The design of Canadas National Holocaust Monument will be led by the architect associated with New Yorks Ground Zero and Berlins Jewish Museum.

Daniel Libeskind has won a design competition for the Ottawa project, in combination with photographer Edward Burtynsky, landscape architect Claude Cormier and museum planners Lord Cultural Resources.

The decision was announced Monday in Ottawa by Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird and Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages Shelly Glover at the site of the monument - a field across from the Canadian War Museum, on the LeBreton Flats about a kilometre from Parliament Hill.

The federal government announced the monument in April, 2013, as a permanent place to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust and honour Canadian survivors; Canada currently has no such site. It will be overseen by the National Capital Commission. A fundraising council is aiming to raise $4.5-million for the construction of the project, with matching funds from the government of up to $4-million.

The plans for the project combine architecture, landscape and art. Visitors will take a journey through a star - a concrete structure that, viewed from above, resembles a six-pointed star, the symbol of Jewish identity. It consists of several triangular spaces; according to a statement from the design team, these are meant to evoke the triangular badges used to classify prisoners in concentration camps, including Jews, Roma, gay people, and mentally and physically disabled people.

"Its very much designed as an experience - its not a monument that you just look at from afar, but it draws you in as a visitor, explains Dov Goldstein, a principal consultant at Lord and the projects coordinator.

Within the monument, original photographs by Burtynsky of Holocaust sites, death camps, killing fields and forests, will be embedded into concrete. And a landscape surrounding the monument, designed by Cormier, will include a forest of coniferous trees growing out of rocky ground, a nod to the forests of eastern Europe and a living symbol of how survivors and their children have changed Canada.

The project will be a significant piece of architecture and urban design in Ottawa, and notable because of the international reputations of all four players - especially Libeskind (who was born in Poland but lives in the U.S.) and the Canadian Burtynsky. They were brought together by Lord Cultural Resources, which organized what Goldstein calls a multidisciplinary and multicultural team for an integrated process including historian Doris Bergen.

Goldstein praises Libeskinds brilliant architecture and his sensitivity to the subject matter. (Libeskinds parents both survived the Holocaust and each lost most of their extended families.) His aesthetic touch is clear. The proposal's complex structure employs Libeskinds trademark crystalline forms, which first appeared on his Jewish Museum in Berlin, completed in 1999. That museum building is a zigzagging and jagged form that is notoriously difficult to program. It employed architectural symbolism for the fate of Europes Jews and other victims of the Holocaust: It is a series of shards, pierced by voids, and visitors end up in a "Garden of Exile.

Libeskind is also closely associated with the most significant memorial project of the past 20 years - Ground Zero in Manhattan, where he designed a master plan for the site of the 9/11 attacks that was capped with a 1776-foot-tall Freedom Tower. Libeskind saw these ideas embraced by the public in New York, but his role in the redevelopment project was reduced dramatically.

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National Holocaust Monument design unveiled

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Frederick Law Olmsted is popularly considered to be the father of American landscape architecture. However, he contributed much more to the American people than the many public parks he was instrumental in designing.

After graduating from Phillips Academy in 1838, sumac poisoning weakened his eyes so he gave up college plans. His parents wanted young Olmsted to enroll at Yale College; however, he was not able to attend.

Olmsteds disability did not hinder him from accomplishing a great deal of good works that would benefit future generations of Americans.

As a journalist he traveled to England in 1850 to visit the public gardens, where he was greatly impressed by Joseph Paxtons Birkenhead Park. From this experience Olmstead wrote and published, Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England. The publication of his book in 1852 was responsible for Olmsted to receive additional work in landscaping public areas.

It was the charismatic Andrew Jackson Downing, the landscape architect from Newburgh, New York, who first proposed the development of New Yorks Central Park in his role as publisher of The Horticulturist magazine.

After reading Downings magazine article, a friend mentioned to Olmstead that he thought that, with assistance from English-born architect Calvert Vaux, the two of them could design an elaborate park in New York City.

A contest was formed for different landscape architects to submit their plans for building the park. It was Olmsted and Vaux who convinced the landscape committee of New York that their plans should be accepted.

The design of Central Park embodies Olmsteds social consciousness and commitment to giving all citizens equal access to the park when completed. Olmsted believed that the common green space must always be equally accessible to all citizens. The principle is now fundamental to the idea of a

public park, but at that time was not assumed as necessary by the wealthiest citizens of New York City. However, Olmsteds tenure as park commissioner in New York convinced many others of his ideas.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Olmsted took leave as director of Central Park to work as Executive Secretary of the U.S. Sanitary Commission. The

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Little Known Characters in America: Frederick Law Olmsted

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Frederick Law Olmsted, god of 19th century landscape architecture, is coming to the small screen. Olmsted, who shaped some of the earliest park systems in the country, will be the subject of a new documentary premiering on PBS next month.

Olmsted was a founder of the American Society of Landscape Architects, and he transformed parks, parkways, and college campuses across the country. Perhaps most famous for Central Park, he was also responsible for the park system in Buffalo, New York, and the landscape around the U.S. Capitol Building. He designed the midway for Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition (a story made infamous in Erik Larson's book The Devil in the White City) as well as campuses for Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley. He made significant inroads in the early conservation movement in the U.S., campaigning to preserve the natural beauty of Yosemite, Niagara Falls, and the Adirondack region.

"Most folks, when they're walking through the park, they go, 'Wow, this is a really pretty landscape,'" as one expert in the trailer for Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing America explains. "They have no idea that every nook, every cranny of these landscapes were laid out intentionally."

Watch the latest trailer from PBS.

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We Can't Wait To Watch This Frederick Law Olmsted Doc

The City of Coral Gables Green Task Force is looking for a local landscape architect who would like to serve on this 11-member volunteer group.

The Green Task Force advises city officials on environmental issues that support a sustainable community and it requires the participation of a landscape architect, a planner, a person interested in historic preservation, an engineer, an architect, a member from the University of Miami, one from the Coral Gables Chamber of Commerce and another from the Garden Club, as well as three city residents two appointed by the city commission and one by the city manager. Nominations have been received for other categories but are still needed for the Landscape Architect category.

If you are interested in serving, submit your rsum, along with a cover letter, to the Office of the City Clerk, 405 Biltmore Way, Coral Gables, FL 33134. The information received will then be forwarded to the city commission for consideration. You must be a resident of Coral Gables to serve on the Green Task Force.

Short URL: http://www.communitynewspapers.com/?p=82923

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Green Task Force looking for a landscape architect