Over 500 people from all across the country and around the world participated in the National Ideas Competition for the Washington Monument Grounds. From a field of twenty-four semifinalists, a distinguished jury chose six top ideas. Now it is the public’s turn to choose the top two People’s Choice winners. More information on the finalists and their proposals after the break.
ARCS OF SHADE
by Stephen Lederach, Princeton, NJ
FIELD OF STARS
by Catherine Peek, Pittsburgh, PA
A GREAT INCLINED PLANE
by Julian Hunt, Lucrecia Laudi, Monling Lee and Miguel Angel Maldonado Torres, Washington, DC
MONUMENT OF UNITY
by Jacques Prins, Kevin Battarbee, and Egidijus Kasakaitis, Gouda, The Netherlands
THE PEOPLE’S FORUM
by Karolina Kawiaka, White River Junction, VT
YOU AND ME
by Jinwoo Lim, Seoul, Korea
To participate in the voting process and for more details on the competition’s finalists, visit here.
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- © 2010 National Ideas Competition
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- Arcs of Shade
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- Field of Stars
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- A Great Inclined Plane
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- Monument of Unity
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- The People’s Forum
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- You and Me
It looks like “people’s forum” is the most reasonable proposal. But I still don’t like how this exact one looks like – it can be much better. Otherwise, the idea is correct, I think.
It’s clearly “You and Me”.
“A Great Inclined Plane” may not be the most illustrative and elegant name but this is perhaps the only project that struggles to respond to the oddities of Mall. That is specifically, the extensive space and the geometric mis-alignments. In terms of the extensive space, the project does not even attempt to disguise this but rather compounds the effect by the overabundant use of what appears to be large paving stones in an over-sized plaza as a counterpoint to the reflecting pool on the other side of the Washington monument. The very long tunnel cut under this plaza, with seemingly very little lateral escape, effectively gives the sense of monumentality without subjecting itself to merely copying a memorial.
(Side note – This is the fallacy of “You and Me” whose cut and exposed vertical face and coincidental sense of solemn memorial is way too similiar to the Vietnam memorial. That particular move may be okay to copy somewhere else MAYBE, but certainly not next door.)
The other brilliant move of “A Great Inclined Plane” is the attempt to resolve the misalignment of the White House, the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial. Though there are possibly more elegant ways to accomplish this it seems to be a more fitting solution that the disregard that all of the other schemes show toward this very important ‘problem’ of the mall. The history of the mall is important enough that the story of its geometry and of this misalignment IS not something to just disguise in arcs of fancy bushes, non-directional rings, or trendy fields of lights.
You and me gets my vote
You and me is Apples entry ;)
I live in DC and run on the monument grounds every day. It’s fine as is. The perimeter lighting needs an upgrade, but a full-scale redesigning is a waste of resources that should go to more-productive expenditures, like: putting Capital Bikeshare stations on the Mall and a few hundred more bikeshare stations in the city proper. The plain minimalism of the current iteration is what makes the monument grounds so striking. We don’t need more concrete and stone.