Dublin Grounds of Remembrance / PLANT Architect

© Stephen Evans

Landscape: PLANT Architect Location: Dublin, Ohio, USA Project Team: Lisa Rapoport, Chris Pommer, Mary Tremain, Lisa Moffitt, Olivia Mapue, Elise Shelley, Jane Hutton, Heather Asquith Project Year: 2009 Photographs: Stephen Evans

Dublin Grounds of Remembrance / PLANT Architect - More Images+ 15

Project Narrative:

On this green bank, by this soft stream, We set with joy a votive stone, That memory may their deed redeem, When like our sires our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare, To die, or leave their children free, Bid Time and Nature gently spare, The shaft we raise to them and Thee.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1837, from the Concord Hymn

The Dublin Grounds of Remembrance is the winning scheme in a two-stage competition for a veterans project in Dublin, Ohio. The committee requested a project to recognize veterans and their families that was “not a memorial, but a place for reflection, contemplation, remembrance, honour, introspection and community gathering.” The Dublin Grounds of Remembrance is the recipient of a CSLA National Honour Award and a Design Exchange Silver Award.

© Stephen Evans

The committee had selected a one-acre site in the historical village of Dublin that forms a doughnut of lawn around an 1840s cemetery, leading into a steeply sloped forest ravine and creek with an existing nature walk. The site was not defined from it’s neighbours as the lawn was continuous with the adjacent library and schoolyard, and has strained visibilities from the street due to the ravine.

As the site has no prior military significance, we posited that the landscape itself must become activated by collective and individual ritual over time. The project proposes the act of walking to generate a physical relationship with the site to create meaning – the collective memory of this community using this land creates the commemoration, not a commemorative object. The act of walking permeates life for soldiers and civilians with its references to marching, pacing, pausing, wandering, hiking, therapeutic walking, journeys, parades, processions, and pilgrimages. These physical and public acts – participatory acts – restore and commemorate. The design approach began with defining, demarcating and naming the site and developing an architecture that is intimate with it: The Grounds of Remembrance demarcate a place of significance circumscribed by the Guide Rail, contains Indian Run Cemetery, and is organized into a Walk, Loggia, and Sycamore Grove, together defining the limits of the grounds and choreographing the experience through the site on both ceremonial days and everyday visits.

plan

The ritual Walk is signaled at the street with an Entry wall and the beginning of the bronze GuideRail and runs from the ceremonial area framed by the Loggia, through the newly planted Grove to the Memory Wall in the secluded ravine. The excerpt from Emerson’s Concord Hymn, laser-cut perforated through the bronze end wall of the Loggia was originally written for Concord’s centennial celebration of the start of the Revolutionary War, making an ancestral connection between the original fight for independence as a necessity for freedom, and all veterans that have followed. The Memory Wall is an intimate place of pause at the end of the walk: a bronze tube perforated stone wall to receive personal and private messages. The Walk, calibrated to pace movement, focuses on the individual journey of remembrance; the Grove provides for both wandering and large gathering functions; and the Loggia –the ceremonial backdrop, panoramic window, and shelter – together with the Dedication wall, is the place of collective pause.

© Stephen Evans

Architectural and landscape elements are closely drawn from the cultural and natural history of the site – the cemetery, ravine forest and limestone cliffs – rather than creating an idealized form on the site: The transparent Loggia, cut letters of the poem, and perforated Memory Wall frame the landscape at the large and small scales; the smooth Indiana limestone Dedication seat wall and bronze Guiderail that polishes with use and hugs back with its form, highlights by contrast the jagged foreboding cemetery wall; and, the rugged Memory Wall of rough and smooth-cut North Shore Limestone and startling mottled Sycamore bark draw from the limestone cliffs and sycamore lined stream in the ravine below.

Each element reinforces the physical and mental remembrance that generates personal meaning for the site while physically and metaphorically providing support, shelter, and guidance. The fundamental dual spatial and textural character of the site – open and accessible versus remote and rugged, spawns the spatial contrasts of the project: The Memory wall occupies an intimate contemplative space, while the new Grove will create a natural canopy reinforcing the stark open lawn of the cemetery and sheltering the collective open space of the sloped amphitheatre to the Loggia. The Walk with its stabilized Indiana Limestone screenings, lined with engraved Limestone dedication pavers –purchased by residents to honour their family and friends–and crossed with precast concrete pavers creates a visual and aural pacing, with the sound changing as one crosses into the woods.

© Stephen Evans

Dublin is a large wealthy suburb of Columbus that has grown from 750 residents to 30,000 in just 30 years. Though the area had been a farmer’s village crossroads for over 150 years, only a tiny number of residents have any history here. This created a special challenge for the project as the City boasted few veterans, though there were several sons and casualties in Iraq. This project is part of a series of deliberate actions by the city to create anchoring and identity for the community – a vigorous outdoor art program, a long list of highly choreographed festivals, a restrictive zoning by law and an intense street landscaping programme. Our approach to the project was to create a place with a strong identity that would be drawn from an intimate awareness of the site, to turn the attention of the residents to the special qualities inherent in the site itself. It would allow each person to bring their own veteran remembrance – a memory of family from far away – to the site, and encourage an action that would bring these memories together into a collective imprint for the site.

© Stephen Evans

Text provided by PLANT Architect

Local Architect/Engineer: Jack D Walters and Associates, Ohio Copper Contractor: The Durable Restoration Company, Ohio Bronze Contractor: Quality Architectural & Fabrication Inc., Ohio Structural Engineer: Blackwell Bowick Engineering, Toronto Electrical Engineer: McMullen Engineering Co., Ohio Soils Engineer: BBC&M Engineering Inc., Ohio Civil Engineer: Hull and Associates, Ohio General Contractor: McDaniels Construction, Ohio

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Cite: Kelly Minner. "Dublin Grounds of Remembrance / PLANT Architect" 11 Nov 2011. ArchDaily. Accessed . <https://www.archdaily.com/183457/dublin-grounds-of-remembrance-plant-architect> ISSN 0719-8884

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