The drafts were developed by two separate committees who themselves were responding to a primary mission statement developed by the LMDC Families Advisory Council. The committees were composed of family members of the dead, residents of the area, survivors, first responders, arts and architecture professionals and community leaders. Three evening discussion and presentation forums were hosted by the LMDC. Additionally, board members travelled with victims' families and staff throughout the States, visiting other memorial sites and communities that had suffered devastating losses, garnering responses to and recommendations for the proposed memorial project.

Brian Tolle: Irish Hunger Memorial; courtesy the architect

This complex preliminary process is exhausting to follow and only serves as the prelude to inviting a creative response from would-be memorial designers. Yet this process, and variants of it, is proving to be the new approach favoured in establishing public sculptural memorials.

For a smaller-scale comparison, consider the involved community-engaged process that characterised the evolution of Dublin's Buckingham Street memorial to heroin casualties and their families. A painstaking aesthetics of inclusion is at work in the delineation of a monument's function and character. At the end of the day artists are asked to fulfil a complicated design brief, much in the manner of architects.

Perhaps it is no accident then that Brian Tolle's Irish Hunger Memorial incorporates many features of the architectural and is as easily approached as an architectural project as it is a sculptural proposition. The memorial is composed of a quarter acre of 'displaced' Irish countryside which begins, quietly enough, at pavement level and ramps gently upward, finally being cantilevered out over the opposite sidewalk in a rather more audacious projection some twenty-five feet above the ground. Approaching from the east side one can leave the city sidewalk and meander through roughly planted meadow grounds following the gradual incline upwards, discovering en-route evidence of fallow potato ridges and the ruin of a period stone cottage. Here the atmosphere is pastoral, contemplative, with muted notes of humanity in the evidence of former occupation, former cultivation. Reaching the summit one finds oneself on a parapet that looks out over New York harbour with its historic signature landmarks of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, silent witnesses to the real drama that accompanied the flight of so many destitute and dispossessed Irish immigrants during the famine exodus.

Brian Tolle, Irish Hunger Memorial; courtesy the architect

Approaching the monument's western facade one is confronted with a bold act of modern architecture. A sharp-edged, limestone-fronted plinth, striped with lines of text behind glass panels, is surmounted by an imposing concrete canopy reinforced with powerful moulded struts, splayed almost like fingers supporting a tray. An entrance in this face leads you through a tunnel way reminiscent of ancient passage graves, also adorned with strips of text, and delivers you to the interior of the ruined cottage nestled in the landscape above. The confrontation of rural and urban, past and present, is purposefully stark, but gracefully aligned. Tolle releases many disparate warring themes within this monument - the ideal and the real, art and nature, interior and exterior, park and mausoleum - yet allows them all an easy breathing space.

The cottage in the landscape above is a genuine imported ruin from Co. Mayo. The vegetation is all native to Ireland. But this landscape, so at pains to declare its authenticity, is hopelessly undermined by its own transposition from one location - Ireland, to another - New York City. In the act of reconstruction, small, telling differences arise. The stones of the cottage are carefully mortared together, honouring period procedures, but using a French mixing technique. The plants, all genuinely taken from Ireland's moist temperate environment, will not all survive New York's harsher climatic extremes. As genuine as these materials are, an act of theatre is invoked; perhaps that same theatrical urge that sustains our most prized memories, even our truths. A scrupulous adherent of conceptual rigour, in the contemporary vein, Tolle is not deterred by these flaws in the veracity of his environment. In part they are the substance of this work. The change in location necessarily changes the quality of the experience being recalled. This evolution is permitted and encouraged. Over time, Tolle allows for the text in the base to change, evolving to permit new observations and understandings that might arise. If the landscape must adapt, so it must; the original intention of the monument is intact. Fluidity of meaning is entertained as inevitable and is considered as a formal character in arriving at a design solution. Will the World Trade Center memorial display such a canny approach to its carefully stipulated purpose?

The structure's design itself serves as a critique of the memorialising process. An idealized landscape is supported by a body of language. The text displayed is an eclectic composite of pronouncements and observations, statistics and musings, all on the subject of famine. Some are drawn from the era particular to the Irish experience, some from more contemporary times. Language can represent how we approach and frame an understanding.

Inevitably the structure has provoked a range of responses. Perhaps addressing the western façade's imposing front, residents of the area have described it as 'unfriendly'. The simplicity and scruffiness of the landscaped portion of the monument does sound a dissonant, bucolic note amidst the orderly, bland building developments that loom above it. Is it a memorial's job to be friendly, to fit in? Tolle draws the surrounding architecture dramatically into play, discovering a subtle level of antipathy.

From Roberta Smith of the New York Times comes authoritative approval. She declares it "an unconventional work of public art that strikes a deep emotional chord, sums up its artistic moment for a broad audience and expands the understanding of what a public memorial can be." Can one ask any more of a memorial? But from Philip Nobel, writing in Metropolis, there is aesthetic effrontery. Dubbing it "cautionary kitsch," he accuses the memorial of being "loaded with abstracted monumentality and in-your-face pedantry, symbolism and simulation, mimicry and sham." The kitsch factor Nobel alludes to is creepily apparent in certain elements that make up the landscape. A standing stone engraved with a traditional cross pops up jauntily toward the top of the memorial, an unlikely presence recalling more readily the notion of souvenir snow globes than a credible Irish environment. Stones originating from the thirty-two counties of Ireland are positioned randomly about the site, each bearing the engraved name of its county of origin. These features disrupt the illusion of being in a real environment, but they also speak of the very real urge to sentimentalise in memory. With a project of this scale, in a bid to be fully inclusive, the artist has to negotiate a fine line with regard to the involvement of diverse interest groups. Like a musical conductor, Tolle must draw from his resources - architectural, landscaping and historical design partners, city and institutional authorities - the effects he feels most express the heart of his concept. Not all the instruments in the orchestra will be tuned to perfection.

Brian Tolle, Irish Hunger Memorial; courtesy the architect

Tolle makes much of his intention of producing a 'living' monument, something that permits the possibility of changing interpretations. Living monument is the buzz notion around contemporary memorial building. Jochen Gertz and Esther Shavlev-Gertz's anti-fascism memorial in Harburg, Germany, erected in 1986, was an early model that expounded this idea. The structure was a lead-lined pillar inviting visitors to scratch their names or thoughts into the surface. As the surface became covered in writing, the pillar sank beneath the ground in several stages, eventually affording inscribers access to the very peak of the structure before it was finally swallowed behind a glass plate in 1993. The memorial provided for its own eventual effacement, reflecting the true nature of memory - a process, not a static entity. The 'living' quality of this project is echoed in Tolle's aspirations for the Hunger Memorial. Not only is the textual component of the structure flexible and replaceable, but, rigged for audio presentations, the memorial invites present and future participation by those who might have something to add on the themes of famine, land use, and world hunger.

The WTC Memorial programme lists, among eight guiding principles, that the project is to "evolve over time." The Museum of Jewish Heritage bills itself as "A Living Memorial to the Holocaust." These ideas embody a desire on the part of the memorial to define a space that permits a fluidity of response, expects an evolution of perception.

The Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York, with digital model of new east wing (currently under construction); courtesy Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates LLC

All of this travels a long way from the traditional, classically styled arch of triumph, or bronze mounted figure on a horse. And to some, perhaps, these ambitions seem too intellectually fastidious, too burdened with the notion of their own evolving longevity to hold an emotional resonance. There is theoretical clutter. Perhaps this is merely a matter of taste. Nobel pines for something more simple, something "spare and resonant." He invokes the widely praised and popular example of Maya Lin's Vietnam Veteran's Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C. Spare, graceful and affecting, Lin's memorial is fundamentally an extended headstone, something most people can relate to. Smith refers to Lin's Wall as populist minimalism, while Tolle's monument might be termed populist postmodernism. Which do you prefer?

Are we presently happy with the interpretive impulse, wanting all our monuments, our landscapes even, to come at us through clever, pliant frames, as artful as they are self-conscious? Or does the self-consciousness in these models push us further from a sense of encounter, into the realms of the virtual? Perhaps the realms of the virtual are the last places we have left to trust when it comes to acts of memorialising. Nobody wants to be caught out like that fellow in the desert, Ozymandias. But in trying to get around him, are we not trying ultimately to get around ourselves?

Paddy Johnson is a writer based in New York.