Landscape Architect

11-02-16 | Department

2016 Excellence in Concrete Construction Awards

The stunning Ring of Memory WWI memorial in the northern French community of Ablain-Saint Nazaire, France is a 328-meter perimeter of stainless steel and concrete. The memorial has 500 10' tall stainless steel panels facing inwards on the ring engraved with the names of the 579,606 soldiers (mostly French, British and German) who died on the battlefields in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region between 1914 and 1918. The base of the memorial is dark concrete, "the color of war." The sleek hardscape is an "ultra high-performance fiber-reinforced concrete "?(R)? to defy the passing of time."
(YouTube video: https://tinyurl.com/jsqpbmo)

The American Concrete Institute (ACI) announced the winners of its 2016 Excellence in Concrete Construction Awards. While most the ACI awards were for building architecture (https://tinyurl.com/jj2c2u7), several of the ACI awards went to hardscape components.

The 1st place award in the infrastructure category went to the spectacular WWI memorial called L'Anneau de la M????(R)???(C)moire (The Ring of Memory) in the northern French community of Ablain-Saint Nazaire, France. The architects are Philippe Prost and Lucas Monsaingeon.

Each of the 500 stainless steel panels are engraved with 1,200 names of soldiers who died on the Nord-Pas-de-Calais front. The 500th panel has no names on it. It was left blank in case historic war archives reveal other soldier deaths on this front that need to be added to the memorial.

The Ring of Memory is on a hill that overlooks the plains of Artois, once the center of French coal mining, which made the area a strategic target for German artillery. This tranquil, green landscape of farmlands and fields of poppies in the summer was a no man's land in WWI, decimated and cratered by an estimated 1.5 billion artillery shells.

The novelty of the memorial is that it may well be the first one to list soldiers who died in battle alphabetically, with no regard to rank or nationality.

The ACI's Excellence in Concrete Construction Awards were presented at an October 24th gala, part of the Concrete Convention & Exposition in Philadelphia.

As seen in LASN magazine, November 2016.