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Urban Scale Richmond: A City of Monuments

Urban Scale Richmond’s City of Monuments, Part I is a fascinating look at the city’s memorials and monuments, including the cemetery at St.John’s, the Powhatan Stone, and the Confederate Soldiers’ and Sailor’ Monument:

Movement through the city of Richmond is punctuated and articulated by an interconnecting series of urban-scale elements that serve to explicate, in concrete form, the city’s formal connection with the past and its causal relationship to the future. In continuity with ancient and modern European and Near Eastern civic traditions, those in charge of the city’s individual and collective narratives have given voice to the city’s ideals and normative values by adding to a growing stock of monuments. These sculptural or architectural elements often served as carriers of didactic or hortatory meaning but always function as markers that clarify the city’s physical and political form and structure.

The city’s monuments never stand alone: they join in loosely connected chains of meaning that extend across the city and through time to other cites around the world.

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Powhatan Stone at Chimborazo Park