Salem Witch Trials Memorial Competition, Salem, MA,
November 1991, Finalist, Open Competition
Design Partner: Barbara A. Boardman
There are many different theories about what happened in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, but in the end, both the story and the history are about the dissolution and destruction of community. Rather than telling the visitor about this terrible event, we wanted to create and communicate a physical experience of that rupture and disintegration. The visitor approaches a granite plinth of the scale and dimension of the foundation of a New England meeting house. The foundation becomes a floor on which large granite blocks are arranged in rows of benches, their forms echoing the sarcophagi in the surrounding cemetery. At the far end of the center aisle, a crack appears in the floor and the foundation begins to fall away, collapsing into the earth. The upheaval throws the granite blocks into disarray and a trickle of water flows from the fissure, sheeting over the sloping floor and over the victims' names, faintly inscribed into the roughly surfaced granite.
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International Sculpture Garden, Penn's Landing, Philadelphia, PA
February 2000, Finalist, Invited Competition
Competition Sponsor: Fairmount Park Art Association
A competition to design a landscape for a collection of religious and culturally significant sculpture owned by the FPAA. Unlike contemporary abstract art, these objects were created and sited within a specific formal, iconographic and cultural context. When removed from their original site, such objects are rendered mute. This proposal created a series of archetypical landscape forms - simple, clear, essential spaces like clearings, groves and open fields. The choice of landscape forms and the siting of sculpture within those forms was based on an analysis and abstraction of the sculptures' original settings, the spatial and formal context of the original site, and how a visitor would have occupied and moved through the original site while experiencing the work.
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