I thought on this day you might find it of interest a project being done in our class on Modernism, Theory & Criticism at Portfolio Center, as it confirms the very values we all embrace… and, it is ongoing right now on this very day. A group of young, bright, neophyte designers are defining the possibilities of a future—the potential of their futures, their world. Even as I write this, one of the four teams is out going across Atlanta, interviewing veterans firsthand.

Their ideas are provoking and give a promise of future leaders and what can be created. In a meeting early yesterday morning they showed a live interview with one former soldier they had met with Friday evening—imagined it beginning, “peace… peace I have been trying to figure out since I went into the military in 1989… whose peace, the idea of peace… I am a soldier…”

I share their project commission with and you as you might find it of a special value on this day and may see their energy as they seek to conceptualize and create across the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. their vision of a Peace Bridge… their vision of Peace.

This is the assignment:

An Interpretation and Symbolic Re-Interpretation Commemorating the soldier of the world war— 1939~1945.

A Bridge Across

A new dawn came and passed, overseeing the coldness of shadows that spanned human abide and once inflicted suffering– yet an agony that was utterly vital and precious.

Ultimately, such adversity became a bridge of respect, which each side came to cross. No longer one that was mordant and bitter; but, one that, once constructed, would span understanding where a peace might prevail.

“I don’t make the soldier look noble, because he couldn’t look noble if he tried. Still, there is a certain nobility and dignity in combat soldiers with dirt in their ears… their nobility and dignity come from the way they live unselfishly and risk their lives to help each other… they are normal people who have been put where they are, and whose actions and feelings have been molded by their circumstances.”

                               — Bill Mauldin, Up Front, 1944

As you might look, you will find the solution to a problem lies within the problem itself. But–– then it is often we look, but we do not really see.

        An Attitude of Modernism

Henry Thoreau got it right: “To affect the quality of the day is the highest of arts.”

The attitude of modernism is the constant of an idea over time. It is characterized by its intent as a commitment to improve life through an integrity of purpose. Modernism is a Viewpoint. It is a commitment against greed, overt commercialization, and exploitation, vulgarization and cheapness. Modernism is a search for truth, To affirm what integrity is requires defining the problem first. Then you seek to discover the possibilities for a range of solutions. The possibilities of these viewpoints are contained only by the possibilities of a mind.

In this assignment each student has an opportunity to see how powerful a message they can create from the collaboration of their thinking and their design and the opportunity to envision the power of symbolism. This becomes… A Bridge Across.

This is a project which represents the spanning of a bridge, one built of respect– one, where each side, now sixty-eight years later, crosses.

The metaphor of peace becomes symbolic of an empathy for another person’s struggle for freedom, now expressed in the lasting amity of that time, born and discovered first in a context of a theater of war– ironically, revealing by those who participated the deep sense of loss and a yearning for peace.

War weaves through entire cultures, and the soldiers of this world war are now its heroes– for they planted a seed that regards and stands for all issues of indifference– those that now provoke society… injustice, racism, social injustice, domestic violence, and religious intolerance.

A Bridge Across, represents a reaffirmation by the designer for an understanding which regards the ideals of ethos in work and life as a responsibility, particularly a social responsibility; and the work they do remains as a relentless enthusiasm to keep the world safe for Democracy and Design.

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