MONUMENT – DEFINITION
Dictionary definitions of the word ‘monument’ indicate two roots, which together signify: ‘memory, fixed.’ For emergent cities of the 21st Century, the fixing of collective memory has evolved beyond the semantic limits of traditional statuary to rely on ephemeral public rituals of rediscovery and reenactment. Although many of these activities largely dispense with architecture per se, such as certain annual parades and festivals, others are sited in permanent locations especially designed to sponsor spontaneous but self-conscious performances reprising group values. Attendance at such places, attention to their calendars of events, and direct participation in their activities comprise a range of engagements that embed these values in the repetitions by which social recollection is produced. As specialized contexts – among which in turn-of-the-century Houston there numbered the Artery, Notsuoh, the Orange Show, Project Row Houses and TemplO (since demolished), and others – they have become acknowledged agents in the reproduction of local memory. Together with their ephemeral cousins, they have appropriated the city’s fluid potential for mass performance to a self-directed theater of common purpose, remembered. Their calendars mark cycles of rededication, setting the past and present in a monumental landscape unbounded by the normative visions of traditional urbanity.
– Cameron Armstrong, Architect, Sculpture Magazine 2004