Los Angeles Times — "Goodbye, Guy on a Horse. A New Wave of Monument Design Is Changing How We Honor History"

“Expanding the aesthetic language of monuments is something that many designers have been working on.

Chicago architect Jeanne Gang and her firm, Studio Gang, have spent several years on design concepts for the Mississippi waterfront in Memphis. The six-mile site includes Cobblestone Landing, built in the 19th century to serve as an important port for cotton — a trade built on the labor of the enslaved. There have been ongoing discussions about how a site like this might be memorialized.

‘It was an almost horizontal monument,’ Gang says of the landing, ‘a place that could also somehow represent democracy and the people, and not have a figural statue standing on it.’ Her firm explored this idea for the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale in an installation titled ‘Stone Stories.’ Hundreds of cobblestones were assembled on the floor of the U.S. pavilion, accompanied by a wall piece that showed how stones might be shaped to tell individual stories — carved into the form of a hand or embedded with the relief of a ship.

‘We wanted to integrate voices and memories into that space,’ Gang says. ‘We started collecting the stories of people from different aspects of the community: an artist, a musician, a patron of the arts, a mayor, a chef. … From the designer’s standpoint, the question was: Could we embed their stories into the material — into the stone.’

At the core of the conceptual piece — intended to prompt a dialogue about making a remembrance of a site such as Cobblestone Landing feel more contemporary, less 19th century — is community involvement. That’s a critical component in how monuments are now being designed and built.”

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