This finalist submission was one of four finalists to design the new Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial for the US GSA. The memorial will sit just off the National Mall in Washington, D.C, on a four-acre site in front of the Department of Education. The City of Washington's open spaces are defined by intersecting diagonal avenues and orthogonal streets. The Eisenhower Memorial redefines these spaces by creating infinite vanishing points that address the evolving American urban landscape. The Eisenhower Memorial celebrates the legacy of public service and public space as a narrative. The Entry Pavilion introduces visitors to Ike's formative years from West Point to the Philippines. The Crossing, an open space of marble and still waters, establishes the place in time where Eisenhower's life as Supreme Commander and the American Century overlap. In the Leadership Pavilion, the President-General quietly guides the world. On the inner memorial walls of both pavilions, lenticular images on 3D-milled marble create discretely powerful impressions of the man, his achievements, his words. Visitors ascend through the Stepped Lawn, the tall grass American Prairie and a thirteen-striped Regimented Grove to arrive at the central water Crossing and the crisp marble Pavilions. They pause to contemplate in the Sentinel Garden or see newly framed views of the City. The proposed landscapes speak to Eisenhower's life - Kansas prairie, Normandy shores, and Washington Mall. As visitors move through the memorial, mobile interface translates Ike's chronological timeline onto cell phones, with links to narrated documentaries, overlaying new information from space to space and allowing them to make their own decision about actions at historic junctures, showing Eisenhower's choices were not foregone conclusions. Further use of technology was explored including a radio station for motorist stuck in traffic, a proverbial American suburban "drive-by" visit to the Presidential Memorials.

Finalist, National Design Competition

with Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects & ARUP