Modern memory.

DURING Operation Desert Storm, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf revived the apothegm, attributed to Stalin, that "quantity has a quality all its own." The principle no doubt holds true for tanks, bombs, and troops. But memorials are another matter.

Nevertheless, memorial design recently has tended to substitute quantity for quality. Sometimes, it is true, this is mandated by the sponsors, as with the numbingly overscaled five-acre site for the September 11 memorial at Ground Zero. It's as if the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation thought a sprawling memorial would make for a meaningful one. Preservation of the Twin Tower footprints, which are nearly 200 feet square, has made it very difficult to provide a focus for the memorial. Not surprisingly, the winner of the Ground Zero memorial competition, Michael Arad, is attempting to make the footprints the foci by turning them into sunken pools girded by waterfalls.

The Pentagon's September 11 memorial will also be a sprawler, consisting of 184 diving-board-like memorial benches, each perched over its own tub of water-one bench for each victim of American Airlines Flight 77's immolation. The benches will be arranged on timelines that indicate each victim's age. At the Oklahoma City Memorial, 168 chairs are arranged on one side of a shallow pool flanked by flat, minimalist arches, with each row of chairs corresponding to the number of victims on the different floors of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.

And of course it was through the sheer quantity of names of the dead inscribed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial that Maya Lin intended to impart a sense of the magnitude of the loss that the war inflicted. But Lin's memorial is uncluttered and spatially contained. It has a clear focus--the vertex of the granite chevron she implanted in the Mall's landscape. Focus is one of the key missing ingredients in our current crop of minimalist memorials.

Certainly that is the case with Peter Eisenman's new Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which was dedicated in May. Situated near Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, this memorial sprawls over five and a half acres and boasts 2,711 gray concrete blocks arranged in a grid. The uneven cobblestone pavement slopes downward as the visitor ventures into the grid. The blocks, which rise just a few inches from the ground on the memorial's perimeter, gradually morph into slabs as tall as 15 feet. The surrounding city becomes invisible; the slabs tilt ominously. The idea is to convey a visceral sense of a world slowly, inexorably, coming unhinged.

This sort of purely conceptual approach to memorial-making almost always falls flat, however, because its artistic and symbolic content is so, well, minimal. Not surprisingly, the authorities who oversaw the Berlin project took out a sort of insurance policy in the form of an underground multimedia information center, which documents the Holocaust with textual displays and personalizes it with accounts of the havoc it wreaked on individuals and families. The information center thus serves as a documentary crutch for an artistically and symbolically hamstrung memorial.

Not surprisingly, such a documentary facility is planned for the Ground Zero memorial--and even for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The Oklahoma City Memorial includes a full-fledged multimedia museum that documents every aspect of the terrorist bombing and its aftermath in exhaustive detail.

The memorial museum is currently the main alternative to the minimalist memorial. One wonders why the Germans even bothered with Eisenman's slabs when the building Daniel Libeskind designed for the Jewish Museum Berlin, completed in 1999, itself functions as a Holocaust memorial. Libeskind, of course, concocted the master plan for reconstruction at Ground Zero. His roots are sunk deep in deconstructionism, as are Eisenman's. Both are conceptualists who look at architecture not in terms of its intrinsic formal content, but in terms of the ideas they associate with it.

In plan, Libeskind's curious museum structure is conceived as an unraveled, jagged Star of David. Its exterior is clad in zinc panels and scarred with window-slits that intersect seemingly at random. Visitors descend into the basement of this building from the converted baroque courthouse next to it, then follow one of three "axes" or routes. Punctuated by jarring vertical shafts, or "voids," that extend from the bottom to the top of the building, these unsettling pathways feature inclined floors under level roofs, tilting walls, and constricted spaces. (Eisenman has relied on much the same script.) The pathways, which also include display cases, have separate destinations: a tall, gloomy, narrow chamber dubbed the "Holocaust Tower"; a Garden of Exile and Emigration; and a long, steep, stark "Staircase of Continuity" up to the permanent multimedia exhibition that covers the 2,000-year history of the Jews in Germany.

Thus Libeskind's building is, among other things, a Holocaust theme park. Similar is the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., where the permanent exhibition designed by Ralph Appelbaum amounts to a long and winding chamber of horrors; it is an atmospherically, scenographically, and technologically sophisticated production. But after walking through it one feels drained rather than edified by the documentary pyrotechnics. There is also a theme-park element to the Washington museum's architecture: In the first large room visitors enter, the Hall of Witness, architect James Ingo Freed has, like Eisenman and Libeskind, sought to evoke a world out of joint by resorting to skewed geometries. A glazed roof slants across the hall, while rails on the stairway to the second floor are pitched at oblique angles to one another. Here and elsewhere around Freed's building grey metal fixtures--factory-style lighting, ventilation louvers, doorways, recessed wall panels, treaded floor panels, girders, and a plethora of bolts--are employed as a death-camp decor. Whereas Libeskind has taken an abstract, arcane, and formally histrionic approach to his Holocaust theme park, Freed's is a more "representational" one.

To be sure, Washington's Holocaust Memorial has been a big draw since its opening in 1993; its success inspired the construction of a new Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem. The Jewish Museum Berlin, in turn, reported an impressive 700,000 visitors in 2004. It is doubtful that Eisenman's minimalist memorial, lacking the museums' atmospherics, will achieve a comparable popularity.

But whether the success of those museums will endure for centuries or even decades is a big question. And along with our current crop of minimalist memorials they pose another question: Whatever happened to the classical practice of distilling meaning in works of civic art by means of a traditional vocabulary of symbolic forms, starting with the human figure? After all, this practice has given us the spatially compact, vertically integrated, aesthetically and emotionally resonant memorials that have enriched our communities across the ages.

But how can such memorials evoke the horror of the Holocaust? the conceptualists and the museologists will ask. The truth, of course, is that no memorial, whether conceived in documentary, minimalist, or symbolic terms, can plumb the depths of that evil. Nor should it be a Holocaust memorial's purpose to do so. Memorials, like art in general, have a redemptive purpose, as the Scottish classical sculptor Alexander Stoddart rightly emphasizes. The artist's role is not to reproduce the "reality" of the Holocaust. It is to divine some aspect of that or any other historic episode that lends itself to an artistic interpretation that ennobles the public realm through the poetic recreation of human experience.

Is that impossible where the Holocaust is concerned? Perhaps not. Some years ago I saw a sculptor's advertisement in a trade magazine with a photograph of his Holocaust memorial. The sculpture included a family of peasants from a shtetl, peering out in different directions, as if trying to locate, or fathom, some tremendous unseen evil on the horizon. This sculptor was on the right track. But not a fashionable one, because our official postmodern culture is busy suppressing the artistic instincts and conventions that, in times past, have led us meaningfully to symbolize human experience. Our sprawling minimalist memorials and elaborate multimedia information centers and museums thus represent a futile antidote to a dysfunctional visual culture.