ABSTRACT
Nowadays, any middling-sized to large memorial is made of concrete. Think
of Peter Eisenmann’s Holocaust memorial in Berlin: 11 acres of undulating
charcoal grey concrete, made up of 2751 concrete steles from 3 to 15 feet
high. The Vienna Judenplatz Memorial to the Austrian Jews: the negative of
a book-lined room, cast in concrete. Ground Zero: the exposed concrete slurry
walls of the piling of the foundations of the twin towers are the one feature
of the as yet undesigned memorial garden we can be sure about. And there are
too many other examples to count. Concrete has become the default material
for memorials.
