Pentagon Memorial Competition - 'The Sky Garden'
Competition: 2002/3 - Second Place
Type: Landscape - Memorial
In association with: Room 4.1.3 (Richard Weller/Vladimir Sitta), Thomas Griffiths, Jackie Bowring, Peter England & Tatum Hands.
This awarded proposal comprises 184 indigo cubes which appear to hover above a plaza. Inside each cube is a deep well of water, reflecting the sky, and a small orange chest in which relatives of each victim are invited to place private mementos. These cubes are analogous to “Black Box Flight Recorders”. The metahoric purpose of this design is to take the mechanistic nature of a Black Box and transform it into the personal poetics of life. In ‘The Sky Garden’ they become a symbol of the transience of memory in the technological age, becoming Black Box Life Recorders - hovering memory containers that seemingly defy gravity.
The Sky Garden derives its overall form and layout from the specific qualities of its context. The Pentagon’s façade is reflected and doubled to provide the configuration for the Life Recorders. With 92 windows on the section of the façade adjacent to the site, through doubling and slipping the grids, the plaza speaks directly to the building at the heart of the event. The garden also draws a connection to the formality of nearby Arlington Cemetery, hence drawing in the wider memorial environment, without explicitly duplicating the qualities of a cemetery.
