Memorials

Updates on the status of the Flight 93 Memorial can be found here. Clinton Taylor is not amused with our recent trends in memorial making:

There is this new design out for the Flight 93 Memorial near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Its original version, called the "Crescent of Embrace," met a barrage of flak in the blogosphere because of its unfortunate resemblance to an Islamic crescent, aligned toward Mecca. In the wake of the criticism the architects retitled that section as the "Forty Memorial Groves" and revised their plan to close the crimson crescent of maple trees around a large natural depression in the earth, adjacent to the "sacred ground" where Flight 93 crashed.

I suppose that is an improvement. Nonetheless, the winning memorial to a plane crash is still...a hole in the ground.

Is that the most tasteful commemoration possible for a struggle aboard a doomed plane, one that may have saved the United States Capitol from the fate of the World Trade Center?

Next up from the same firm: The Titanic memorial ice sculpture.

Read on.