The Importance Of Building A Monument

What makes a good monument, is it the size, the location, the materials, or the interaction with nature? All of these things can be attributed to the formation of a wonderful monument and or statue, but are they key deciding factors of whether not a group or agency should build a statue / monument. Personally i believe that there are very different things that make a statue great, those can be, how the statue interacts with its environment, how it represent history, and how significant it is to society.

All the times i’ve seen a monument or a statue in public it has been places to “fit” into the environment. The monuments placement is influential to the viewers and gives history of the monument without any previous knowledge. Personally

When a builder is considering building a monument they are going to make sure the monument has factual evidence on why its important and why it should be built. They will also take into consideration the significance it hold to the surrounding population. Within source A the author mentioned that the monument of his choosing needs to be places in the correct area, but also hold significance. The author asks in source A “ why make a pilgrimage to a site with no historical significance”, the author hints at the facts that if the monument is unimportant then it will end up getting “eaten by rats” in a warehouse (source F). The statue must hold significance because if not then there is no point in wasting the time, energy, or space to build something that will mean nothing to everyone. While taking the historical significance into consideration, the builder must make sure the monument is in the correct historical setting. For example you wouldn’t want a statue of George Washington in the ally way of Paris. It hold no historical significance to the street of Paris. While the viewer may not know the setting has historical significance, the viewer “must stand at a certain distance to see the text panels in the entirety”(source A) giving the viewer some previous knowledge not already

If we choose to not acknowledge what the key factors of making a monument are then we will alway ben making pointless monument. A monument has the ability to depict history without even defining anything, the ability to be unnoticed, but still important, and the ability todo much more than that. When building a statue we must ask our selfs, does this monument cause pain for many, does it interact with its environment, and does it represent history accurately? If those guidelines are met then there will be no problems with how a monument is presented to