CONSTELLATION GARDEN REMEMBRANCE MEMORIAL

Charlotte, North Carolina

18,000 SF, 2021-2023

On April 30th, 2019, Reed Parlier and Riley Howell lost their lives, four students were wounded, and classmates, families, friends, and an entire community were forever changed by a terrible event at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. To mark this tragic event and to honor those impacted, the University released a national request for qualifications from design teams to create a commemorative space integrating art and landscape in December of 2020. The landscape architect brought together a diverse team of local partners, artists, lighting designers, and engineers to create a memorial design that would unite the Niner Nation and City of Charlotte with strength, resilience, and hope in the wake of this tragedy.
Remembrance is an act, a ritual, and an engagement with the past. Grounded by themes of illumination and healing, the Constellation Garden Remembrance Memorial aims to make remembrance visible and be held in the light, to strengthen the community through human connection, to acknowledge the magnitude of loss, and to embrace an optimistic and hopeful future.

The design team took great care to absorb how the shooting impacted various stakeholders and then translate that into a campus space designed with both sensitivity and meaning. Through two virtual workshops, two focus group meetings, and an augmented reality community event on campus, the landscape architect collaborated with a trauma-informed therapist and a local Charlotte engagement partner, to identify key themes of reverence, permanence, hope, transformation, and healing.
From conceptual sketches through final construction, the team took steps to balance grief, pain, and trauma of a horrific event with the design and construction of a place of remembrance and healing.

The memorial includes an interactive sculpture made of large steel arcs grounded with six pillars, one to represent each person killed and wounded. The crisscrossing arcs rise 25’ above a granite plaza, creating a voluminous ceiling that hovers above a circular gathering space embraced by planted landforms and an arc of trees, flowers, and plants.
A web of thin cables is anchored by the arcs and holds an array of lights, suspended against the sky. These lights are frozen in a map of the constellations of stars in the night sky on April 30, 2019, at a moment when time stopped for all of those affected by this tragedy. Reed and Riley’s pillars are wrapped with commemorative bands that, when touched, send a kinetic wave of increased light intensity through the constellation above, signifying the network of those affected by gun violence. Light ripples quietly and slowly across the sculpture, representing the ever-present constellation of trauma, pain, and loss caused by gun violence.
The sculpture represents both the vast emptiness of the night sky, but also the feeling of being connected and together. Designed to heighten the senses, the sculpture is at once delicate, strong, reflective, and ephemeral. The landscape holds the sculpture carefully and softly within it, integrating additional opportunities for seating for study, contemplation, and reflection.