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The Planned West Village AIDS Memorial Is Gorgeous
By
Garth Johnston
Published Jan 30, 2012
Modified Jan 30, 2012
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By
Garth Johnston
Published Jan 30, 2012
Modified Jan 30, 2012
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Designing a good memorial is not an easy task, so it's nice to see when someone knocks it out of the park. Enter Infinite Forest, a design for an AIDS Memorial in the Triangle Park across from St. Vincent's by Brooklyn studio a+i. This is how you design a memorial, people.
The group's winning design (by Mateo Paiva, Lily Lim, John Thurtle, Insook Kim, and Esteban Erlich, with a rendering by Guillaume Paturel) was selected from more than 475 entries and is incredibly simple. Basically they want to enclose the triangle in walls with mirrors on the inside and slate on the outside. Within the triangle they'd place a grove of white birch trees creating the illusion of the titular forest. Entrances to the memorial would be at each corner and the space between the mirrors and the slate walls would act as light wells and entrances for a planned museum beneath the park.
The whole thing is lovely, but what we really like about it is that instead of naming the roughly 100,000 New Yorkers who have died of AIDS it honors, the memorial encourages visitors to write the names of their lost loved ones on the exterior slate walls so they can be washed away with the rain. We heartily endorse this one.
So, next step in making this memorial a reality? Raising money and persuading the City Council to approve. You can learn more about how you can help right here.
[h/t Curbed]
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aids
aids memorial
manhattan
st vincent's
studio a+i
west village
Garth Johnston
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