Poised on the edge of a war of their own seeking, Americans have not forgotten the event that, in their leaders' minds, at least, brought them to this point: the three-pronged attack of Sept. 11, 2001. While the plans to invade Iraq proceeded, so did the competitions to design fitting monuments to the people who died that day in New York and Washington, D.C. In late February, New York's Lower Manhattan Development Corp. announced its choice of a design for rebuilding the World Trade Center site, and last week a jury chaired by the chief curator of New York's Museum of Modern Art also declared a winner in the competition for a memorial at the Pentagon.

Both these competitions have aroused tremendous interest, in part because of the variety and merit of the ideas proposed, but in part, too, because of the way they have refocused attention on the question of just what it is we do -- or should be doing -- when we build memorials. This is what makes the Sept. 11 efforts fascinating even to those of us who are not American. Quite apart from the fact that people of many different nationalities died in those attacks, every nation has its own sad or traumatic events to remember and cannot help but be curious as to how others choose to translate loss or outrage or grief or even defiance into physical form.

Fashions change in public memorials, as in all things. Over the years, they have taken one of several well-worn paths. There are shrines, such as the Meiji and Yasukuni memorials, and churches, too numerous to mention. There are houses where the revered dead once lived, such as Gen. Maresuke Nogi's simple home in Nogizaka. Sometimes the ruins left after an attack or invasion are preserved, as with the A-Bomb Dome in Hiroshima, the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedachtniskirche in Berlin or the USS Arizona memorial at Pearl Harbor. There are statues, men on horses, pillars and obelisks -- like Nelson's Column in London or the U.S. capital's monument to George Washington. There are gardens, such as Hiroshima's Peace Park, and museums, including the trio of notable buildings commemorating the Holocaust: the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the Holocaust Museum in Washington and Jerusalem's Yad Vashem. These are the standard embodiments of grief.