The Vietnam War still colors American politics, and its most famous memorial, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., has similarly influenced subsequent monuments. "It's almost a revelation for how we could deal with tragedies of national importance or relevance," says Hans Butzer, co-designer of the new Oklahoma City National Memorial. Maya Lin's 1982 design, says Butzer, "served to bridge memory from the monumental to the personal."

Butzer, his wife Torrey, and their colleague Sven Berg crossed that bridge to commemorate the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Dedicated on April 19th, the fifth anniversary of the attack, the memorial they de-signed is the first installment in the city's $29-million formal response to the bombing. A museum and counter-terrorism institute will open this fall.

The entire complex reinforces the personal motive that Lin introduced to American monuments, as well as the documentary and didactic imperatives advanced by the 1993 U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, also in Washington. These paired desires, for therapeutic comfort and redemptive meaning, distinguish contemporary memorial-making from the more static efforts of the past, in which classical architecture anchored annual wreath-laying services. Vietnam helped shatter the social consensus that shaped those memorials. But that created a void in an already cynical world, and people still craved sentiment.

The New York Times discerned the trend when people began leaving mementos at a park near Columbine High School in the days after the 1999 shootings there--just as others had at the fence around the Oklahoma City blast site and at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Psychologists told the Times that TV had conferred a new freedom to unleash emotions, and that a "deritualized" society offers no opportunities to grieve.

Today opportunities for grieving abound, however, in the haze of history and on the heels of every adversity. In 1998, American veterans of the Span-ish Civil War were honored in Seattle, and last year victims of the 1996 ValuJet crash were remembered with a monument in Florida. Japanese-Americans interned during World War II will soon have a memorial on Capitol Hill, and a site for mourning is, of course, planned for Columbine High School. No longer are courage or sacrifice the determining factors: Misfortune of all kinds merits concrete memory. If you died with many others, you will be remembered formally. Even if you die in a car crash, you may be mourned with one of the im-promptu shrines increasingly found on American streets and roads.

The Oklahoma City memorial honors the dead on a slightly rising lawn in the vacant foot-print of the Murrah Building, where 168 chairs--bronze-backed, on glass pedestals--represent each of the lives lost. Relatives of victims visit the chairs, tie ribbons to them, and leave mementos, reprising the initial, informal practice of placing items by the fence that surrounded the blast site in the first days after the bombing.

Edward T. Linenthal, a professor of religious studies at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh who is writing a book about Oklahoma City's memorial, has discerned a "democratization of memorial experience" in these offerings. Of course people have always left items at graves. In a sense, they have converted memorials from sites of public observance into symbolic cem- eteries. Protesting "The Rise of Misguided Memorials" in the New Leader two years ago, Michael Lind cited Lin's watershed: "It seems that the public does not interpret the wall as a war memorial at all. Instead, visitors perceive a giant tombstone."

The Oklahoma City memorial acknowledges its debt to this impulse by including a new "memento fence" just outside one of the two massive, bronze-faced gates at either end of the block. One is inscribed "9:01" for the moment before the blast, and the other "9:03" for the moment after. Between them stretches a shallow reflecting pool that separates the chair terrace from another lawn. From this green rises a semicircular plinth for the "Survivor Tree," an elm that withstood the blast and thus symbolizes the human survivors. Sloping away, a small grove of fruit saplings recognizes the rescue crews that streamed to Oklahoma City after the calamity.

Speakers at the dedication ceremonies made it clear that catharsis, however crucial, was not enough: They insisted that the memorial marks a triumph over evil, and that the battle must continue. Oklahoma City National Memorial Foun-dation chairman Robert Johnson promised a 30,000-square-foot museum that "will house the experience of April 19, 1995, and the days that followed." Here, said Johnson, visitors will "receive the imperative that we reject violence."

This recalls several contested efforts to commemorate the Holocaust, in which politicians and historians argued emotion's insufficiency. The long-planned Holocaust memorial in Berlin won approval last year only after a documentation center was added to the field of slabs proposed by Americans Peter Eisenman and Richard Serra. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, pronouncing the message of "never again" through both design and exhibits, offers a parallel for the planners of Oklahoma City's museum.

Plans call for a chronological progression through 10 "chapters" of artifacts, including sound and video recordings. "Chaos," for example, will simulate in sight and sound the horror and confusion of the bombing's immediate aftermath. "You're challenged with what the people were going through," says Michal Carr of Washington's Hillmann & Carr Inc., the museum's media producer. But exhibition designer Patrick Gallagher stresses that the Oklahoma City museum "is not in any sense intended to be a standing tragedy," acknowledging criticism of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as a theme-park pavilion.

That the museum and anti-terrorism institute will augment their work did not trouble the Butzers and Berg. Speaking of Berlin's similar addendum, Hans Butzer observes, "So much of it has to do with the day and age we're in now. You don't want people to go to this obelisk in the park."

That obelisk, emblematic of shared political, social, and aesthetic values, was the mute locus of civic ceremony, the site where the public gathered for annual harangues about those values. But speakers at Oklahoma City's dedication spun varied interpretations of the memorial site, from healing to learning to warning. President Bill Clinton, the last to speak, cheered the builders' choice of "hope and love over despair and hate" and told those scarred by the bombing, "I hope you can come here and find solace, and the memory of your loved ones, and the honor of your fellow citizens."

Solace, memory, honor: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial made the first two as critical as the third. "Its opponents hated it because it didn't have anything to do with victory, or even human courage," says architectural historian Vincent Scully. Lin was his student at Yale University, and he agrees that her work made possible a new generation of personal, consoling memorials. Could this represent the public's yearning to escape a cynical age? No, says Scully, who argues that too many memorials are being built, too soon after the events they mark. "It's only our contemporary consumerist desire for instant grati-fication in everything."

Not surprisingly, Torrey Butzer disagrees. "That's a very shallow viewpoint," she says. "People have started to use memorials more in helping them deal with things. It helps people get through it."--Chuck Twardy

When the people at Yahoo! decided it was time to open a store--a real one, that is, the kind you could walk into--they thought long and hard about what they would sell there. The answer (and this must be why they're all millionaires) was nothing. There would be no Yahoo! baseball caps, no coffee mugs, not even a cash register.

Instead, they found a small storefront in Rockefeller Center, stocked it with a few laptops, and opened the doors with the intention of teaching people how to shop on the Web, preferably through Yahoo! Shopping, their own online mall of a site. "We figured the best way to overcome people's fears about shopping online was to show them," says project manager Linda Bennett. At this experimental location, open only from April 10 to May 12, Willis, "the World's La-Z-iest Shopper" (really an actor named Daryl), demonstrated how to shop on the Web from the comfort of his Yahoo!-branded La-Z-Boy, complete with in-arm fridge and Internet access. It was the dot-com field of dreams: If we build it, they will come, and when they come, we will teach them how to shop and send them home.

Once upon a time, Web sites were places, too, and the sense of plucking a computer's heartstrings from a thousand miles away was exhilarating. It felt like travel. Now our Web servers sit in suburban vaults; they might as well, as they say, be anywhere. But the temporary Yahoo! Shopping store was distinctly not just anywhere: It was in the middle of Rockefeller Center, the most cosmopolitan shopping mall in the world, with a guaranteed stream of tourists, investors, marketing executives, and high-end merchants passing by. The company that first thought to advertise the Web on TV was acknowledging that while the Internet may be a convenience, it's not an experience. "This is what eclicks and bricks' means to us," Bennett says. "We figured you can't make any bigger or bolder a statement than building a store."

Taking a cue from Yahoo!'s slogan, "Your Home on the Internet," architects Andre Kikoski and Victoria Blau created an abstracted domestic environment, with a front lawn, a living room, and an indoor backyard featuring Astroturf and a picket fence. Laptops rested on counter-height picnic tables, with ketchup and mustard bottles bolted down beside them. It was just the kind of joke that epitomizes the Yahoo! brand: "fun, friendly, and irreverent," as Bennett describes it, exclamation points flashing in her eyes. But the pièce de résistance of Kikoski and Blau's design was the freestanding, blobish archway that separated the two main spaces. It was, quite clearly, the "Y" in Yahoo! extruded into three dimensions, and it defined the space, gathering people like a kitchen doorway at a crowded party. Not since the Masons thought to make a church in the shape of a cross had a brand found such clear architectural expression.

With the Yahoo! Shopping store a self-described "tremendous success," will the month-long experiment be replicated in malls across the country? Bennett won't confirm anything. "Yahoo! isn't in the habit of speculating about its plans," she says. "But I do know you'll have an unexpected encounter with Yahoo! in the near future." --Andrew Blum

Toshiki Okazaki is the Murray Moss of the cyber-boy set. Zakka (Japanese for "trinket"), his eccentric Chinatown "shop and space for creators," is stocked with a personal collection of objects--Voltron-esque robots, Tibor Kalman texts, Jap-anese font sets--that attracts design-savvy New Yorkers who love his aesthetic. Designers from nearby Razorfish are regular customers, and David Carson and the Tomato kids stop by when they're in town. Nancy Nowacek, who works with Bruce Mau, was browsing the bookshelves on a recent afternoon. "Every young designer in New York loves Zakka," she says. "There's nothing in here you don't want to look at."

The shop is a unique outlet for Japanese youth-culture design, including books that aren't available elsewhere in the U.S. ("There is a Japanese bookstore in Midtown, but it is very traditional, with books about, like, sushi," says Okazaki.) Zakka is also the American outlet for Digitalogue, which distributes CD-ROM image sets and katakana (Japanese alphabet) fonts by young Japanese designers. Digitalogue sponsors Flokke, or "Floppy Market," a twice-yearly Tokyo festival that gathers together the best in street-level design. The shop is a satellite Flokke showroom, making the exhibition's cutting-edge font sets, magazines, T-shirts, and other design objects available here soon after they are first introduced in Japan. Items from the latest Flokke, which started in Japan in May, are currently in stock. --Jonathan Ringen

Zakka is located at 147 Grand Street in Manhattan
and can be reached at (212) 431-3961.

In the postwar period, Modernist architects swept through America, replacing what they considered to be outmoded structures with new, sleekly efficient buildings. Half a century later, corporate bad taste has turned the tables on a Modern masterpiece.

In 1957, the Connecticut General Life Insur-ance Company (now the CIGNA corporation) completed its new corporate headquarters in Bloomfield, a suburb of Hartford. Frazar B. Wilde, chairman of Connecticut General, wanted a thoroughly modern structure that would be expandable, economical, and adaptable to new technologies. His firm hired the architect Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Mer-rill (SOM), who had designed the watershed Lever House a couple of years earlier.

For Connecticut General, Bunshaft built a low-slung 500,000-square-foot building with an attached glass-walled cafeteria. The structure is punctuated by four of Isamu Noguchi's Japanese-style interior gardens and a large, beautifully proportioned terrace, also landscaped by Noguchi. Adjacent to this terrace is a rectangular decorative pool used for ice-skating in the winter. Surrounding the main building is its park-like site, designed by SOM's Joanna Diman, which features paths that wind around a large Noguchi sculpture and a man-made lake.

In January of this year, CIGNA petitioned the town of Bloomfield to approve the redevelopment of the property. Its plan would replace the Bunshaft building and the 650 acres of surrounding grounds with a championship public golf course, a hotel and conference center, 400 residences, and several new office buildings. CIGNA has received conditional pre-approval from the town's wetlands board and is now presenting the plan to Bloomfield's zoning board. The scheme is expected to be approved.

CIGNA seems unaware of the complex's considerable charm. "They are obsolete facilities," spokes-man Ken Ferraro says. "It is more cost-effective to build a new facility than try to renovate the existing ones." Nor does CIGNA understand the architectural significance of its HQ. "We don't see any historical value to the building," he says. "It's only 40 or 50 years old."

Architect Robert A.M. Stern is incredulous. "This is a landmark by any normal standard," he says. "It's a very important building in the history of postwar American architecture and urbanism, when the corporations were moving into the suburbs."

Tyler Smith and Jared Edwards, two Hart-ford architects, have initiated a letter-writing campaign to preserve the building. CIGNA management, Bloomfield residents, preservation leaders, and architects nationwide have all been targeted. "It is a campaign to shame CIGNA," says Smith. "We hope to convince CIGNA to downsize the proposed development and preserve the buildings and the most important features of the landscape."

"We would like to see them preserve the building," says Shoji Sadao, executive director of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation. "If they tear down the building, the courts that were designed in relationship with it cannot exist."

News coverage of CIGNA's plans has so far focused on environmental concerns. Local resident Laurie Julian has organized opposition to the development and appealed the wetlands board's decision. "We are arguing that the wetlands commissioners abused their discretion when they failed to require of CIGNA alternatives that would lessen the impact on wetlands and wildlife," she says. Diana Balmori, a land-scape designer and the co-author of Rede-signing the American Lawn, is also concerned. "The chemicals and insecticides used on the golf course will run off into the wetlands and can kill all life in them," she says.

Activists are aware that it may be impossible to dissuade executives with visions of golf carts dancing in their heads. "To save this Modernist architectural icon is a long shot," Smith says, "but worth it." --Ana Maria Torres

Some of New York's most powerful and influential citizens are climbing the walls of their luxury apartments in United Nations Plaza as the Trump World Tower rises nearby. Soon it will dwarf their building and overshadow the UN's. When it's completed, the 861-foot-tower will be the tallest residential building in the world. "The whole arrangement of the UN and its gardens will be broken by this monstrosity across the street," says neighbor Walter Cronkite, who at one point wrote a letter to the president of Korea to prevail upon investors in that country to kill the financing for the tower.

Even as construction continues, there's an on-going lawsuit to halt it. And while that effort hasn't stopped Donald Trump, the outrage over his building is fueling a different endeavor: changing the city's zoning laws. Civic groups and planners could not have found a more compelling poster child to call attention to their fight. "The Trump World Tower is to zoning what the loss of Penn Station was to the landmarks-preservation movement," says Kent Barwick, president of the Municipal Arts Society.

According to Joseph B. Rose, chairman of the New York City Planning Commission, the current zoning regulations are impossibly arcane, encouraging a building style that he calls "anti-urban." Under his direction, city planners have written a weighty document called the Unified Bulk Program; it's the first attempt in 40 years to completely overhaul the city's zoning codes, which control the size, shape, and scale of buildings. The proposal is currently under review by the New York City Council.

"If zoning isn't changed," says Rose, "more build-ings like this one will be built in areas where they're completely out of scale." Trump, of course, has a different take: "If the new regulations were already in place, my new building would be shorter and squatter. It wouldn't be nearly as beautiful."

So how did Trump manage to build an 861-foot tower on a lot where basic development rights provide for a structure almost two-thirds smaller? Through a rather creative interpretation of what everyone agrees are cryptic zoning laws. The schematics below show exactly how he did it. --Alex Ulam

It's 2 a.m. and T.C. O'Rourke is leading a handful of bikers sweating and swearing through the heavy gravel of an old rail bed. They're on an "urban assault," a late-night tour of Chicago's wasted parts. The riders crash through industrial lots and rail yards, over crushed pavement, past heaps of metal scrap. Then they summit some wall, bridge, or roof-top and look out over the city. Twinkling beneath them, Chicago calls out from a thousand unvisited corners. "You can't justify it; it's trespassing," O'Rourke admits. "Then you'll glance down some dark alley and think, eI wonder if I can go through there. I wonder where I'd come out.' "

The first urban assault was held five years back, when the guys at the Rapid Transit Cycleshop wanted to show the visiting editors of Dirt Rag magazine a good time. Rapid Transit's owner, Chris Stodder, says his guests were unmoved by the area's regular off-road options, "but when I offered to take them through the underside of the city, they perked up." Stodder showed them the routes he liked to ride with his friends: shortcuts they had used as bike messengers that they sometimes revisited at night.

Now the urban assault is a semi-regular, semi-organized event. Anyone can pick a route and announce a ride; news goes out by word of mouth. The typical crew is a bunch of guys in their 20s, joined by the occasional female. Jim Redd, who's past 50 and programs software by day, instigates some of the wildest rides. He favors those parts he calls the "Gothic estuary," a maze of streets and rails that runs below grade down by the Chicago River. In the past he liked to emerge in the vast, old rail yard south of the Loop, overgrown with native wilds. Crawling out from the dark into that secret prairie, he and his crew would look up to see the skyline glittering above the scrappy trees. Not any more. On the first mild night of 1999, they came back to find fences in place, the ground churned up for new development. "There's just not as much wasted space anymore," Redd sighs. Some of these places haven't seen new development in more than 30 years; the buildings emptied out as the people drained toward the suburbs. Now the builders have come back, and they're taking over the best routes.

Not that redevelopment will put an end to urban assaults: The recently gentrified streets are just a new surface to try with a bike. You can always race up the ramps of parking garages, jolt down flights of stairs, or rouse the bored security guards for a race through the Metra stations. But the best rides, O'Rourke argues, are the ones that make unexpected connections from one part of the city to another. Just because you can see a place in the distance doesn't mean you can find it. If you do, it's often by chance. On certain nights O'Rourke says he'll come out on top of some mountain of slag, or find himself in a field of gutted cars, and realize, "Wow, this is that place I used to see from the train when I was 12 years old."

"We're Americans, we need a frontier," Michael Burton philosophizes, "a place to strike out, to see what there is." During the summer, Burton leads Sierra Club trips out West, but in his urban life he says he finds the promise of the frontier "in the parts of a city coming apart--where the human touch has withdrawn for whatever reason, and nature overtakes it. I'm not sure I'd call it wilderness; it's a frontier of a different kind." --Kristin Ostberg

Without question, the ability to fly through the air at hundreds of miles per hour stands as a major technological accomplishment of the modern era. Which makes it all the more bewildering when you step on an airplane today and are instantly transported back in time a dozen years (and we're not talking about the Seventies decor and seats apparently designed by a rogue macramé artist). Suddenly, you're lacking the most rudimentary features of daily life: e-mail and Internet access.

Not even money can get you online in the air; the technology simply isn't available yet. But it will be soon. With "Offices in the Sky" from Boeing Business Jets (BBJ), executives who shell out $38 million for a private plane are about to become the first with Internet access at speeds comparable to those on land--and without having to hook into those clunky seat-back phones. These corporate high flyers will be guinea pigs--albeit ones with leather couches, exercise machines, and mahogany desks. Next year, Boeing will make it possible for passengers on commercial planes to log on as well, though they'll probably still be hunched over a laptop on a tray attached to the seat in front of them.

Offices in the Sky customers suffer no such discomfort. A joint venture between Boeing and General Electric started in 1996, BBJ outfits 737-700 and 737-800 planes with whatever accoutrements an executive requires. One of the seven planes currently flying belongs to Miami Dolphins owner Wayne Huizenga, who outfitted his jet with a bedroom, an office, and an exercise area. A few minutes after take-off, he can retire to the back of the plane, roll out the treadmill and go for a run. "These guys are flying 10 to 12 hours at a time," says Thad Dworkin, a Boeing Business Jets director. "So why not exercise?"

If finding time for the gym on land was a prob-lem, executives may soon lose the incentive to work out in the air, as well. The forthcoming technology Connexion by Boeing will bring two-way broadband or high-data-rate Internet access directly to airline seats. Instead of wires, the service will operate by a network of antennae, satellites, and on-the-ground support. Dworkin equates the concept with the way boats remain connected to land through "ship to shore to ship" communications: Computer users in the air will transmit data to the ground, where it's then reflected back to the plane.

Boeing hopes that in addition to e-mail and the Internet, Connexion users will also have access to company intranets and live hook-ups for teleconferencing. "You'll have the same environment and technological ability in your airplane as you would in the office," Dworkin says. This may be a mixed blessing, as we'll probably lose one of the last vestiges of our non-work existence (not to mention the use of our e-mail's out-of-office-reply feature). It's not hard to envision a high-tech seating class: cubicles set up between first class and coach, with flight attendants/IS personnel juggling drink orders and pleas for advice on how to retrieve files. Let's just hope no one wires the palm trees and beach cabanas at the other end of vacation flights. Otherwise, everywhere you go, on the land or in the air, you've got mail. --Richard A. Martin

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