In Tension
Year: 2021
Location: Somers, Wisconsin
Competition Entry: Cold War Veterans Memorial Design Competition
Hinterlands Team: Conor O’Shea
This memorial translates the tensions that defined the Cold War into public space through architectural form and vegetation.
Anonymity and confrontation, suspense and arrival, compression and release, materialization and dematerialization, and solid and void are expressed through two spirals. These forms are also a scaffold for outdoor exhibits that can feature digital materials, events, and names from the Pritzker Archives & Memorial Park Center archive.
The interior spiral transitions from a boxwood hedge into translucent concrete, both caged by a red powder-coated steel frame. This semi-translucent form—33’ at its highest—features long rectangular viewing portals and gently lifts up off the ground, allowing visitors to voyeuristically spy on each other through the wall. The exterior spiral—47’ at its highest—transitions from a boxwood hedge into a steel and mesh frame. It features multiple 1’H x 50’W digital marquees for displaying a timeline of events, veterans names, images, and other important items that emphasize the competition design themes. Curators can also display artifacts from the archive on a 23’H x 37’W video screen.
The void between the spiraling walls becomes more compressed as visitors move through the site. The walls grow taller and more angular, and grow in scale and complexity. The walls are balanced, yet stand in tension to one another at the center of the spiral, where the void is narrow and tall.
