of innovative virtual reconstruction of monuments here.

"In Richmond, Virginia—the former capital of the Confederacy, in what was the largest slave-holding state on the eve of the Civil War—crowds joined the mass protests that erupted across the country and beyond following the callous killings of George Floyd and others at the hands of police. 

Protesters focused attention on the Confederate statues lined up along Monument Avenue, covering them with graffiti, and projecting an image of Floyd’s face with the letters “BLM,” for Black Lives Matter, and the slogan “No Justice No Peace” over the monument of Robert E. Lee—the largest on the avenue, a six-story state-owned monument on a state-owned island of land—the first monument to be erected to the Confederate general in the nation, in 1890. Thousands of similar monuments went up in the years that followed. The projected image, created by Dustin Klein and carried widely over social media" 

Read more about Dustin Klein's projection on the Robert E. Lee statue here. 

The Steilneset Memorial in Vardø  is a striking memorial, located on an island in the far north-east of Norway, designed by architect Peter Zumthor to commemorate suspected witches who were burned at the stake there in the area in the 17th century.  It comprises two structures, one designed by Zumthor and a second housing an installation by the Franco-American artist Louise Bourgeois.

Zumthor's structure comprises a fabric cocoon suspended inside a pine scaffolding framework.  Inside the cocoon is a corridor floored in oak, along the length of which light bulbs hang behind 91 windows to represent each person who was put to death during the witch trials.

The second structure houses a sculpture by Bourgeois that takes the form of a steel chair through which a perpetual flame burns, surrounded by seven mirrors, like judges around the accused.

Learn more about the Steilneset Memorial here.