Architecture firm Gómez Platero has designed a new memorial to honor those affected by COVID-19. Sited in Uruguay, the monument is made to be an expression of hope in an uncertain time. As the first large-scale monument to the worldwide victims of the COVID-19 pandemic, the project is called the “World Memorial to the Pandemic.” It aims to be a space for mourning and reflection that’s environmentally conscious and emotionally impactful.

The memorial will be located on the edge of an urban waterfront, accessible only by a long pedestrian walkway. At the center of the platform, an open void to the ocean beneath allows people to observe nature. It is designed to allow a high percentage of the structure to be pre-assembled for on-site assembly, minimizing the impact on the natural environment. The large, circular structure will serve as a “sensory experience that bridges the gap between the urban and natural worlds, creating an ideal environment for introspection.”

Director and Lead Architect Martín Gómez Platero noted that, “Architecture is a powerful tool to transform the world. It is, above all, a collective and historical reality, made of small fragments which survive over time and become culture. It is a way to show who we are on this planet. Monuments, too, mark our shared cultural and emotional milestones. By creating a memorial capable of activating senses and memories in this way, we can remind our visitors — as the pandemic has — that we as human beings are subordinate to nature and not the other way around.”

The memorial is made to welcome up to 300 visitors at a time (while obeying current social distancing guidelines), allowing for moments of shared grief and solidarity in addition to solitude. “With each project we carry out,” Gómez Platero continues, “we must create a piece of a better city. Public space is the common space par excellence: it represents us as a collective, and it reflects what we are capable of sharing as a society.”

As the firm noted, discussions with the Uruguayan government are currently in motion to choose a specific site. They estimate that, once started, the memorial will take six months to complete.

Medora is a tiny town (population 112 as of the 2010 census) located in western North Dakota, just south of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park. The town is one of the main entrances into the 70,000-acre park devoted to the 26th President of the United States.

Per the National Park Service, “When Theodore Roosevelt came to Dakota Territory to hunt bison in 1883, he was a skinny, young, spectacled dude from New York. He could not have imagined how his adventure in this remote and unfamiliar place would forever alter the course of the nation. The rugged landscape and strenuous life that TR experienced here would help shape a conservation policy that we still benefit from today.”

TR’s links to the North Dakota Badlands — so named because of the difficulty in traversing the beautifully eroded, rocky landscape in the days before highways — led to the creation of the eponymous national park, as well as the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library Foundation’s decision to locate the planned library in Medora.

Dating back to 1939 and the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (TR and FDR were distant cousins), presidential libraries are privately funded institutions that hold the papers of US presidents, predicated on the notion that the documents of a president are personal property. Some of the most famous presidential libraries, at least from an architectural point of view, include the Kennedy Library designed by I.M. Pei and the Clinton Library designed by James Stewart Polshek. (Technically the ongoing Obama Presidential Center designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien will not include the presidential library of Barack Obama, as his library is fully digital.) When built, the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library would become the 14th physical US Presidential Library.

Following the release of an architectural brief in December 2019, the foundation leading the competition for the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library selected fourteen teams in April 2020 and then one month later chose Henning Larsen, Snøhetta, and Studio Gang as the three finalists. Their designs were released to the public yesterday, and next month a winner will be announced. Below are renderings of the three entries, with excerpts from the architects’ descriptions.

Multi-disciplined engineering firm Maffeis Engineering has added a wavy and translucent canopy to the south side of the Veronafiere Trade Show ground, an international leader in the agriculture and agro-food sector, hosting 45% of Italian trade shows in their two fields.

Named New Entrance Re Teodorico, the project creates a dynamic atmosphere for the visitors of the trade show, its undulating form can be perceived from far away and marks the project site.

The project is made of a steel roof structure and in L-shape plan and it extends over an area of 6,750 square meters. The design is based on merging the two concepts of an undulating veil and an organic surface.

The wavy effect was created with high and low points in the structure, that are required for drainage. The firm formed this organic shape by using a Voronoi pattern highlighting diversity as a visual effect.

The macro modules with each one low point were repeated several times to facilitate fabrication and mitigate cost but from the visual side this is not noticeable. The repetition is a key effect in the structure, but to an observer’s eye, one cannot grasp this repetition due to the different array of the columns.

The roof is carried on 17-metre high steel columns that are designed to represent trees in the woods with their tapered upper columns. At the top of the columns diagonal members project to support the roof, mimicking tree branches.

The columns are located under the low point of the canopy and the drainage of the Voronoi occurs through the columns core into the ground.

The steel columns are painted in different brown Pantone tonalities to resemble the effect of being in the woods, with brighter colors at the entrance and slightly darker colors as you move further down the Plaza.

For the canopy’s 3 different shades of fritted ETFE in a 2-layer composition was used to emphasize the differentiation between the macrostructures.

“The ETFE pillows are representing an undulating veil from the top and from underneath representing tree leaves,” said Maffeis Engineering.

“The different shading options were analyzed with an environmental analysis tool to create a comfortable area in winter and summer for the visitors. Outdoor comfort is complex to assess.”

“Unlike what happens in indoor environment, people are exposed to a multitude of variables when spending time outdoors.”

“These variables are difficult to foresee and to control without transforming the outdoor space into an indoor area,” the firm added.

Under the roof, light is controlled by defining the amount of dark and light fritted pillows. The necessary light transmission as well as heat gain on the ground during the fair season was also influenced by the fritted ETFE. A translucent canopy has Mean Radiant Temperature a little higher than Dry Bulb Temperature.

As the firm highlighted, the whole canopy structure weighs 495 tons of carbon steel welded on site due to structural and cost reasons. The macro modules were lifted onto the column trees via mobile cranes and then were welded to each other. There is no bolted connection on the project.

“The main objective was to demonstrate a high-level steel structure controlled by computational design in all stages from design to analysis and construction details,” the studio continued.

The Voronoi pattern is generated with Grasshopper software in Rhino3D by a set of given points. The process started with first identifying the optimum insertion points for the tree shaped columns thorough structural analysis. Following that, a set of points were generated around the column to create the tree shape block of Voronoi module panels.