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Simple but powerful piece does justice to the dead
Rowna Moore, Architecture Correspondent01.08.08
Designing memorials is a fraught business. Emotions run high and the task, of representing tragedy in dumb building materials, is essentially impossible. Think, for example, of the traumas of the Diana Memorial.
Even the greatest Diana fan would have to admit that 7/7 was the greater disaster, but the young architects Carmody Groarke have succeeded in doing it justice.
Their proposal is in the tradition of Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial in Washington, a simple but powerful piece where the names of the dead are carved in stone.
Like Lin's piece, the proposed 7/7 memorial is plain. It uses a few facts, in this case the inscribed date and place of the bombings, and the numbers of the victims, together with the subtle qualities of its materials, for its effect.
It has also got to this stage discreetly, in consultation with the victims' relatives, without public sound and fury. The debate about the commemoration of 9/11, perhaps because of the greater scale of the atrocity, has been, by contrast, protracted and heated.
Central London has been besieged with memorials and plans for memorials in recent years, from marking animals killed in war to the Queen Mother. It is entirely appropriate 7/7, as the greatest peacetime attack on London's civilians, should be commemorated, and this is an apt way of doing so.
Let's hope it can now be built with as little fuss as possible, which would make it a rare example of how to do such things.
