remembering

Memorial Day gives us a chance to pause and reflect, with gratitude, on the millions of ordinary people who have done extraordinary things when called upon to serve and defend their fellow citizens. There is an ethos of service and sacrifice that defines us in our best moments, and it is an ideal to which we ought to strive more and more.

And since we see the world through the lens of the built environment, our Memorial Day tribute is, of course, architectural. Of Maya Lin's sublime Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1980-82), the best description may be from John Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), where he wrote of architecture that, "We may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her."