HART ISLAND_HOPE MEMORIAL
Hart Island, located in the long island sound of New York, is to this day used as a mass burial site for the unclaimed bodies of the wide New York area. The site holds thousands of AIDS victims, COVID victims, infants that died before or shortly after birth the homeless and unclaimed, all who have stories to tell and little to no recorded history. This design includes both a memorial for these unknown souls of hart island as well as a mortuarium for a more humane approach to the mass burial currently undertaken by prisoners from a neighbouring island.
Due to the sensitive nature of this design, a lot of conceptual design was undertaken before arriving at a resolved proposition. Taking inspiration from Perry Kulper, an abstracted site analysis was undertaken to uncover potentialities across the site before taking these abstractions forward in initial architectural brainstorming.
As a result of this, the following prompt was taken forward:
The cycles of time, the seasons and the tides are universally common despite our unique human experience. this memorial presents the unknown souls of hart island as tangible mathematical parabolas flowing out of the mortuarium like these tidal cycles. they stand as a reminder that while life may be fleeting we can rely on the infinite cycles to continue writing our legacy.
...a place to hug, to hold, to protect, to expose, to touch, to listen, to explore, to hide, to grieve.
...woven by the souls resting on this island, never known but never forgotten.
...an invitation.
...an unknown history rising out of the ground.
...a place to feel _
There are few elements in this world that are universal amongst all living souls. We are united because day will inevitably turn into night, the leaves will drop, and the ground will freeze as autumn turns to winter. The first glimpses of spring blooms a gentle reminder of the coming warmth. The tides will ebb and flow every morning, every night. Life is created, life is grown and eventually, life is lost.
These cycles exist beyond us, without them, we would become uprooted but without us they continue with the dawn of a new day. We may know very little about the souls buried on hart island and the stories of the complex and intricately woven lives that they led, but we do have these shared experiences. We may have felt the sting of the summer sun, tilted our heads to bathe our faces under a newly risen moon, we may have dipped our toes in the chilling waters of a high tide or we may have existed for a tiny fragment of the same tidal cycle.
These cycles exist beyond us, without them, we would become uprooted but without us they continue with the dawn of a new day. We may know very little about the souls buried on hart island and the stories of the complex and intricately woven lives that they led, but we do have these shared experiences. We may have felt the sting of the summer sun, tilted our heads to bathe our faces under a newly risen moon, we may have dipped our toes in the chilling waters of a high tide or we may have existed for a tiny fragment of the same tidal cycle.
This memorial for the unknown souls on hart island continues their legacy, despite knowing very little about their history. We know that even with just whispers of data, we can map out the facts, we can make tangible presence out of the elemental experience. A simple formula using inputs taken from the hart island project such as the age at death, date of death, date of burial and burial plot number, created parabolas which are comparable to the graphs outputted by the tidal cycle. These curves drive the form of the design, ensuring that the legacies of the unknown souls continue to impact and influence the experiences of others long into the future.
With no explicit path, the visitor is unknowingly directed by the unknown souls' parabolas to interact with the site in differing ways. They can run their hands along the mesh, perhaps recoiling back in the heat of summer or the burning cold of winter. They are held in refuge, away from the wind or left exposed to observe the vast landscape. Native wetland vegetation takes hold of the mesh, transforming the ground with a flurry of differing textures, colours and experiences at the change of the season. And we can rest in the comfort that at the break of the year, the cycles will restart the transformation of the island, and we will age yet another year, but this memorial will stand as a tangible reminder of the life cycles that we have lost.
The footprint of the mortuarium that serves to process the bodies to later be buried by natural burial is the shadow of a building that previously existed on the island. Although recently demolished to make way for further burial sites, the brick building stood for decades. The mortuarium sits close to the shoreline connecting the memorial to the mortuarium. The strong rectilinear form present in plan facilitates a linear and procedural circulation of the body through the mortuarium with the core point of the building presenting the point of exit for the body. This is not only where bodies will be collected for burial, but it is also more symbolically the origin point of the memorial, where the legacy of the soul is carried up through the curve before flooding out across the landscape.
The conceptual site analysis and further spatial explorations below show the origins of the design narrative and allows for architectural exploration beyond typical logical bounds, allowing for abstracted perspectives
