Monument Wars: Washington D.C. the National Mall and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape

About this book

The National Mall in Washington D.C. is a great public space as essential a part of the American landscape as the Grand Canyon according to architecture critic Paul Goldberger but few realize how recent fragile and contested this achievement is. In Monument Wars Kirk Savage tells the Malls engrossing storyits historic plan the structures that populate its corridors and the sea change it reveals regarding national representation. Central to this narrative is a dramatic shift from the nineteenth-century concept of a decentralized landscape or ground-heroic statues spread out in traffic circles and picturesque parks-to the twentieth-century ideal of space in which authority is concentrated in an intensified center and the monument is transformed from an object of reverence to a space of experience. Savages lively and intelligent analysis traces the refocusing of the monuments themselves from that of a single man often on horseback to commemorations of common soldiers or citizens; and from monuments that celebrate victory and heroism to memorials honoring victims. An indispensable guide to the National Mall Monument Wars provides a fresh and fascinating perspective on over two hundred years of American history.