WWII memorial

 Reading the built environment as a text, reading Washington, both the ceremonial center and zones of a reshaped neoliberal urbanism echo historical reactionary modernisms. The World War II memorial and the streetscapes of revitalized downtown clusters suggest the unsettled questions of modernity, albeit in a one-sided conversation of stylistic conventions and discourses. Walter Benjamin found that “Fascism renders politics aesthetic, and communism responds by politicizing art” (Benjamin1970). The emerging built environment of Washington is scripted in a post modernism idiom, containing a-historical and yet historicized referents to both the beaux arts traditions of the classic nation state and to the futurist imaginings of Italian Fascism.

WWII memorial

  As a polycentric urban region, the Washington metropolitan area is symbolically unified by an urban imaginary of place. The monumental core is the point of reference and structuring element of a key node in the circuit of global power. The World War II memorial is situated between the two major constructions of the National Mall, framing both the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, symbolically connecting the two, locating the war as a project for the preservation and extension of the universal principles of the enlightenment. In choosing a neo-classical idiom, the designers made a clear choice to link the post war moment to the period of ascendance of modern nation states, rather than locating it in a system of functionalist references, or in a figurative, heroic representation of a stylized individual.

references
Benjamin, Walter.(1970) “The Work of Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction”, trans. Harry Zohn. London: Jonathan Cape, pp 219-53.