On Monuments and Public Memory / Paul Farber (Monument Lab)

Architecture Off-Centre

“It's far easier to protest the statue than a statute, which is to say that power that lives through policy institutions embedded into practices made across generations are hard to dive into.”

In our effort to question the premise of this season’s three central themes: preservation, restoration and conservation, we often came across the idea of public memory and monuments. This led us to think about what historic monuments, most frequently seen as stone statues on pedestals, signify in the contemporary context and what new monumentality could look like.

Paul M. Farber is the Director and Co-Founder of Monument Lab, who were the inaugural grantees of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s “Monuments Project,” a $250 Million initiative to “transform the way our country’s histories are told in public spaces,” including Monument Lab’s National Monument Audit and the opening of research field offices throughout the United States.

Everything about Monument Lab: www.monumentlab.org