Steller: Jan. 8 memorial designs lack proportion

If you give teams of designers a mission with a sense of sweeping importance, they’ll deliver designs like the four proposed for Tucson’s Jan. 8 Memorial in El Presidio Park.

One would create a pattern of lit poles — “beacons” — scattered across the Tucson area that converge on a site in the park. Another would form a landscaped pair of sloping walls, pools and gardens that re-create the west entrance to the old Pima County Courthouse.

A third would consist of a native-vegetation garden that leads to a shaded amphitheater of sorts, with the memorials to the Jan. 8 victims winding around its walls.

These preliminary designs are beautiful and inventive — to grasp them, go online to Tucsonsmemorial.org and take a look. They reflect the assignment the designers were given — to create a memorial and also put it in the context of a new master plan for the park. But I think they also share the same problem in greater or lesser degrees — disproportion.

The memorial is necessary, and I like the location at the center of government downtown, rather than at the shooting site at a shopping center on the northwest side. That’s because what was so important about the Jan. 8, 2011, mass shooting was that it was an attack on democratic participation in government. In Tucson, El Presidio Park is where local memorials and government converge.

But that doesn’t mean the memorial should take over this historic central place in downtown Tucson. And these four preliminary designs show there’s a danger of that happening.

The fourth design illustrates that problem the best. It would completely alter the park, eliminating the fountain in the middle and putting a large shade canopy high over the center of the plaza, with six holes in it that reference the six people killed in the attack.

I talked with Ken Scoville, a well-known Tucson historic preservationist and tour guide, who has been following the memorial design process, and he shared my concerns. After watching the design teams present their ideas April 2, Scoville said, “I felt they were all so overblown.”

“It’s expanded, like so many endeavors, until the memorial shapes the whole El Presidio park,” he said. “Typically, understatement works better.”

How did we get here? A group called Tucson’s Jan. 8 Memorial Foundation has been working for a couple of years, first to pick a site, then to set up the process of picking a design. It will also be responsible for raising money to build the memorial, though if a county bond proposal is put to voters and passes, that would put $4 million of taxpayer money toward building the memorial and redoing the park.

A separate 11-member panel is running the selection of the design team. Representatives of events such as Tucson Meet Yourself have also been involved, and the downtown festivals are to be taken into consideration in the designs.

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As is typical with this sort of project in Tucson, the process of creating a memorial has been elaborate and inclusive. Michelle Crow, the foundation manager, walked me through the series of events, which included visits by the four design teams in January. Each team met with stakeholders and the public and received tours of the area.

The teams came back April 2 and presented their ideas first to the selection panel, then to a packed meeting at the Arizona Historical Society, Crow said. Now until May 8, the public is invited to make comments on the designs via the website, Tucsonsmemorial.org. They’ve been doing so by the hundreds.

“I’m really touched by the amount of public reaction we’re getting,” she said. “I’m also very touched by the thoughtfulness and thoroughness of what they’re saying.”

Perhaps the key reason some of the teams took a sweeping approach to El Presidio Park is that they were asked to. Mary Ellen Wooten, who is the public-art program manager for the Tucson Pima Arts Council, is running the selection panel.

“When the Jan. 8 Memorial board and I started talking about doing the request for qualifications, it was pretty evident that there are a lot of disparate elements in the park that have been added in since it was designed in the 1970s,” she said.

So they included a request that design teams present a master plan for the park along with their memorial designs.

“There is a tremendous opportunity to make the space somewhere we might like to come, someplace that would be a nicer place to come,” she said, adding: “While we’re suggesting a blank slate, it really isn’t a blank slate because of the historical interests.”

I walked around El Presidio Park on Tuesday, as I do fairly often, and could see they’re right in viewing it as a disorganized place. It includes a handful of memorials to those killed in important historical events, such as the Vietnam War, as well as a sculpture that I couldn’t describe if you gave me the whole newspaper to use. The statue of the Mormon Battalion arriving at Tucson in 1846 and trading goods with a local man is a favorite of mine.

To make wise choices about the memorial, the panel and the public need to imagine how important the mass killing will seem as a historical event in 10, 20 or 50 years. It will be important, no doubt, but probably not important enough to become the organizing principle of downtown’s centuries-old gathering place.

“Certainly that’s not our intent, to overtake the park,” Crow told me. “I think we’ve been very respectful in recognizing we’re just a piece of Tucson’s history.”

In any case, it’s important to remember the designs are preliminary and the panel is receiving the public’s input now. They can consider my input to be encapsulated by this one word: proportion.