Understanding memorial practice as the building of objects or spaces for the purpose of preserving particular human events or identities, the preservation must be truthful memorialization. However, the reason we see new construction designed to memorialize the past is because we focus on a future shaped by contemporary responses to the memorialization.

In this mission, remembering can manipulate perception, either toward action or inaction (amnesia). In North Korea, monuments and memorials are considered as sacred objects that actively engage with everyday life. In South Korea, in contrast, the many monuments at otherwise nondescript highway rest areas represent our intentional amnesia disconnected from our daily life. Those monuments are built to forget the past.

In this contradictory state, Slanted Memorial is proposed to both governments to build housing on the site of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in Korea for families separated by the Korean War (1950-53). It aims to instigate public action toward reconciliation beyond mere stimulating and sensational expression.

Slanted Memorial present irrefutable evidences: 1.The DMZ as a memento left to us from the war, the no-man’s land protected for more than half a century, 2. Separated families as keepsake that the war bequeathed to both North and South. By slantedness, the mechanism linking the object and the act of commemorating is artistically defined. The elevated and slanted built ground symbolizes the tragedy of family separation and also strategically attempts to maximize the exposure of the housing to a memorial walkway underneath.

After 60 years of separation, witnessing the tragic reunion in the Slanted Memorial will spur Koreans to create a national shared memory for quiet but powerful action – action that political talks were unable to achieve. In this way, the architecture of the Slanted Memorial has the potential to instigate action toward reconciliation between the two Koreas.