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Memorial aims to bring first world war to life for America’s new generations

On a typical day the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington draws old soldiers from that conflict to run their fingers over the names, etched into polished black granite, of more than 58,000 comrades who died.

So the creators of a first world war memorial in the nation’s capital faced a particular challenge: no one who fought in it is still living.

Their answer is a monumental bronze sculpture that features 38 hyper-realistic, larger than figures to depict the great war, accompanied by information panels that tell the story of its origins, costs and consequences.

The memorial opens on Friday with a mostly virtual ceremony featuring Joe Biden, the interior secretary, Deb Haaland, and the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell. The site will raise a flag that has flown over nine first world war battlefield cemeteries in Europe over the past three years and there will be a flyover by the air force’s 94th Fighter Squadron.

Related: The first world war helped shape modern America. Why is it so forgotten?

More than a century after the last shot was fired, the site will finally join national memorials to the second world war, Korean war and Vietnam war. Unlike those landmarks, it will not be on the national mall but its location is still prestigious : Pennsylvania Avenue, near the south lawn of the White House.

“The Vietnam memorial was built seven years after the war ended,” noted Edwin Fountain, former vice-chair of the US World War One Centennial Commission, taking the Guardian on a tour of the new site. “Everyone knew what Vietnam meant and knew the history of that war and its place in American culture. You put up a black wall inscribed with 58,000 names, you know why that form was chosen, you know why those names are there.

“The Vietnam war memorial was very much a place of mourning. The world war two memorial is triumphal and fairly so, I think, given the great accomplishment of the allied victory in world war two. This memorial was built a hundred years after the war was over. The people who fought in that war are gone. The people who would have grieved for those people are gone, the people who served with them are gone.”

In striking contrast to Maya Lin’s famously spare Vietnam memorial, the centrepiece of the first world war memorial will be “A Soldier’s Journey”, depicting faces, figures and scenes based on the archetypal myth of the hero’s journey. Overlooking a pool of water, it will be the biggest free-standing bronze relief sculpture in the western hemisphere, 58ft long and 10ft high.

“This was not meant to be a memorial of grief, although certainly we do want the memorial to recognize the loss that was involved in the war. It was not a place for triumphalism overtly because world war one was a much more complicated war; the reasons for American entry were much more morally ambiguous than our reasons for entering world war two,” Fountain said.

The sculpture will not be ready until 2024 – it is currently represented by a giant reproduction drawing – because of its complex transatlantic production, which involved models in period costume posing inside a photogrammetry rig at the Pangolin Editions foundry in Stroud in the UK. The resulting 3D prints were sent to sculptor Sabin Howard, who conceived the sculpture design and selected the British firm, in New Jersey to fashion in clay and will be returned to Pangolin Editions for moulding and casting.

When out-of-towners come to the capital and ask what to see, Fountain wants locals to reply: “There’s this killer work of public art that’s not like anything you’ve seen. It is a truly monumental work of bronze that is completely different from all the other memorials in town.”

Fountain argues that it was also necessary to give the first world war memorial – which emphasizes the contributions of women and people of colour – a stronger educational component than its counterparts from other conflicts.

“We all know what Normandy looked like but we don’t know what charging into Belleau Wood was like. I query in 75 years, what will visitors take away from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial because they’re not connected to those names and they won’t remember how tragic that war was for us. There was a conscious choice to make this more educational, less abstract.”

Based on a competition-winning design by a young architect, Joe Weishaar, the $42m memorial is grafted on to a 1970s park that contained an ice skating rink, kiosk, statue of the first world war general John Pershing and memorial to the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) – the Pershing statue and AEF memorial have been preserved.

On the reverse of the sculpture wall is a peace fountain, a cascade of water flowing over lines of poetry by Archibald MacLeish, an artillery captain in the war who went on to serve as the librarian of Congress, which begin: “Whether our lives and our deaths were for peace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say: it is you who must say this.”

The memorial is dotted with other inscriptions, including one from the then president, Woodrow Wilson, who has lately fallen into disrepute because of his racist actions and opinions. Fountain explained: “Our view was he was our president at the time, he led us into war, he articulated the reasons why we went to war and in so doing articulated an idealistic view of American foreign policy that we followed for a hundred years.

“You have to include Wilson, he’s too central a figure. I think people will understand this is not a shrine to Wilson.”

Related: First world war posters at the Library of Congress – in pictures

The first world war is arguably America’s forgotten war. It caused twice as many American deaths as Vietnam and fuelled civil rights, women’s suffrage and the rise of the US as a 20th-century superpower. Yet the centenary of the country’s entry into the war in April 1917 came and went with barely a murmur compared with the full orchestra of remembrance in Britain. It lacks the simple story and moral clarity of the second world war.

Fountain, general counsel of the American Battle Monuments Commission, said: “It got overwhelmed in our consciousness by world war two which, as some people say flippantly, had bigger bombs and better villains than world war one. We were attacked in a way that we weren’t in world war one – you have Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini – and it existed at the time in popular culture in a way world war one didn’t.”

The first world war is not part of American mythology in the way that it is in Britain and France and eastern Europe, Fountain added. “You can say that the revolution was our creation myth, the civil war was our tragic myth of original sin and redemption and world war two was our great heroic quest, but there’s no particular mythology for world war one. The closest I come is that world war one was our coming of age.”