Memorials to Shattered Myths: Vietnam to 9/11 by Harriet F. Senie
Oxford University Press, 2016
Paperback, 262 pages

Before a review copy of Harriet F. Senie's new book arrived in the mail recently, the only book I'd read by the City College art history professor was The Tilted Arc Controversy: Dangerous Precedent" from 2002. That book was a must for a paper I wrote in graduate school on Javits Plaza, which was home to Richard Serra's Tilted Arc before it was graced by curlicue benches designed by Martha Schwartz (its latest incarnation was designed a few years ago by Michael Van Valkenburgh). That exhaustively researched book tackles the creation and reception of public art, so it makes sense that just over a decade later she focuses her attention on memorials, what are really another form of public art.
The two projects that bracket the book are mentioned in its subtitle: the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM) in Washington, DC, designed by Maya Lin and inaugurated in 1982; and commemorations of 9/11, particularly the annual Tribute in Light and the permanent National September 11 Memorial, aka Reflecting Absence, the competition-winning design by architect Michael Arad with landscape architect Peter Walker. The VVM and 9/11 memorials are strongly linked, particularly in their abstract formal languages and in Lin, who won the competition for the first while still a student at the Yale School of Architecture and who served as a jury member on the second. In...