Five Finalists in Design Competition for National AIDS Memorial

Many of Memorial Grove's features are meant to blend in with the natural surroundings of Golden Gate Park. A new design will be added if the board of the National AIDS Memorial can raise enough money to construct it.
Photos courtesy of aidsmemorial.org

The National AIDS Memorial Grove, located on seven-acres in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, will likely get a new addition soon. Two hundred architects, designers, artists, landscape architects and students participated in a competition to develop a design that would give visitors to the site a deeper understanding of the 20 million lives lost to AIDS in the past 25 years. Entries came from 21 states and 24 countries. Five finalists were chosen and the winning design will be announced in April. If funding can be acquired, the winning team will then get to see its ideas come to life.

Among the finalists is Melissa Cate Christ, a landscape architect based in Toronto. She proposed building a 20-foot-high pile of small rocks that visitors could take and move to make small memorials throughout the grove. The pile would eventually change and get smaller over the years until eventually, just a ring of stones would remain where the pyramid used to be.

Other finalists' designs include a tangle of red, interconnected tubes, and a swarm of hummingbirds, developed by Raveevarn Cholsombatchi, Jacob Atherton, Michael Eggers and Andrew Shanken, all from the Bay area; a wire-mesh wall that would serve as a framework for mementos, designed by Andrew Thurlow and Maia Small of Rhode Island; a pocket of black fiberglass poles and a sidewalk of charred wood, designed by Janette Kim and Chloe Town of New York; and an installation of 24 polished, stainless steel spheres, each engraved with a number to indicate the lives lost each year to the disease, proposed by Shinya Uehara and Chantelle Brewer of Chicago.

There has been some disagreement over whether the final design should be in keeping with the natural setting of the grove, or be more of a stand-out piece of architecture. Opponents of the latter, including Alice Russell-Shapiro, a landscape architect and founder of the Grove, argue that a grand monument would take away from the dignity and graveness of the site.

The National AIDS Memorial Grove was conceived in 1989 by a small group of San Franciscans who had lost loved ones to AIDS. Development of the Grove began in 1991. People come from all over the country and the world to enjoy the greenery, to hold private services, and to volunteer at monthly workdays. The Grove is governed by a board of directors who have signed a 99-year renewable agreement with the City of San Francisco through the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department to maintain it in perpetuity. The Grove is a project of the Tides Center, a non-profit corporation dedicated to social service and stewardship of the natural environment.