Remember in Architecture

If the memorial is indeed a sculpture established to remind of a person or an event (as the Oxford dictionary tells us), then General Robert Lee is in trouble. The memory of his deeds is now forever overshadowed by that of the death of a young woman, Heather Heyer, who was killed in Charlottesville, VA, USA in the summer of 2017 when a protest turned violent. The General’s trouble has not started there, however. He, as well as a half-a-dozen of other Confederate figures, fell under public scrutiny earlier, in 2015; their statues taken down in cities like New Orleans, LA, Gainesville or Jacksonville, FL. The tide of critical examination of the Confederate memorials then moved north and widened, reaching the city of New York and bringing its own statuary to question. Monuments threatened with removal included the equestrian statue of President Theodore Roosevelt outside the Museum of Natural History and the statue of the gynecologist J. Marion Sims on Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street, in addition to the memorial of Christopher Columbus at the southwest corner of Central Park. It has been now remembered that Roosevelt advocated eugenics and Sims gained her reputation as a pioneering gynaecologist by performing medical experiments on black women in the South without the use of anaesthesia1, while the discoveries of Columbus led to the extermination of indigenous people.