The Beginning
Saturday June 6th, 2015 was a boring day. The kind of boring that requires you to lie on the floor and toss a tennis ball at the ceiling rather than do anything else.
Things at work had been relatively steady, but altogether un-challenging and we were a bit behind in getting paid as of late. As such, I had taken up painting and experimenting with oil pastels so I could have pieces of art to sell on the side. My first at-home gallery show the previous fall had gone well and I had just started on a new series which used discarded cardboard boxes as canvases. On that particular Saturday I was completely out of cardboard, inspiration, and willingness to do anything that resembled 9 to 5 work. Thankfully we had the internet.
I can’t remember how I came across Bustler.com, but I do remember that whatever link I had clicked on took me straight to their architecture competitions page, and that the National WWI Memorial Design competition was at the top of the list. Honestly I was a bit baffled at first. Having studied enough architecture history in college to effectively qualify for a minor, I was pretty sure that there must have been a WWI Memorial built at some point. We had memorials to the other three wars of the 20th century right? And there were tons of big Civil War memorials that I was familiar with. How did we miss WWI?
The second thing that I quickly realized was that I knew absolutely nothing about WWI other than the fact that there was trench warfare and it was bad. You can thank the American public education system for those dollops of knowledge. Anything else I might have learned was crowded out by the weeks and months we spent learning about the Great Depression and WWII. Thankfully the competition website had a link to the National Archives WWI photo repository, so I had a source from which I could fill in some of the mental gaps between trench and bad.
And boy was it bad. I didn’t look up from my computer for about 4 hours. I had gone through several thousand pictures, and it was just starting to sink in how utterly destructive the war was to the world. Countries were carved up, empires had ceased to exist, and an entire generation lay dead or dying. If you ever wonder why WWII started in 1938, it’s because it took 18 years and 9 months for the next group to pick things back up again. There’s a sobering thought for you. There was something else in the pictures that I hadn’t expected. Most of the images showed groups of guys in their early 20’s, looking none too dissimilar from myself. While I certainly hadn’t ever been in the military or a war of any kind, there were simpler things that I had been exposed to. As an Eagle Scout, I could see the camaraderie and knew what it was like to be cold and wet and hungry out on a long hike. Or trying to build a shelter in the rain during wilderness survival. It wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine that if I had been alive roughly 100 years earlier that I probably would have been drafted and shipped off to the front lines.
As somebody with an architecture degree, it wasn’t hard at all to decide right there and then that I should come up with a design to submit.
I can’t remember how I came across Bustler.com, but I do remember that whatever link I had clicked on took me straight to their architecture competitions page, and that the National WWI Memorial Design competition was at the top of the list. Honestly I was a bit baffled at first. Having studied enough architecture history in college to effectively qualify for a minor, I was pretty sure that there must have been a WWI Memorial built at some point. We had memorials to the other three wars of the 20th century right? And there were tons of big Civil War memorials that I was familiar with. How did we miss WWI?
The second thing that I quickly realized was that I knew absolutely nothing about WWI other than the fact that there was trench warfare and it was bad. You can thank the American public education system for those dollops of knowledge. Anything else I might have learned was crowded out by the weeks and months we spent learning about the Great Depression and WWII. Thankfully the competition website had a link to the National Archives WWI photo repository, so I had a source from which I could fill in some of the mental gaps between trench and bad.
And boy was it bad. I didn’t look up from my computer for about 4 hours. I had gone through several thousand pictures, and it was just starting to sink in how utterly destructive the war was to the world. Countries were carved up, empires had ceased to exist, and an entire generation lay dead or dying. If you ever wonder why WWII started in 1938, it’s because it took 18 years and 9 months for the next group to pick things back up again. There’s a sobering thought for you. There was something else in the pictures that I hadn’t expected. Most of the images showed groups of guys in their early 20’s, looking none too dissimilar from myself. While I certainly hadn’t ever been in the military or a war of any kind, there were simpler things that I had been exposed to. As an Eagle Scout, I could see the camaraderie and knew what it was like to be cold and wet and hungry out on a long hike. Or trying to build a shelter in the rain during wilderness survival. It wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine that if I had been alive roughly 100 years earlier that I probably would have been drafted and shipped off to the front lines.
As somebody with an architecture degree, it wasn’t hard at all to decide right there and then that I should come up with a design to submit.
