 Okay, great. I think we can get going. Good evening, everyone. Welcome back to the forum webinar series. I'm Sarah Warden, a senior field director with the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Project Director of the Title Basin Ideas Lab, and I'll be hosting today's webinar. Tonight's event is sponsored by Preservation Leadership Forum, which is the professional membership program of the National Trust. This webinar series is made possible by forum members, and we thank those of you who have joined us today. Today's event is developed in partnership with our friends at Trust for the National Mall and is the third in a series of conversations about the Title Basin Ideas Lab and the changing nature of public space and the complexities of its preservation. This session will focus on memorials and controversy in the context of the Title Basin. Before we begin, I have just a few technical announcements. We will take questions from the audience during the webinar. Please send those questions directly to the panelists via the Q&A function. And you're welcome to submit those questions at any point during the webinar, but we will hold off on answering audience questions towards the end. And you can also communicate with other participants through the chat function. Following the program, we will send out a recording of today's webinar directly to the email you used to register. And finally, all forum webinars are archived in our forum webinar library. And I'll also note we have the closed captioning function for this webinar. So if you need that, please use it. And we welcome all of you. Now I would like to introduce our speakers. Donald Albrecht is an independent curator and author. His exhibitions and books have ranged from overviews of cultural trends to profiles of prominent visual and performing artists. He has worked for the Library of Congress, the Vitra Design Museum, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and the Museum of the City of New York, among other institutions. Thomas Melons has curated exhibitions on a wide variety of architectural and cultural subjects from 400 years of residential architecture and domestic life in America to the history of the New York Public Library. Additionally, he is the co-author of three volumes in an award-winning series of books on the architecture and urbanism of New York City. Just in fact, and Tom Melons are co-curators of the Ideas Lab exhibition, and they will give a brief presentation and then moderate a panel of guest speakers. And I'll introduce those guest speakers now before I turn it over to Donald and Tom. Justin Garrett Moore is joining us. He is a transdisciplinary designer and urbanist and is the program officer for the Humanities in Place program at the Andrew W. Melon Foundation. His work focuses on advancing equity, inclusion, and social justice through place-based initiatives, built environments, cultural heritage projects, digital and ephemeral programs, and commemorative spaces and landscapes. We also have Marcel Acosta joining us. He is the executive director of the National Planning Capital Commission, the federal government's central planning agency. He oversees a team of urban planners, architects, historic preservationists, and other professionals who are committed to preserving and enhancing the extraordinary qualities of the national capital region. Also, Teresa Durkin, executive vice president of the Trust for the National Mall will be joining us. The Trust for the National Mall is the leading nonprofit, non-partisan, philanthropic partner of the National Park Service dedicated to restoring, enriching, and preserving the National Mall, and my partner and Grime on the title-based Ideas Lab. I'd now like to turn it over to Donald and Tom. Thank you. As Siri mentioned, tonight's, this evening's webinar, which is part of a series of four webinars, that tonight we'll be focusing on the title-based and memorials. One of them were inspired by the online exhibition that Donald and I curated on the title basins Ideas Lab. And in addition to focusing on the proposals that were generated by that, the exhibition looks at the title basins history, as well as the challenges that it faces today. Among those are how to interpret and present the memorials and monuments and how to engage in the controversies that have been developing around them in a constructive way. For many people, the monuments, including the Jefferson Memorial and more recent memorials to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, among others, are synonymous with our national identity. And they are very much in flux in terms of what they mean and the issues that they raise. And in addition to the controversies, their very existence is threatened by a variety of forces that we'll look at now. So if we can look at the next slide, please. It was created in the late 19th century, as you see the 1880s, and it is the result of a truly remarkable infrastructure project. It's really, in a way, it's a celebration of engineering bravura, in the sense that the Potomac was flooding the area on a daily basis and sub-aqueous gates were constructed to control the water's flow. In that process of holding back the water, of regulating the water, a pond was created. And we call that pond today, we call it the tidal basin. We look at the next slide. Now, from the beginning, from the tidal basins inception, it has been a magnet for Washingtonians as well as for tourists who come to enjoy the iconic grove of flowering cherry trees and particularly the annual spring festival that's dedicated to that wonderful event of nature, as well as to participate in recreational activities, including at different times in the tidal basin's history, swimming and fishing, and a variety of activities more and less active. What people don't realize is that the monumental component of the tidal basin, and we see here the iconic Jefferson Memorial, is actually a more recent addition. The Jefferson Memorial, designed by the great American classical architect, classicist architect John Russell Pope, was not completed until 1943, and the other monuments followed. So it's actually a more recent part of our national story. There has been controversy or discussion about these monuments for quite a while, but in recent years it really has come to the forefront. And perhaps most memorably last year there was a op-ed piece in the New York Times, written by an heir of Thomas Jefferson, and this man argued that perhaps Jefferson's likeness should actually be replaced by a statue commemorating the abolitionist and former slave Harriet Tubman. Next slide please. More recently, there was a monument to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, designed by the landscape architect Lawrence Halperin, and completed in 1997. It came to fruition after decades of planning, but even with a long process behind it, it also was the object of discussion and some degree of conflict, which is to say that Halperin had designed a series of outdoor rooms, which comprise sculptures. As we see here on the right, the likeness of Roosevelt with his famous dog Fala and a series of quotations carved into the granite walls of these ruthless enclosures. There was some concern on the part of activist groups representing disabled Americans that the fact that Roosevelt had been in a wheelchair, the victim of polio, was not acknowledged. The sculpture that we see on the left was added and what I think, what Donald and I think this speaks of is simply that these monuments are not either literally or figuratively set in stone in the sense that they become part of a national conversation. Okay, if we could go to the next slide please. More recently, a monument to Martin Luther King, Jr. was dedicated in 2011. It was by the sculptor Lee Yixin, and it is the first monument on the National Mall or in the title basin area, dedicated to an African American. And the many people felt that the monument to the great civil rights leader was long and coming. But again, even after a long process it was not free from controversy. The monument in addition to the likeness that you see on the right contains a number of inscriptions of quotations from some of King's most memorable speeches, and one of them was originally read, I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness, which was paraphrased from one of King's speeches, and some critics argued that it made King seem arrogant. And so it actually has been removed. It was removed two years after the memorial was dedicated. Okay, if we could go to the next slide. And today, the gates of the original 19th century infrastructure are no longer operable. And so the site once again floods daily. And this is exacerbated by a number of causes that are leading to the waters rising. And I think one of them are actually the entire city of Washington DC is sinking to some degree as a result of tectonic plate shifting. And there's so there's a, there's a incidence of subsidence that is causing the waters to rise. If we go to the next slide. So one of those two factors, the fact that the gates no longer work and that there is subsidence, the, in a sense the title basin has become a victim of its own success there are so many people that visit on a daily basis and particularly the highly popular cherry tree festival each brings more than a million people to the site. And it's simply, there is wear and tear on the site and on the earth's ability it becomes impacted its ability to absorb water, this becomes exacerbated by over development or a high degree of development in the area as well to go to the next slide. Thank you. Thank you, Tom. So, thank you in response to these conditions and these challenges and these problems. The National Trust for Historic Preservation and the trust of the National Mall initiated what they called an ideas lab which was to spark creative ideas for the future of the title basin. And there were at least two essential principles undergirding the ideas lab. The first one was that five landscape architects were invited to participate and they are these five firms Reed Hildebrand, GNN, D land studio, Walter hood and James corner field operations. The thought that links them all is that they are landscape architects, and the organizers went to landscape architects because landscape architects think big. They think regionally, and they think over long periods of time, and it was decided that these ways of thinking were important to the future of the title basin. The other conscious decision that was made on the part of the organizers was not to hold a competition, a competition has a winner. And oftentimes, the participants in a competition are looking over their shoulders, trying to second guess what might win, and therefore might be less prompted to be speculative. In ideas lab, which does not have a winner prompts a wider range of responses from the practical to the highly speculative and the theatrical in many ways, as you'll see by what we're going to show you. The landscape architects, all proposals address the sites memorials, and they do so both environmentally physically, and they do so culturally or socially. I have selected three examples to give you a flavor of the highlights so three of the five. We're going to show you how they address the memorials. The proposal on the screen now by D land studio which is headed by Susanna Drake, called for two major infrastructural moves that relate to the monuments. On the on the lower left hand corner of your screen, they propose building a new jetty off of the Lincoln Memorial into the Potomac. And on the upper right hand corner of your screen, you see a kind of land bridge that has been built connecting the Jefferson Memorial to the Washington Monument. Could I have the next image. The this is the view of the land bridge that is connecting the Jefferson Memorial to the Washington Monument, and it has two effects. One is it creates a kind of ceremonial front yard, a landscape front yard to the memorial to the Jefferson Memorial, and the cherry trees for environmental reasons have been relocated here. The memorial provides easier access from the title basin to the National Mall. One of the problems has been circulation has been difficult with security issues and flooding. This land bridge would actually cause an easier access to the map to the National Mall which is the main event in Washington DC. And this is the view of the jetty, which D land studio Debra Susanna Drake proposes moving the Martin Luther King Junior Memorial to this jetty, which has two effects. One is to move the memorial to a safer place, free from rising season climate changes, but also culturally, it makes a direct link in the visitor's mind to King and to Lincoln to historic figures in African American history in the United States. Could I have the next image. Another was the work of Walter hood hood design studio in Oakland, California. In his scheme he takes what we would call a narrative approach to the site. And he imagines what he calls a novella in four parts. Part of the novellas themes or purposes is to uncover and to memorialize hidden histories. So he's not building anything new, no new memorial. He's adding signage to interpret the more entered to interpret the site, and to memorialize it in that way. A lot of signage would point out, for instance, that wetlands in nearby plantations service over called hush harbors hush harbors. These are places where enslaved people congregated and practice religion and secret, and it's a major factor in the creation of the hush harbors in the United States. So he wouldn't be building a hush harbour, but he would be interpreting the hush harbors to memorialize and commemorate that fact of American history. Could I have the next on a physical level, a couple of the schemes proposed to let the site flood to let waters rise. In Walter Hood's case, it creates a kind of necklace of monuments that are linked by new construction bridges. Could I have the next slide field operation James called the field operation is another scheme that fashions the site into what he calls an art and island archipelago of monuments, which are accessed by boat. So it takes advantage, if you will, of climate change by letting the site flood and creating islands that can be landscaped that hold the monuments. And the final image. This is also field operations. This is probably the most provocative and speculative image. The question he's raising is, should we let the site flood, and should we let nature take over the site floods and monuments gracefully age, and in this scheme, decay into picturesque ruins. Could I have the next image. So you could see the range is quite broad from the speculative to the more practical. This final image of the online exhibition the title basin ideas lab is a page that prompts participation, a major goal of the online exhibition is advocacy, and we're urging people to participate not only in programs like this, but to go to the site to use the site to register for surveys to post Instagram posts of your experience at the title basin to generate as much image and as much interest in the title basin as is possible to generate public interest. So funding can be created to save this priceless heritage. Okay, now we're going to be joined by our panelists. So Donald and I welcome you, Justin, Marcel, and Teresa, and we wanted to start by giving you the opportunity to tell us a little bit about yourselves, and particularly how your professional experience illuminates the ways in which you approach the title basin and particularly the idea of the monuments and concomitant controversies and the, what, what questions that raises in terms of their preservation. So we wanted to start with Justin with you, and if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself. First apologies event if there are any connectivity issues I'm joining from Kigali Rwanda, so pretty far away. But I have two points of entry actually to this conversation. I was introduced as being a program officer for the northern foundation where I'm involved in the foundations monuments project. But prior to that role, I was also the executive director of the public design commission in New York City, the city's design review agency that includes public art and public monuments and following Charlottesville we had a number of really challenging conversations and conversations with people in multiple sectors and from multiple points of view about the role and the importance of monuments, not only in the city but really in our kind of national landscape and understanding. The first kind of point I'll sort of make or mark is that there's very often a point or a comment that people will make that monuments are sort of a background or that they're sort of affecting kind of a limited slice of people in society. But it would challenge and press on that because we saw it in real time and in a sustained and kind of collective way that these spaces and the elements of our built environment do matter. There are a lot actually and we saw that in the multiple conversations, people coming out for public hearings about how we would sort of collectively value and sort of maintain and kind of empower our shared public realm and public landscapes that are activated and charged by monuments and through the power of built environment, the power of representation, the power of art, the power of the word in our spaces. The other kind of point I would sort of notice that in these conversations I think the key question that comes up is a question of power. And who has the ability to shape things in spaces that that we are meant to have in common. And that's obviously incredibly evident in places like the National Mall, but it's something that that we need to engage and to understand who is reflected in our spaces who has been able to show their presence to tell us their identity, to kind of have their kind of identity become a part of our collective and shared identity and history. So, kind of switching hats a little bit to more of my current role with the Mellon Foundation. So, an expansion of this question in this project to really think about what types of work or monuments doing right for us and, and for society and whether that's addressing issues of repair addressing issues of justice, but also thinking about what kinds of roles do we want our spaces to have in our society, and vice versa right there, you know our spaces are shaping society in our society or shaping our spaces. And how do we do that in a way that best reflects our, our values are individual values are collective values in ways that that we can all sort of kind of imagine the world that we want together. Great thank you so much. Very informative. Marcel, do you want to Yeah, thank you again Thomas and this is a great opportunity to explore the opportunities at the title base and but also talk a bit about the importance of these memorials and monuments not only to the city but also to the nation at large. I think he wishes the National Capital Planning Commission is responsible for the review and approval of memorials and monuments in the nation's capital so we have dealt a lot with the approvals of such memorials such as the FDR Memorial, which you showed in your presentation the Martin Luther King Memorial, and we kind of take it through iterative steps. Obviously Congress makes the final determination about the authorization of the memorial and to some extent they grant us the opportunity to verify locations where these memorials should be placed and also both the Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission work together to review and approve the final design of those memorials and those are typically sponsored groups, and also through the National Park Service for the General Services Administration, which essentially are the property owners, and essentially those are turned back to the federal government through the National Park Service for the General Services of the Memorial so we deal with that in terms of a traditional design review process. Also we're responsible for the long range planning from the federal government side of the nation's capital, much of our responsibility and focus has been on the commemoration. We tend to focus much of this on the land assets in terms of where they should go. And if you think about it, there's a lot of competition for sites in and around the National Mall. So to a great extent, we're not only looking for today, but into the future and for instance for future generations in terms of what sites could be made available and to ensure that there are locations where future events, future people and future things that are in sequence to this nation are, have an opportunity to be represented in the nation's capital. I think one of the most important things that we've been dealing with and I think all of us have been grappling with is, this is a symbolic space, this is a very sacred space. This is a place where everyone feels a need to be represented. They want their stories told and I think the proximity to the levers of government, the capital, the White House, the Supreme Court, and kind of that notion of, you know, if my, if my people are here, if my experience has been represented here, if something that is important to me or people that I care about are on the mall or around the mall, then I've been acknowledged, I've been recognized. I think that's basically a large undercurrent of site decisions that we face on an ongoing basis. I also think in the long term we've been exploring, I think as Justin has mentioned, what has been unrepresented. And I think that to a great extent, all the memorials and monuments that you see in Washington DC tell the story of America. It's, and a great extent it's been a bottoms up process that sponsors will go to Congress, they'll get their memorials approved. And that's all in terms of fundraising and constructing it so that's important and I think that is essentially what gives us the memorials that we see today, at least in the recent past but I do think there are, if you kind of look at the inventory of memorials in Washington DC, many of them a majority of around 50% deal with military and military conflict and that's very important to our history, but what about sciences, what about arts, what about the work of women, about brown and black people in our country, what has that rolled and what have they played and kind of are those stories should those stories be told and in what fashion. So I think we're starting to explore many of those questions, and kind of our next generation of memorial research. And I think this is really an exciting time to bring those issues in terms of having a larger conversation about what that means that kind of different ways to manifest that in our cultural landscape, which I think is going to be an amazing experience over the course of many generations. So, I think that's a bigger issue that I hope this panel will discuss but I do think that representation is important. Thank you, Teresa. Thanks, Donald. In my role as a project director for the trust for the National Mall. It's to fulfill our mission which is to help the National Park Service enhance restore and preserve the National Mall. We do recognize, and looking at the history is a big part of understanding the National Mall and the memorials that are in it. The name of the place is actually National Mall and Memorial Parks. So what we recognize is that as we look at this, this place. It's very very clear that it has evolved a lot over time. It wasn't built all at once and it wasn't conceived full blown by one plan. It was built over a couple of centuries. And so I'm a landscape architect and I tend to look at it that way through the lens of a landscape architect and a planner on how the place has evolved and even our relationships to the monuments and memorials has evolved. What's happened is, you know, over two centuries, how we think about this place and the landscape has changed and we used to talk about, you know, in the 19th century, the public grounds which is, you know, a landscape with gardens and paths and things. But that really evolved to the concept, a more modern concept of public space or the public realm. And that's what really changed the place and made it more powerful because the landscape and the monuments became an ensemble that uplifted the notion of creating space for public gatherings, exercising First Amendment rights and so on and so on. And I love this quote from Kirk Savage, who's from his wonderful book, Monument Wars, as we all know every monument had a war around it before it was built. The power of the symbolic landscape rests on the command of the space. And what we're seeing right now is that the National Mall and the title basin in particular is a particularly fragile and vulnerable landscape. And we're troubled about the command of the space in the future and so that's what really gave birth to the ideas lab. So we could think about all these complex issues. One of which is, can we create and establish a model for collaboration and interpretation of monuments and memorials that is more inclusive than we see these days. I actually am going to jump in. It was a very interesting question that popped up, and it was for Justin and I would love to just ask you the question. I hope I'm saying it right. What did you mean by the word repair. And how do we know when a monument has been repaired was a question that I think is really interesting building on what you were saying. I actually would connect it to actually the sort of the timeframe that Teresa was just talking about sort of the scales of hundreds of years. And so when I talked about repair, we have to, I think have broader conversations about all of our various types of structures and constructs that become present in our built environment in our landscapes and our public ground. And so there are constructs like things like monuments or constructs like a title basin controlling flooding and water, but they're also constructs like systemic racism, kind of structural inequality through various forms of capital and labor. There are a lot of different kind of structures that we have to talk about. So you can talk about repair in terms of kind of things that may be present or built, but there are multiple layers and multiple facets to this conversation of repair. So that work, the types of work that you may do may be addressing something like the engineering or the kind of redesign reconsideration for the relationship between humans and environment and water and climate, that you can go back and redesign and re-engineer and kind of repair our relationship to how we take space. But you can also have repair in terms of some of the points that Marcel was kind of underlining about who is represented, who is empowered, who has been given agency to create and shape space and kind of collective moments. So, you know, it's sort of a term that talks about what has happened or what has been allowed to not happen in a way, you know, for the capital products type people right deferred maintenance. We need to have many different types of deferred maintenance for the different types of work that we need to do as a society, you know, not just for like, you know, keeping our roads or our water tunnels in good shape, but in terms of keeping our our comments are kind of shared experiences and landscapes in good shape and ways that will take multiple types of efforts of repair. So it's meant to be kind of a broad term that captures many different things. You mentioned the subject of agency has come up. How do we broaden the, how do we make this creation of memorials in the United States where more people are becoming agents? The stewards that exist, the funders, the general public, how do we increase that agency? Yeah, would anyone like to jump in or Marcel, do you want to respond to that and then Teresa? We unmute here. Yeah, I think that's a very interesting question about, you know, who is commemorated or what is commemorated and kind of the role of the public in that discourse. Right now, I would characterize the process as a project by project effort that a constituency group that wants to be recognized goes to Congress, finds a champion, they have to have a real commitment to getting it done. And they basically, a lot of times a commission is formed. And, you know, but it's kind of kept within that, that basic framework that there and you, and since Congress doesn't authorize the memorial, at least for national ones, that, you know, it is public in that sense. But there isn't like a huge, large public discourse about storytelling, different perspectives, what stories being told, and kind of how that is manifested in kind of the physical side of the memorial itself and it does go through our commissions and the public has an opportunity to make, to provide that input in the discussion, but it's basically incremental at that point, you're basically working off a basic framework that the designer and the sponsors have kind of created. So I think that I'm just saying that in terms of what how the process works today, and that it is bottoms up in the sense that it does arise from somebody members of the public who have an interest in seeing this in the nation's capital. But the process is somewhat limited just because of the way it's set up in terms of encouraging larger discourse. I think there's a bigger question about if you wanted to talk about who is, you know, the broader issue of what is missing, and kind of kind of the relative values of what should be there and what should not. I think that is a totally different construct of a conversation that you would have to have with the public and I do think the work that the, that the Mellon Foundation is doing today. A lot of the groups out there I think are kind of leading to that point where, you know, we have to have a broader discussion. We need to have facts on the table in terms of what's there or what's not, we need to understand that even with memorials today, they are conflicting viewpoints and conflicting perspectives of what that story that's currently being told is is out there and how is that going to be changed or should it be changed over time so I think that's a somewhat slower process but I think it is an important one in that I don't necessarily think it's up to just. Government to lead that conversation I think they have a very important role to play but I do think the not for profit sector. Many people out of the community organizations I think have an important role but I think to some extent somebody has to organize it. Is the Mellon initiative was it started to broaden the number of people in the conversation. The Mellon work is about humanity and complexity, essentially like in the broadest sense and you know point that I think more so is just raising I think kind of gets to this point of what do we mean by we right and that that has to broaden. And that we have to understand that you know there there is complexity in that conversation. And so instead of the idea of not replacing one kind of singular or narrow history for another presumably correct or more correct or more appropriate or more representative one. It's actually to do the work of broadening who who is involved, who can be a part of that complex, we write the kind of the multitude in a way, and this idea of what does public participation interaction agency look like does to kind of factor in conflict complexity, learning and unlearning in a way and I think a lot of public processes and what this work might look like has to frankly develop some new tools and new approaches for doing work right the the process that Marcel is sort of identifying is based on kind of a certain type of power structure financial structure that that has left a lot of people out and we have a lot of evidence that shows that it leaves a lot of people out. And certainly the entire design community how we do any kind of place changing work has similar structural issues, in terms of how decisions are made and so the design community itself, thinking about how does it involve people when it's developing work and changing for place may need some new and different tools and so the melon effort is actually looking to kind of promote more innovation, more exploration and more complexity and doing that work. Thank you. I just said one thing. I think the issue here I think there was a difference in terms of we've kind of view monuments and memorials in terms of design. But I think the big missing piece right now this is a question about public history, and that to the extent that those experts but also interested members of public kind of reading stories perspectives, and kind of syncing to all that and kind of making it kind of manifests itself in some sort of either a memorial or a bit or whatnot. I think it's kind of the interesting question here is that you know we're planners were designers, or landscape architects, architects and we all have a hand in this. So at least quite my view as personal view is that you know the big missing gap is kind of public public history, and where do you place this into kind of the spectrum of issues, and also how do you view this with the experience of time. We get a little bit of that in our discussions, but I think there has to be a lot more, because in terms of how that memorial is designed is actually a kind of outcome of that story, and whoever controls that story kind of sees itself in the memorial. Yeah, right. So it's I think that's kind of the bigger issue that I hope we're able to address at some point. I wanted to pick up on that. I follow up on that Thomas. I really just want to reinforce what Marcel and Justin are saying and some of the things that have risen up out of the ideas lab is that we need to be open to a new set of principles for memorial landscapes over time and I think what we have gotten out of this initiative. From the five landscape architects is is a vision, it envisions a landscape of what it might actually look like in the future, in terms of memorials living landscape a more diverse landscape, and one that's open to change. You know, these things can be very abstract when we're talking about them but but what the ideas lab has given us is a set of visions that will help to further this dialogue, particularly around memorials it's not just about infrastructure and ecological systems it's more about guidelines and policies that can help us to implement change. The idea is that recent I was very well also the destruction of the cherry trees, which is a kind of ephemeral memorial. You know we always think of memorials as being brick and mortar and stone and marble. But one of the memorials at the title basin is a memorial to time and to nature, and what makes the cherry trees so prominent and so powerful as they come and go the blossoming is so quick, and they are being destroyed, as well as the brick and mortar which I think pushes the conversation into a slightly different direction and I'd like to open it up which is what about the element of time and particularly how it relates to the telling of public history and are there opportunities to program this space, or even to really blur the distinction between the different kind of monuments that Donald was just talking about the brick and mortar and one based in time, can we in fact liberate ourselves from thinking about those as two separate silos and are there opportunities to make the meaning or the access to meaning more porous and more accessible through events and through different kinds of memorials that don't necessarily last for all time. So, to you all. I'll start so actually I think there's a slide of the voice over with the deficit memorial that parents so you can put that up. So, in 2006 we held a design competition, along with the National Park Service in the band at one Institute of New York to look at what was called memorials for the future and it kind of looked at opportunities to express memorials beyond what we see today, and also to kind of think about are there different ways of commemoration, not only in kind of the traditional physical forms that we see today I think one of the big questions here, and one of the big topics that a lot of the participants had wanted to put forward is this notion of having a conversation about subject matter. In this case, we're seeing two versions of it at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial that you know the memorial itself tells a certain story. So you can read a lot into into it, in terms of your own views, but a lot of times are multiple views as somebody pointed out earlier about Thomas Jefferson at his history, and his meaning to the country for good and for bad. Additionally, I think people 15 years ago would have thought holding a little computer in your hand cell phone was almost possible to think of but, well, today we have that that's one way of getting different perspectives and narratives out there and giving people a bit more context in terms of what Thomas Jefferson was about. I think people are probably wondering on the right side what's about what's up with the pink parents. This was an entry called voice over. And essentially this was an effort to record stories from everyday people told we told by everyday people about aspects of the subject matter to kind of different points of view and different points and perspectives across the table. Essentially, these parents would come in pre record these stories, a flock of them will come to the memorial and that would provide an opportunity to tell these stories, a certain pair of the type, and also to get engaged in public and some sort of discourse about the meaning of that memorial that was a more fanciful playful way to express what you can do with technology that we have today. And I think it just brings up the point that there are multiple stories out there are multiple perspectives that need to be told, and that people can make up their own minds about what they, how they want to proceed, but they also should have the benefit of hearing other stories and views. So I think this is what this allows us to do beyond a architectural piece or a built permanent piece. I'm also thinking a bit more about temporary commemoration on the mall. I'm also thinking about the inauguration, President Biden's inauguration, there was a very moving ceremony the day before the inauguration at the reflecting pool, which, which commemorated the people lost to code at 19 that effect was a temporary event. It was an event, but it took advantage of the place the symbolism of the National Mall as a place of healing. And I think much more can be done in that, that avenue, and with that opportunity to kind of use that setting as a way to reconcile that conversations in a way that's not necessarily done in a permanent built monument memorial. So I think that's where we see kind of the future. And I also think, even with that example as long as well as AIDS quilt, I think a great example. The AIDS quilt is a great example. I agree that the conversation about the ephemeral and the programmatic are really important, especially when we talk about this this idea of kind of public participation and kind of connection for place in history and you know, kind of an alternate example we saw recently in DC would have been the Black Lives Matter mural, right the kind of the the marking literal marking of people and their power in a place that matters and has power, having an effect that ultimately, as we all know, was connected to kind of a moment and a movement that people are going through but also connected to other places so we had other cities and other communities communities that you may not have even associated or thought about being connected to these ideas, so we were able to kind of mark their spaces. Another, I'll have another inauguration example I just put a link in the chat because there's no way I can share a video from Kigali, but during the inauguration, African American dance troupe did a performance at the Jefferson Memorial on the title basin and so the idea of, you know, talking about again that notion of complexity. So yes, Jefferson, one of our presidents, importantly, but telling of a different kind of story by having African American dance troupe perform and sort of take and have some measure of control and reflection in that space at frankly an important time. Kind of socially and politically was very powerful and not always expressing things in a way that that you might think right to talk about Jefferson and slavery, for example, but instead to talk about the presence and power importance of black people in this country. Right as another mode of expression and claiming and making of space. So I think this idea of kind of pushing the boundaries a bit on, on what we mean by commemoration, memory, story, presence, power to do so in broader ways is really important. That's the reason I started out by talking about the history and that this is really a place that has evolved over time. And I really do believe that we're in one of those important moments right now in the history of the National Mall, where we're going to take advantage of just the inevitability of change. And that change is going to come many, many new innovations such as we're seeing here and that Justin and Marcel are talking about and, and that the trust is planning also around public education and awareness. The time has come to do these things, because we continue to evolve and over time, we may find that some of our monuments are not relevant anymore unless we continue to layer in these stories. So I'm very hopeful. Marcel is what is this on the screen now. What you see on the screen right now was actually the winner of our design competition 16 this is called climate chronograph and this is very similar to some of the ideas that came out of the ideas lab, but this literally was a memorial to climate change, and kind of the impacts of rising sea levels on public space and if this this this example is a grove of cherry trees have been planted at the end of AIDS point which is a low point by the Potomac River and over time, over generations that will flood that shoreline will be missing over the course of generations. Essentially, they would plant the trees, and people would mark that time. And over the course of successive generations you'll see the trees disappearing, and it was a way to kind of measure that impact in a meaningful way I think what's interesting about this. It was a memorial about the future as opposed to a memorial about the past. I think that's what made this and it was very deliberate in terms of having using this as a way to have a conversation about what climate change means and what it what it is doing on a slow but kind of on a daily basis and you know your children and your grandchildren will be able to see the dead trees that were worth driving. And they would, they would kind of remember what that impact has been so this was a winner of our competition. So should we open it up to quit off, there it is questions and answers. Yes. All right. Good timing. Well, thank you panelists is a really fascinating conversation a lot to unpack here and like our other webinars this really helps inform the title based ideas lab and the future of our work at at the title basin. So we don't have a ton of time and I'm sorry for that for questions from the public will do our best to follow up with you. One question here I'd like to try to have the panelists address, and it is this. Many people may not realize how commemoration affects them and their communities, what strategies with the panel recommend to engage with people with all levels of awareness of the topic to reflect a more complete cross section of community input when considering changes to the title days. Anybody. Anyone else want to jump in on now. Oh, yeah, go ahead. Please. So, I'll jump in and this is, you know, maybe with a bit of bias, but I do think that the role of artists. And I mean that in a broad way. The intersection of what Marcel raised earlier the role of kind of historians and scholars is is a really interesting and important point because the, the work of, you know, research people finding histories, doing the kind of the not so sexy and not so visible work of kind of uncovering and collecting and elevating the stories it's difficult to get that work to a broader public, but that is a place where artists of different kinds different media is different modes of expression can can have a great way of doing that work. You know, whether it's a visual artist doing a temporary sculpture or a choreographer and dance company activating a space or a poet, sort of giving voice to maybe a history or a narrative and doing that in public doing that in space through different modes. I think is really powerful way to engage again this idea of how to be broad in the conversation art arts and culture are great ways to kind of find different ways to connect to different audiences and different people. And especially when you talk about again the kind of the multitude of different modes of expression different modes of participation through through the work of artists. Thank you, and I'm afraid our time is up I think we could talk for a great deal longer about these incredible incredible topics. But if we haven't answered your question please reach out to us I'll show you an email at the end and we'll do our best to to get back to you. You can also keep talking form connect is available to all and it's online and free and open to anyone so there's a particular topic that you found interesting today, or a line of conversation feel free to get on form connect and keep that conversation going. I say we do a panel about our arts and culture next. I like it. Absolutely. And we do have a couple of webinars coming up that I invite you all to attend. We have an event regarding the brown be bored decision it students on strike to massive resistance and farm filled Virginia, and that'll be on April 12. So we will have our fourth and final for the series title base and webinar regarding funding the public sphere and that will be April 21 530 Eastern like today's event. I, I thank you all I thank our panelists. We just had a wonderful conversation is really fantastic. I'm so grateful for this intriguing conversations a lot to think about. And I think all of our participants as well. We couldn't do this without you so we appreciate that. And if you have any questions, certainly reach out to us at forum at saving places.org, and we will get back to you so thank you all. Good evening, and hope to see everyone soon. Thank you. So much. Thank you. Good night.