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Remembrance
Over many years and many conflicts, close to 300 soldiers have sacrificed their lives in their call to duty at Northeastern University. To honor those soldiers who lost their lives while serving the country, Northeastern University sponsored a memorial dedicated to keeping the soldiers' memories alive.
Memorial as Space
Traditional monuments have relied on objects as the focal point of remembrance. They focus the visitor's attention to grand porticoes, large marble steps or heroic statues. Our proposal, however, relies on the creation of a space of reflection framed by various landscape design elements. The remembrance space creates opportunities for personal engagement and interaction. It also allows for a place of gathering for larger casual or formal groups. Three parallel elements slipping past one another organize the site; two spatial and one vertical. A black granite wall, contemplative garden, and public plaza are situated in a manner that allows for multiple readings of space to be legible. Interwoven within the contemplative garden is a paved ground plane abstracting the American flag with 13 strips and 50 lights. A grove of Whitebarked Himilayan birch trees to the north and east participate as framing devices into, and help contain the space of the memorial. These orchestrated views ensure that the spaces are balanced between being visually protective and appropriately open for ceremonial activities. The black granite wall is two sided, both serving a specific purpose. The southern elevation that faces the campus, serves as a backdrop to the campus community, and the northern side, the contemplative side, reflects the intimate nature of war and loss. The public southern side features a laser-etched mural depicting iconic images of the various conflicts, the ‘official memory’. The private northern side, however, memorializes each soldier with a single stainless steel plate representing the ‘vernacular memory’. The 279 stainless steel plates, which reflect the faces of the visitors, unite the dead with the living. The stainless steel plate is designed to be touched and lifted; singly reflecting the individuality of each soldier, and collectively representing the mutual bond soldiers' form in times of war. The plates are organized randomly.
The memorial is designed to accommodate the unfortunate inevitability of future conflicts with 100 empty spaces for additional dog tags. The voids created by the organization and construct of the plates, symbolize the voids that have been left in the lives of the loved ones and the community, as well as the loss of life experienced in war.
The Northeastern University Veterans Memorial challenges traditional roles of memorials, supplanting iconic forms with abstraction and space-making strategies. The design embraces the multiplicity of readings found in spatial memorials over the single reading of the object memorial. The granite wall provides multiple readings based on the content and interaction with the wall and via its proximity relative to other architectural and landscape elements. The Memorial suggests that meaning and intention, to accurately be communicated through commemoration, must be derived from careful introspection and that the memorial must convey simultaneously official and vernacular meanings. It avers that the role of the memorial is to represent the collective conclusions about the past as well as commemoration of the fallen.
Metal Fabricator: Erica Moody www.magma-metalworks.com
Landscape Architectural Consultants: Jay Emperor www.pressleyassociates.com