MERIT AWARD - DESIGN
The World War II Illinois Veterans Memorial
Oak Ridge Cemetary - Springfield, Illinois

The client, a group of World War II Veterans from the capital city, formed an organization to create a memorial honoring the 987,000 men and women from the State of Illinois who served during World War II. The site for the memorial is the historic Oak Ridge Cemetery on Springfield's north side. The Lincoln Tomb (1874) is located in the northeast portion of the cemetery. The new memorial was planned for southwest portion of the cemetery on an irregular site shaped by two previously built memorials - the Illinois Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1988) and the Illinois Korean War Memorial (1996).

The memorial features a concise form that communicates its central ideas through movement, hierarchy, and description. It continues to develop the landscape memorial paradigm prevalent in the 20th century by combining it with an active learning component.

Two black granite walls reach out to the adjacent memorials to create a unified movement sequence among all three. Each wall features a chronology of events for a theater of battle - one for the Pacific Theater, the other for the European Theater. At the end of each chronology, at the apex of the composition, the walls merge and transform into a circular granite bench that surrounds a 22-ton cast white concrete globe twelve feet in diameter. Each event identified on the walls is marked with an inscribed stainless steel medallion on the globe. The globe, representing the distant places where the war was fought and acting as a catalyst for reflection and contemplation, is illuminated from underneath and visually floats over an aperture in its base. The scope of the war becomes immediately comprehensible as one examines the events chronicled on the walls and then highlighted on the globe. Thus, the memorial is intended to honor the veterans and to enlighten future generations.

Adjacent to the globe is a second inner series of thick black granite walls with quotations by wartime presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, as well as generals and admirals. The walls surround a plaza paved with a taut military grid of gray granite bricks each inscribed with the biographical information of an Illinois WWII veteran. This Veterans Plaza aligns with the continental United States portion of the globe, and is a place in the middle of the composition for both commemoration and personalization.