In the eight episode of this year’s A is for Architecture’s, I speak with Professor Erika Doss of the University of Notre Dame’s Department of American Studies, Indiana. We discuss her book Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2010 which describes and analyses the ‘thousands of new memorials to executed witches, victims of terrorism, and dead astronauts, along with those that pay tribute to civil rights, organ donors, and the end of Communism [which] have dotted the American landscape’ as well as those ‘spontaneous offerings of flowers and candles that materialize at sites of tragic and traumatic death.’ Pitched around the sticky territory of history versus memory and the rights the them, the podcast reflects on the role of memory culture as a cultural, spatial and material instrument in urban culture.
You can get the book via The University of Chicago Press’ website here. You can also hear Erika talk on The Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at The University of Texas at Dallas’ podcast here, and also give a talk – Public Art, Public Feelings: Creativity and Controversy in Public Culture Today- at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in 2010. You can watch Erika speak at the Minneapolis Institute of Art here, with a talk entitled Monumental Troubles: Reckoning with Problematic Public Art in America.
The tension between history and memory for architects is a significant one, and the rise of memory-culture is a huge cultural shift off which architecture increasingly depends, so Erika’s insights are meaningful and valuable.
Happy listening!
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
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