Memory in Form explores how geometry participates in public remembrance. Focusing on memorial architecture since 1945 while returning to selected earlier precedents, the book studies how ground, proportion, alignment, repetition, cuts, and sequences of movement shape encounters with histories of violence, trauma, and loss. It brings geometric analysis into relation with historical and philosophical accounts of memory, asking how memorials engage site, material, movement, and time.

Through archival research, measurement, and digital reconstruction, the book investigates twenty-five built, unbuilt, altered, and temporary memorial projects in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Original analytical drawings trace and test spatial relationships that can remain difficult to discern in photographs, published design drawings, or written descriptions. Redrawing becomes a way to understand the choices through which memorials take shape. The projects include works by BBPR, Max Bill, Maya Lin, Mary Miss, Carlo Scarpa, Dani Karavan, MASS Design Group, and WAI Think Tank. Together, these case studies reveal the different responsibilities of memorials situated on traumatic ground and those that commemorate events elsewhere.

Written for architects, scholars, students, and readers interested in geometry, history, theory, and public space, this book offers a method for reading memorials closely and informing memorial design. Memory in Form argues that memorial architecture does not contain memory as a fixed meaning. Instead, memory takes form through relations among event, site, material, inscription, and bodily movement—relations that geometry organizes and carries forward across time.

Scott Aker is an architect, educator, and researcher whose work examines relationships among geometry, memory, and trauma. Aker is the architect of Philadelphia’s award-winning June 5th Memorial Park (2018), a memorial to victims of demolition that transforms a small urban site into a shared place of remembrance. His approach to architectural education draws on more than twenty-five years of teaching and was recognized with the 2026 G. Holmes Perkins Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design. Memory in Form brings together more than a decade of research, teaching, and analytical redrawing of memorial architecture.