Tangshan Earthquake Memorial Park

The architects for the project are Kjellgren/Kaminsky and it looks to be a  interesting and beautiful project with some very powerful interactive aspects within the park. For example . . .

MESSAGE STONES

Upon entering the park one passes a carved out block made up of 240.000 black stones placed in metal meshes. Visitors are free to pick up a stone, write a message on it with white chalk, and place it at their own special spot in the park. Eventually the walls will be torn down and spread throughout the park by the combined actions of thousands of visitors creating individual places of remembrance.

There is much, much more to the park and it would better serve you to go to the architects site and go through their description.

I thought I would post one other part of the description the opening. I want again to say what caught me was the above rendering, and that image led me to this site and the story for the park memorial.

I would think this would be a real challenge for the design of the integrated horticulture.

SILENT CITY  . . . TANGSHAN EARTHQUAKE MEMORIAL

Landscapes and cities contain information layers. These layers can exist physically, they can be visible or invisible, they can be abstract like cartographic grids, or remembrances.

For Tangshan the layer of the 1976 earthquake will always be present, in the collective memory of its inhabitants and through its physical remains.

For the memorial park we propose a monument that is omnipresent throughout the whole park constituting one of its many layers. Juxtaposed to greenery, paths and daily life remembrance becomes a natural part of the park.

The dichotomized relationship between grief and hope, black and white, past and future reoccurs throughout the project materialized in the relationship between the message stones, the lanterns and the two parts of the ruin.