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THE OFFERING
Project team—
Richard Weller,
Gary Marinko,
Mike Rowlands,
Bruce Rowe
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Karen Burns considers Richard Weller and Gary Marinko's shortlisted entry to the Tsunami Memorial Design Competition.
Building a memorial to disaster is always
a tricky business. Fictional film,
documentaries and even theme park
animations can effectively portray the
disorder, terror and scale of destruction,
but architectural and landscape designs
are constrained obviously in their ability
to simulate an experience, to physically
enact the form of an event. This
conundrum – to what extent should the
cataclysm be portrayed – marks some of
the entries for the recent competition for
a Thai Tsunami Memorial.
The memorial is situated amidst one of
the most devastated coastal landscapes and
must commemorate the site of ruination
among its other tasks. It was a disaster of
grave magnitude. To remind you once more
of what occurred, these are the facts.
At 9.38 am on 26 December 2004, a
tsunami struck the coast of 61 southern
provinces of Thailand, along the Andaman
coast and its islands. In many countries
bordering the Indian Ocean the event left
enormous damage – over 280,000 people
died, more than 500,000 were injured and
over two million people were left
homeless. The tsunami produced
extraordinary physical effects. Ominously
the sea receded 500 to 1000 metres from
the coast, then twenty minutes later the
first wave of two to three metres in height
rushed in. Fifteen minutes later a second
wave appeared, three to ten metres high.
There was a final wave, five metres in
height, which inundated the coast and
inland areas for an hour. The sea returned
to a calm state at 12 pm.
The site in Khao Lak-Lamru National
Park in Phananga was selected from the
most seriously affected Thai province,
Khao Lak, once a major tourist area. Five
finalists, from China, Spain, Finland, the
USA and Australia, have been selected to
enter the second stage of the competition.
The shortlisted Australian entry was
produced by Richard Weller and Gary
Marinko, together with team members
Mike Rowlands and Bruce Rowe. This
design organizes the various acts of
memorialization into an intelligent
choreography, dispersing paths, museum,
sacred space and memorial across the
landscape.
The brief called for a master plan,
memorial expression, museum space (with
flexible interior spaces and exterior spaces,
restaurant, gift shop, library), a visitor
centre including multi-faith worship area,
a learning centre, outdoor amphitheatre,
indoor lecture, small conference area,
offices, back of house. These are a lot of
works to reconcile with another demand
of the brief – to respect the site’s natural
ecology and to provide a “non-intrusive
pathway through its different elements”.
Like all briefs, competition briefs usually
contain some contradictions and successful
entries often recognize and resolve these
tensions. This is the case with the
Australian design.
One paradox is the vision of nature
generated from the contrast between a
violent natural event and a tranquil site.
Part of the Khao Lak-Lamru National Park
amidst an abandoned rubber plantation,
the chosen site rises to a central hill and
the land falls away to a small idyllic bay.
Literalizing the wave as a design form is
one way to incorporate the destructive
natural world, and numerous competition
entries did incorporate a symbolic wave
(but none of the finalists, thankfully).
Although, as Weller observes, surprisingly
none of the entrants site their memorials in
the ocean – the disastrous origin of the
tsunami devastation. The Australian team
does, however, mark the ocean.
Their design proposes a large circle,
with a diameter of two hundred metres,
made of lights housed in black casing, not
dissimilar to beacons used for navigational
safety. Like many successful acts of
memorialization this work activates a
number of symbolic levels. It references
candles or lights as objects of
remembrance, carries the seeds of earlier
land art projects, perhaps recognizes the
global nature of the event and the global
aid response in the form of the circle and,
through this form, also conjures the ghosts
of former sublime architectures from the
late eighteenth century. As Edmund Burke
famously defined the sublime in 1757, the
concept of terror and power and physical
effect produced a more apocalyptic view of
nature than that encoded in other forms of
idealism. The lights will move with the
water, effectively incorporating a temporal
element and encapsulating movement and
change, the forces of the event.
By requiring a museum and a memorial
the brief implicitly raised another tension –
the difference between the two forms. Most
entrants chose to combine these functions.
This makes some sense given that the
gallery will be a place to screen footage,
preserve artefacts and no doubt use
photographs, videos, testimony and
possessions to personalize the sense of loss
and tragedy. But, in specifying a memorial
and museum, the competition did not
assume that the two were the same, or
necessarily even congruent. Within the
space of the museum it is difficult to
incorporate the sea as a mutable, sometimes
violent element.
Weller and Marinko’s proposal offers a
number of places where different acts and
forms of remembrance may occur. They site
the museum adjacent to the existing road,
effecting a lesser impact of building works.
They choreograph two paths to the site, one
for the journey towards it and another for
the return, perhaps recognizing the changed
emotional landscape people will inhabit
after visiting the sea. They offer a spirit
house on a deck by the beach, a place of
offering and spiritual commemoration.
Their museum design is unsurprisingly
schematic, given that it is a first-stage
response. One noticeable element of the
building is its material, a special dichroic
glass that Weller describes as a bit like
driving through a rainbow. It plays with
vision and a visually transformational
architecture. The jurors have expressed
some reservations about its reflective
nature. I understand their concerns about
being blinded in the Thai sunlight, but I
am also attracted to the symbolic
possibilities of the form. Its dazzling
lightness may produce another sublime
moment of overwhelming blindness and
illumination. To read this even more
symbolically, and perhaps over-determine
the designers’ intentions, unstable light and
vision may be a space of disappearance, a
space beyond overt interpretation, a
movement into the infinite.
KAREN BURNS IS AN ARCHITECTURAL WRITER
AND CRITIC BASED IN MELBOURNE.
THE OFFERING
Project team—
Richard Weller,
Gary Marinko,
Mike Rowlands,
Bruce Rowe
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