Okay, so Ashley, I want you to close your eyes and just think about some of the

monuments that you picture when you hear the word monument. I live in Indiana, born and raised and one thing that's true about

Indiana is you're going to get a war memorial. Okay?

There's gonna be a statue for a general, okay?

You're gonna find some cannons.

That was me from a conversation I had with one of our producers. I'm from Fort Wayne, so I literally grew up around memorials to war and conflict.

And those have predictable forms,

like an obelisk or a soldier on a horse.

In this series, we've looked at monuments and memorials in various corners of the United States.

And I've noticed that the newer attempts at grappling with our history look very different from the monuments I saw as a kid.

Maybe it's because they're trying to tell a different kind of story.

Sure, artistic styles change.

But new kinds of stories ask us to stretch our assumptions

of what a monument should look and feel like.

This is Monumental, a podcast series produced by PRX.

I'm your host Ashley Ciford. This episode, we're focusing on the design choices that go into monument making.

Good design, you're not meant to notice.

You're meant to kind of experience.

This is producer and art historian Tamar Avishai.

She got me thinking more deeply about the challenges of creating monuments.

My background is in Holocaust memorials and museums and the design elements that go into them, the different ways that these spaces have tried to tell a story that have a scope and a magnitude of tragedy and just kind of the

unimaginable.

...