Although well written, I find that some of the content is a bit difficult to understand. Pershing Park appears to have some statues in place. There was a ceremony dedicating the park in 2021, but I assume that 2024 is the expected date for all of the statues to be in place?

Another article about the same topic, written in ArchPaper (https://www.archpaper.com/2019/05/national-wwi-memorial-move...), mentioned that the memorial quoted Weishaar as saying, "If you make memorials too big and too oppressive, then that’s all anybody can focus on. They won’t sit there and eat their lunch. They’ll always feel like they have to be reverent." From the maquette, which can be viewed here (https://www.civicart.org/national-world-war-i-memorial), this piece looks a lot like a frieze.

It seems uncertain whether this will have the intended effect of rekindling the memory of World War I. To quote from this article, ""In 2015, the World War I Centennial Commission announced a design competition for a national memorial to the war...There was a feeling—a fear—that the legacy of the war was being lost, forgotten." I would argue that this doesn't really accomplish that intended end. Nobody is going to look at this and understand how terrible the war was. It makes war seem grand, right, and worthwhile. In fact, war ought to be avoidable and should not be glorified. War is a tragedy. War is bad.

The heavy-handed prose of this piece also glorifies the process of sculpting. What exactly is the need for people to be constantly exercising in the studio? Also, once the models are scanned digitally with an--ahem--cell phone, they are cast in styrofoam in England, coated in clay by hand, enlarged through photogrammetry in England (Why couldn't they find a local studio? Couldn't that scanning process be done just as well with the cell phone?), and then enlarged, coated by hand in another coat of clay (introducing many small details over a course of many years [How much can this really add, especially considering that the casting errors have to be fixed--in England--with "tiny heated tools resembling dental instruments"?]), and then the entire product is shipped back to England to be cast. This costs more than $44 million.

In my opinion, yet another statue in Bronze is bland. How about something to actually connect us to the stories of real people? How about some letters home from the war showing how raw and terrible war actually is? What about something that actually displays the important points of the war, its causes, and consequences?

When I see something like this, it makes me shudder that we have not changed in thousands of years. In fact, this is far less impressive than something created thousands of years ago--the Terracotta Army--and serves a similar purpose. Also, unlike the Terracotta Army, which were likely modeled off of real people, this piece is not actually descriptive of any real people who participated in World War I, does not describe any historical events, will not help future archaeologists, and ultimately glorifies something ugly--war.

Also, the article's prose is a too flowery, and that flowery prose conceals a lot of half-truths, the worst of which is that humans slaughtering other humans for powerful people is something noble. It isn't.