Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

I never found out how they were organized, interesting. I was struck by the need for and lack of maintenance of the directories stationed every few feet as you came into it.
http://flickr.com/photos/steveportigal/229598307/
http://flickr.com/photos/steveportigal/229598031/

The names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM) are listed by date of casualty not date of death. Soldiers who were injured in a battle and later died of their wounds are listed on the date they were injured. So all who fought and died as the result of a specific battle are listed together. This is the power of the VVM. Survivors who also fought in that battle can find their buddies and their memories in one place.

Maya Lin was influenced by Edwin Lutyens’ WWI Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval, which lists names by regiment. This arrangement also keeps comrades together because the regiments were based on hometown. Many of them died during the massacre of the first day, so chronology would not have the same effect that it does on the VVM.

In my own blog, IsisInBlog, I am writing a series about the arrangement of names on memorials. I became interested because of the proposed random arrangement of names on the World Trade Center Memorial. Unlike the arrangements at the VVM and Thiepval, which keep friends together, memories will be forever separated by the random WTC memorial.

Postings that address the details of the arrangements are “Reflecting 9/11’s Random Absence” (11/7/2006), “Vietnams’s Chronology” (11/22/2006), and “Comrades in Vietnam and the Somme” (1/15/2007). Future postings will look at the temples of Burning Man and return to the proposed WTC memorial.

http://www.bloglines.com/blog/isisinblog

Thanks, Katherine.