Le Calligramme

Entrant and Design Team: Patterson Associates Ltd Architects, with Paul Baragwanath.

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This spatial composition consists of three elegant components, soft landscaping, a honed plinth, and an intricate floating tabula. Narrative engagement is augmented by an audio and light presentation.

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Five stanzas raise lives above the earth and into our consciousness, creating space to encounter the blank loss of war with the hope of today, provoking a deeply spatial, temporal and emotional engagement integrated into the experience of Pukeahu National War Memorial Park.

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The Memorial has been designed in the round to create an elegant, distinctive and living beauty, fraternity with future memorials, and sympathy with the design integrity of the Carillion, terrace, and park as a whole.

L'Arc de Paix - The Arc of Peace

Entrant and Design Team: Kingsley Baird (artist) and Adam Flowers (CCM Architects) with Professor Annette Becker (French historian) and Allen Wihongi (Maori cultural advisor) and Alistair Cattanach (Structural Engineer).

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L’ Arc de Paix, The Arc of Peace memorial acknowledges the enduring friendship between New Zealand and France forged by shared experiences of war and peacekeeping and the two nations’ deep cultural affinities. Recognizably French qualities are expressed in the design, materials, and symbols. As a ‘living monument’, the experiential nature of L’ Arc de Paix is enabled via visitor engagement with the memorial’s features. This ‘journey’ through the site includes references to France’s devastated World War I landscape, passing beneath the multi-coloured glass L’ Arc de Paix pavilion, and into a setting of peace and remembrance. With the intention of contributing to the visitors’ affective experience and understanding of the purpose of the memorial, the choreographed journey provides a sensory encounter that considers tactile, olfactory, and visual qualities.

Carrière de Mémoire - Quarry of Memory

Entrant and Design Team: Andrew Sexton Architecture ; Andrew Sexton, Sylvia Main, Cleon Ferreira-Craig, Hannah Griffin, Stephanie Roughan, Kirsty Jones.

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A series of underground quarries in France, named after New Zealand towns and cities, have offered the inspiration for a memorial which brings these New Zealand named impressions protected under French soil to the surface at Pukeahu National War Memorial Park.  The memorial is to be experienced from any vantage point, and seeks to encourage visitors to move around and through, inviting participation and exploration.  The memorial aspires to have an enduring attachment to the French terrain.

 

Les Fleurs Sauvages

Entrant and Design Team: Richard Ainsworth, Amanda Bulman, Nick Denton, Hamish Moorhead, Jake Yocum, and Nicolas Zilliox.

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War settled on a rural landscape, through the interactions of soldiers, and the communities they occupied.  The enduring bond that came from these interactions was the positive outcome of a desperately bleak and horrific war.  The memorial commemorates the soldiers who came from such far-flung places to help other nations defend a free way of life.

Within the ground of Aotearoa New Zealand the terrain of France is constructed.  The digging into the ground builds the trench, the maps locate the battles, and the hand-crafted objects displayed cite the domestic bonds formed between our soldiers.  The materiality is raw, recording the passing of time as it physically changes the face of the memorial.  The cloak of wild flowers, ‘Les Fleurs Sauvages’ becomes the resilience of the enduring bond between the two countries, one that is built from fragility, yet is determinedly perennial.

The memorial is both unsettling and beautiful.  It invites the occupant to inhabit an uneasy space, taking them outside of the familiar.  It shifts the horizon and works with scale to heighten perception, as the benign meadow landscape is shut out, and the inescapability of the trench dominates.