Memorials for the Future

The National Park Service (NPS), the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC), and Van Alen Institute collaborated on Memorials for the Future, an ideas competition to reimagine how we think about, feel, and experience memorials.

Memorials enshrine what we as a society want to remember. But the places, people, and stories that we memorialize, and the audiences who engage with them, are in fact constantly changing. A memorial tells its story through subject matter and design. This story is often complex and multi-dimensional as a memorial’s interpretive elements embody ideas of identity, culture, and heritage, and each have intensely personal interpretations for every individual.

The Exhibition

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will host the Memorials for the Future exhibition.

Fall 2016, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts – a living memorial – hosted an exhibition that reimagined the nation’s future memorials and celebrated the Memorials for the Future competition’s finalist teams.

Key Findings

Van Alen Institute has worked with NPS and NCPC to develop a series of key findings for the Memorials for the Future competition. The full report is available here. For a summary of findings, please see the slideshow below.

Competition Winner

Climate Chronograph

Members: Erik Jensen, Rebecca Sunter

A platform for witnessing rising seas, the Climate Chronograph is a living observatory for an unfolding global story. As seas rise, cherry trees die in place, becoming bare branched delineations of shorelines past. Over a lifetime, a visitor will experience the same place in its ever-changing condition, a legible demonstration of generational-paced change. This new memorial is continually becoming, and in doing so offers a new approach to monumentality. A light human hand sustainably initiates a profound pastoral meditation. This landscape chronograph marks both our vulnerability and our response. It records the challenges before us.

Climate Chronograph’s final report is available here.

Honorable Mention

Honorable Mention for Marrying the Ephemeral and Iconic

American Wild

Members: Forbes Lipschitz, Halina Steiner, Shelby Doyle, Justine Holzman

American Wild virtualizes the National Parks through an interactive, immersive installation. Using ultra-high-definition video, recordings of each 59 natural parks can be projection-mapped at full scale. Audio recordings heighten the visceral experience and establish emotional connections to the landscape. The memorial democratizes National Park access by creating an installation in one of the most economically and racially diverse neighborhoods in the nation’s capital. Full scale, immersive environment design expands access to both phenomenological experience and ecological understanding. In so doing, the memorial reinvigorates the ways in which we interact with the cultural and biological diversity of the American landscape.

American Wild’s final report is available here.

Honorable Mention for American Heritage and Community

The IM(MIGRANT) : Honoring the Journey

Members: Radhika Mohan, Sahar Coston-Hardy, Janelle L. Johnson, Michelle Lin-Luse

The experience of movement and migration is the elemental experience of what it means to be an American. Leaving home, hopeful and expectant, and meeting hostility and kindness, misunderstanding and acceptance. Overcoming obstacles fueled by ambition and resourcefulness. Making a new home among people familiar and strange. Immigrant experiences, including those of native peoples, are at the foundation of the national psyche. They are also experiences that divide our country and have been a part of our political debate since the country’s founding. The IM(MIGRANT) is a proposal that responds to these ideas, reinforcing core American beliefs by unfolding and commemorating the varied journeys that grandparents, parents, brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, friends, and strangers have taken through the landscape of Washington, DC. It offers the visitor access to the experience of movement, of arrival, and of making a new home.

The IM(MIGRANT)’s final report is available here.

Honorable Mention for Futurism and Reinterpretation

VOICEOVER

Members: Anca Trandafirescu, Troy Hillman, Yurong Wu, Amy Catania Kulper

VOICEOVER: histories, memories, and flights of fancy VOICEOVER is a project that embraces a spirit of revisionism as a means toward a broader and more democratic form of national memorialization. Rather than a freestanding monument, VOICEOVER is a supplemental overlay that expands the original monuments’ meanings and extends the territory of possible memorial subjects deeply into Washington DC’s urban fabric. Fragmentary and dependent by nature VOICEOVER makes no claims toward cultural conclusions on historic events. Rather, VOICEOVER is a loud call to reawaken a nation to its relevant and multi-faceted pasts. It gives voice to the diverging understandings and conflicting perspectives of a multi-cultural society.

VOICEOVER’s final report is available here.

Jurors

• Marcel Acosta, Executive Director, National Capital Planning Commission
• Mark Gardner, Principal, Jaklitsch / Gardner Architects
• David van der Leer, Executive Director, Van Alen Institute
• Thomas Luebke, Commission Secretary, U.S. Commission of Fine Arts
• Jonathan Marvel, Principal and Founder, Marvel Architects
• Julie Rhoad, President & CEO, The NAMES Project Foundation
• Deborah Rutter, President, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
• Kirk Savage, Professor, History, Art, and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh
• Jason Schupbach, Director of Design Programs, National Endowment for the Arts
• Erik E. Shaw, Director, District of Columbia Office of Planning
• Gay Vietzke, Superintendent, National Mall and Memorial Parks, National Park Service

Visit the official project website for more information about the competition.