The Key Factors for Building a Monument

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Monuments are sometimes depicted negatively because of petty things, such as the publicity the monument will receive or how the monument would be destroyed because of natural disaster, as if the circumstances were not beyond one's control. People are forgetting the bigger picture! Monuments should make people feel something, whether it is positive or negative. Monuments honor, teach, and inspire people in their own way. There is a lot of consideration put into monuments to appear as worthless. Monuments like The Crazy Horse Memorial are portrayed badly because no one knows what the man looks like, but the monument honors the North American Indians and people seem to forget that. So when building any kind of monument the site, aesthetics, money, and purpose are some factors that an administrator must take into account.
Location is one of the key factors to take careful thought into when memorializing a person or event. One of the biggest problems with finding the right emplacement is that some administrators feel the need to demolish an environment to place their monument there. With this in mind, a monument should blend into an environment while still being conspicuous. The monument should also tie into the site. There would be no sense in having a grand monument in a small town. Such as the United States Holocaust Memorial, according to Judith Miller, in her article “Holocaust Museum: A Troubled Start”, Elie Wiesel believed the museum would either be a sanctuary or an abomination. The monument received a lot of controversy because it “would be built in the United States, who did little to stop the Holocaust from occurring.” Christine Musser explains in her article, “Preserving Memory: National Holocaust Memorial Muse...

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...t as important as the Jews. It is more than a little bit insulting. In “Obscure Monument to Loberstone: Washington, DC,” the statue was made for a man who trapped lobsters. Trapping lobster is not something worth remembering.

Works Cited

Jackson, Bruce. “The Necessary Evil: Thoughts on Time and War.” Acsu.buffalo.edu U of
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Lin, Maya. “Making the Memorial.” New York Review of Books. NYREV, 2 Nov. 2000. Web.
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Miller, Judith. “Holocaust Museum: A Troubled Start.” New York Times. New
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Musser, Christine. “Preserving Memory: National Holocaust Memorial Museum Controversy.”
Suite101.com. Suite101.com. Media, 30 Dec. 2010. Web. 20 Dec. 2010.
“Obscure Monument to Lobsterdom: Washington D.C.” RoadsideAmerica.com. Roadside
America, n.d. Web. 20 Dec. 2010.

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