"For my part, I don't want anything to remind me that a president was killed on the streets of Dallas. I want to forget."
R.L. Thornton, Sr., former Mayor of Dallas, in a speech at the Baker Hotel given on December 3, 1963

   The best memorials are the simplest-always. We fill them with meanings of our own choosing, meanings they allow as much as invoke. Their simplicity forces us to think about ourselves, liberating us from the conventions of action and thought that organize our daily lives. When we find ourselves in a place of such radical simplicity that we have only ourselves to fall back on, our thoughts can pour forth, and we can remember. So Philip Johnson teaches us in his Kennedy Memorial.

   Its history is complex, even tortured. It was originally to have been located on another block-that is now occupied by John Neely Bryan's log cabin. It was originally intended to have been made of stone. The

architect even mentioned the most glorious of stones, marble, in an interview with Dallas' architecture critic, David Dillon, recorded years after its dedication. Instead, it became concrete and migrated across the street. And America waited and waited and waited almost seven long years for its completion and dedication on June 24, 1970. An underground parking garage before the monument could be built, and the complexity of entrances and engineering forced even the Dallas press to become restive and impatient. On April 29, 1968, the Dallas Times Herald ran the headline "JFK Memorial Just Sits, Waits," and the Dallas Morning News on November 21 of the next year continued with "Kennedy Memorial Delayed Again."

   When the first visitors entered the Kennedy Memorial's light, but somber space, a good deal of local, regional, statewide, national, and international grief had already taken place. Kennedy's death had achieved a permanent niche in American history. Dallas still struggled with mixed feelings for the president who died in its city limits. While his body was borne away for what would be the first global funeral, the sheer fact of his death in Dallas associated the city with a murder almost tantamount to regicide. Not since the death of Abraham Lincoln had America struggled so publicly with the conflict between the divisiveness of politics and unity of grief.

   Although John Fitzgerald Kennedy's body lies in the National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, beneath an eternal flame, his life is commemorated in two other places-Dallas and Boston, where his memorial and his library were constructed after his death. Designed by major American architects Philip Johnson and I.M. Pei respectively, both structures resulted from long and torturous processes of planning involving conflict and doubt. The Pei project was originally intended for one of two sites near Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but local political pressure forced an alternate plan.

   So too the memorial. Although an early proposal published in February 1964 called for " a free form marble monument ..… Near the triple underpass" where Kennedy had died, its first intended site was a block of downtown Dallas completely unconnected with the route of the presidential motorcade. Subsequently, as if even that block was too close to the pain, the memorial was moved further, protected visually from the crime scene by the bulky masonry of Dallas' beloved "Old Red," the County Court House that had come to symbolize continuity in the city's short history. Clearly, the library and the memorial raised questions that opened psychological wounds in both Massachusetts and Texas, and their siting on completely neutral ground seems to have been essential in both cases.

   Since the Kennedy Memorial was dedicated in 1970, The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza has opened to the public in the space where the sniper's perch was discovered. The directness of its location and its searing authenticity brings literally millions of visitors to the site of John F. Kennedy's assassination. Two blocks distant and invisible from the museum, the memorial has languished in its emptiness and enforced neutrality. Few Dallasites remember who designed it or when, exactly, it appeared. And a minority of the teeming visitors to Dealey Plaza actually walks over for a moment of quiet reflection. The monument's emptiness is, in a sense, double-a product of both intent and neglect. Its rededication one generation after the original ceremony forces us to fill it with meanings once again.

   The memorial is a square, roofless, room, thirty feet high and fifty by fifty feet-that's it. Or so it seems. In fact, this "simple space" is decidedly complex. It sits in the middle of the block, its two narrow axial openings facing north and south respectively. They are oriented to nothing in particular and avoid any associations with either the sun or with Old Red, the building of consequence nearby. The Kennedy Memorial's walls are not really walls at all. They are, instead, made of seventy-two white pre-cast concrete columns, sixty-four of which float with no visible support two feet above the earth. Eight touch the ground, acting as legs that seem inadequate to their task-too far apart and too small actually to hold up the other sixty-four. The floating columns are, thus, not columns at all as they support nothing. Instead, they function almost as grouped rockets. In recognition of this space metaphor, each column ends in a light fixture that, at night, seemingly supports the apparent weight of the concrete column with nothing more substantial than light. Thus these vertical elements, rigorously separated from each other and individually poured, seem held together by an unseen, invisible force. Philip Johnson once called it a "magnetic force" and suggested a connection to the vitality and charisma of the living John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

   The corners and apparent door jams of this roofless room are decorated with rhythmic rows of concrete circles, each identical in dimension and perfectly aligned. They have an uncanny though unintentional relationship to the round log ends of the John Neely Bryan cabin on the adjacent block. These decorations introduce the circle into the relentlessly square architecture of the Kennedy Memorial.

   The room itself is entered after a short walk up a slight concrete incline, embossed with concrete squares. Because the room is open at the bottom and the top, one feels oddly exposed inside. There is the uncomfortable feeling that those outside the memorial will see only feet, which adds to the viewer's self-absorption, a necessary aspect of the ontology of the memorial. Inside one confronts a low-hewn granite square, too empty to be a base, too short to be a table, but too square to be a tomb, in which the name John Fitzgerald Kennedy is carved. The letters have been gilded so that they pick up the ample light scattered about the roofless room by the white floating column walls and the pale concrete floor. These words-three words of a famous name-are the only verbal messages in the empty room, and they too function as vessels to be filled with meaning by the viewer.

   In poignant irony, the roofless empty room is never really empty. Even if we are small within its ample confines, we are forced upon ourselves. John Fitzgerald Kennedy is not there-we all know that. Yet, we want him to be because we are so uncomfortable being there without him or some representation of him. When groups of people enter together, they tend to speak quietly, to gather in one or another of the corners, and to gaze at the empty center. A few bold souls actually dare to stand on the granite plinth, occupying the place of the absent Kennedy. When they do, onlookers feel a little cheapened.

   Located in the center of a large city, the room is never silent. The noise from three busy streets, cars, sirens, construction, and the occasional parade is omnipresent. Its emptiness-the sheer poetry of a roofless room in the midst of a great city-is radically undercut by the banal, careless emptiness of its urban setting. The ultimate failure of the Kennedy Memorial lies less with Philip Johnson, who conceived it in the mid-1960s, than with us. Not only have we been careless with its upkeep, but we have been even crueler to its urban setting. The simplest of forms must remain pristine in order to work magic on us.

   Philip Johnson's roofless room is full of potential-for reflection, for memory, even for an occasional flash of recognition that might not occur elsewhere. Yet, its emptiness is radical and, thus, disturbing to most viewers. Its parallel rows of Texas Live Oaks, their leaves always green, their trunks always dark, allow us to think of it as a monument amidst nature, even a nature so organized and controlled as to lose its qualities. It is, oddly and appropriately enough, a place as much about the "forgetting" as about the "remembering."

   In many senses, the forgetting could serve as the text for the Kennedy Memorial that we experience today. Yet, a distinguished group of Dallasites working with Philip Johnson, one of our century's most important architects, chose to remember through architecture. Our understandable act of denial-forgetting-has allowed us to abandon the very monument we created in Dallas, to surround a poetic emptiness with waste and neglect. Until we fill Old Red, until we line that square with thriving urban architecture, the Kennedy Memorial will be tragically empty, a monument to our denial, not to the memory of a slain president.

   By Richard R. Brettell, Professor of Aesthetic Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, and Founding President of The Dallas Architecture Forum