Mini Monuments to Immense Tragedy

Those little plastic likenesses of the Empire State Building or the Eiffel Tower, mounted on key chains and sold in ground-floor gift shops, may be schlock to some, but they serve a purpose. They say to friends, to neighbors, to the tourists themselves 20 years hence: I have been there.

Then there’s Oklahoma City, Waco, the World Trade Center. We’ve all been there too, not physically, perhaps, but through the images played over and over on television as tragedy and destruction struck those places. As a nation, we have erected memorial parks and monuments to pay tribute to those whose lives were lost, to help us remember. There are more personal ways to remember too, ways that, like those little plastic likenesses, are small and portable souvenirs, if not quite so cheap.

Constantin Boym, head of the New York design firm Boym Partners, got the inspiration for his Buildings of Disaster series--miniature models of places where disaster has struck--while watching the nonstop news coverage of the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

“It occurred to me that day watching the 24-hour news coverage how this totally unknown, nondescript building suddenly became this universally recognized icon,” Boym said. “I started thinking this could be almost an alternative history of architecture. Here are these buildings that are famous not because of their architectural qualities but because of a tragic event that occurred there.”

The Buildings of Disaster series turns the concept of the souvenir on its head as well, using a form that usually commemorates a happy event--a vacation, a visit to a long-admired landmark--to instead commemorate a tragic one. At $95 apiece, the Buildings of Disaster models are carefully crafted--individually cast of bond- ed nickel and hand-finished--and weighty, as much as a pound for a model only a few inches high.

The series, which debuted in 1998, initially included models of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, with pieces of the damaged structure strewn around its base; the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas; the World Trade Center after the 1993 bombing; the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, one entire face reduced to a pile of rubble; the Watergate Hotel; Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s Montana cabin; the Three Mile Island nuclear plant; the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, tongues of flame spewing skyward; the deadly bonfire at Texas A&M; University, listing to one side on the verge of collapse; and O.J. Simpson’s Ford Bronco being pursued by a phalanx of squad cars.

But after Sept. 11, the Buildings of Disaster series, like so much else, dropped its ironic overtones and took on a more serious cast. Orders poured in for the 1993 World Trade Center model, so Boym decided to create a model of the World Trade Center in the early stages after the Sept. 11 attack--with gashes carved into its upper stories--as well as a model of the damaged Pentagon. Part of the proceeds, roughly $10,000, Boym said, from the sales of these two models will be donated to the Sept 11 Fund, set up by the New York Community Trust and United Way of New York City.

“We have to continue, and we have to remember. The memory dimension is very important.... There’s a big personal dimension. These are private memorials rather than public memorials,” Boym said. One man put candles in front of his model of the World Trade Center, creating an altar to the dead, Boym said. Another, a museum curator, used the models as tools to teach her students some lessons about history.

“It’s the idea of marking history, or the history that we witnessed, with these little objects,” said Lorraine Wild, a graphic designer who bought models of the Unabomber cabin and the World Trade Center from OK, a design store in L.A.’s Fairfax District.

At OK one recent afternoon, the Buildings of Disaster models repose on a lower shelf in a case displaying jewelry, glass bowls, candleholders and vases of all shapes and hues. The small scale of the models gives the viewer a god’s eye perspective on the tragic moments they depict. Pieces of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor are strewn like a child’s blocks; the caved-in section of the Pentagon is only an inch or so across but represents an immeasurable amount of human tragedy.

The buildings that are physically damaged are obvious candidates for the series. The ones that are intact, such as the Watergate Hotel and the Unabomber’s cabin, prompt reflection on what is “disastrous” about the events that happened within them.

Boym was initially reluctant to sell the models in stores, fearing that customers without the benefit of a written explanation might see just a cynical attempt to capitalize on tragedy. But that kind of negative response did not materialize to any great extent, Boym said.

OK owner Larry Schaffer hasn’t heard much complaint about the series either. “Our clientele is generally really, really sophisticated. What people respond to is the irony,” Schaffer said. “The people who’d get [upset] at [the model of] Waco don’t come into our store.”

But one customer at OK said she found the World Trade Center and Pentagon models disturbing. “You have to have stamina to have it on your desk and be prepared to explain. Is it celebratory? Is it anti-something? ... The Trade Center and the Pentagon, they’re too recent. They kind of give me the creeps,” said Carol Clements, a production designer.

Customer Jeremy Podeswa, a film and television director who is originally from Toronto, said he understood why many Americans were unable to distance themselves from the events depicted in the models. But the models make an important statement about present-day America, he said.

“The things we’re most proud of we take home as souvenirs. Now, when we represent America, part of the package is destroyed buildings, America as discontented, America as affected by the rest of the world,” Podeswa said.