Edison Graff / Stardust Fallout
Visitors view one of the five concepts for the Oct. 1 memorial designs last month at the Clark County Government Center. The models are on display from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday in the Rotunda Gallery of the government center.
Wednesday, July 5, 2023 | 2 a.m.
From angel wings protruding into the sky from a concrete floor to giant horses scattered about the grounds, the 1 October Memorial could take shape in many different forms.
The public won’t know which design will get the 1 October Memorial Design Committee’s approval until September, when the seven-member board will submit its design recommendation to the Clark County Commission.
But the five finalists in the selection process all have proudly displayed their design models inside the Clark County Government Center since early June.
As more places are building memorials to commemorate the lives lost in mass shootings across the country, architects are confronted with a new problem: how to present a meaningful and unique interpretation that does justice to the loss specific to a community.
“Obviously we don’t have a blueprint for a shooting memorial, and the blueprint holds so much space for so many different emotions,” said Jessica Henson, a partner at Olin, one of the teams fielding a finalist. “Some people are doing OK. They saw that event as like, ‘Oh, I need to get to living my best life.’ Other people, it’s still Oct. 2, 2017, for them, (so) here we needed to hold enough space for everyone’s current emotional journey.”
Las Vegas will soon get to the results of a process that began almost four years ago.
Gathering the right people
The 1 October Memorial Committee was created in 2019 by Clark County commissioners and then-Gov. Steve Sisolak, who appointed Tennille Pereira — director of the Vegas Strong Resiliency Center — to lead the panel.
Other members are Vice Chair Karessa Royce, a Route 91 survivor; local artist Harold Bradford; local architect Robert Fielden; Rebecca Holden, public art project manager for the city of Las Vegas; retired Metro Deputy Chief Kelly McMahill; and Mynda Smith — the sister Neysa Tonks, another Route 91 victim.
The group was organized to recommend a design for the memorial, but the coronavirus pandemic stalled the board’s work, which for some members included familiarizing themselves with the process of building a memorial.
To do this, Pereira and her team reached out to other communities that similarly had been affected by tragedies — Newtown, Conn., site of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting; Stoystown, Pa., home to the Flight 93 National Memorial, and Orlando, Fla., where the Pulse Nightclub massacre occurred — to get information on how their memorials came to be.
They also conducted community surveys in March, June and August of 2021 that received over 10,000 responses, according to Punam Mathur, a consultant to the committee.
In July 2022, the 1 October Memorial Committee and county leaders began the first phase of the 18-month process to gather ideas and select a design to recommend to the County Commission.
The committee put out calls for creative expressions from the public and a request for qualifications from international architecture teams and evaluators to help with reviewing those submissions.
Five teams moved on to the final competition phase: Aaron Neubert Architects + studioStigsgaard, JCJ Architecture, Olin + Andy Scott, Paul Murdoch Architects and SWA Group.
The finalists in January began outreach efforts and work on their design concepts.
Henson said there were a number of requirements the committee decided upon for design teams to follow, like the creation of a book detailing the site constraints, maintenance plans and operations. Outreach was also a big part of this project for the 1 October Memorial Committee, which encouraged the five final teams to engage with as many people as possible during the design process. To assist, the committee provided the teams with results from the 2021 surveys.
By the end of May, each team had to submit final design proposals to be displayed at the Clark County Government Center, which are available to the public for viewing until the committee makes its recommendation to the County Commission in September.
Inspiration from the community
In the days following Oct. 1, 2017, people left American flags, crosses and stuffed animals at the “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign for a temporary memorial. Then, five days after the shooting, the Las Vegas Community Healing Garden off South Casino Center Boulevard was constructed and opened.
It has become a gathering site for various public and private Route 91 remembrance events every year.
Talk of a permanent memorial since the days after the tragedy, however, and the 1 October Memorial Committee surveys in 2021 only confirmed the public’s thirst for something beyond the Community Healing Garden.
“Between the impressive response and the depth of information people offered in comments, it’s clear that the community cares a great deal about what happens with this project,” Bridget Kelly, data and operations manager of UNLV’s Cannon Survey Center, which administered the survey, said when those survey results were released.
A key finding of the survey: 65.6% of responders said it was “extremely” or “very important” for the county to build a memorial at the Route 91 Harvest Festival site on the Strip.
Clark County announced later in 2021 that MGM Resorts International was donating 2 acres in the northeast corner of the fairgrounds on the Strip where the country music festival took place for the permanent memorial.
Survivors felt most strongly that it should be located at the site, according to county officials. Over 70% of respondents wanted a memorial that appeals to all ages and 73% believed education about the Route 91 shooting should be the most important element, said the survey.
Artistic features, an interactive component and the ability to leave mementos to commemorate victims and survivors were also elements that stood out.
From individual surveys and one-on-one conversations with Route 91 survivors, family of victims and first responders, the five design teams were able to grasp some of these different design requests from the community.
The themes of country music, 58 angels and Vegas Strong were prominent in these talks, which inspired the final angel wings design, said Paul Murdoch, principal-in-charge and lead designer at Paul Murdoch Architects.
The SWA Group went for an approach that included colorful spheres suspended above a walkway — meant to mimic the look of a guitar’s sound hole.
Andy Scott, sculptor with Olin + Andy Scott, noted that the Route 91 shooting was a “joyous occasion” that flipped to a “senseless tragedy,” but he didn’t want to create another memorial that would be a sad reminder.
“We’ve all seen the statues in city centers with a sad looking angel, (so) I wanted to create something which could be read in different ways,” Scott said.
It’s the main reason why the Scottish-born sculptor, along with the Olin team, decided to feature a procession of giant horse and foal statues in their design. Each horse represents a different state or country some of the shooting victims lived in, and the foals symbolize the children who lost their parents, Scott said.
Some teams, like Aaron Neubert Architects + studioStigsgaardand JCJ Architecture, saw that a ray of light resembling hope was something in which many of their contributors expressed interest. Their designs focus on large light displays, including a dark room-type fixture with lights resembling stars and an infinity sign that can be seen from above, respectively.
Navigating those various design points, as well as the “paradox” of the tragedy itself was challenging, but important, said Natalie Beard, project director at SWA Team.
“By default, memorials, it’s a place of sadness, because something bad happened,” Beard said. “But what we heard over and over again from people was, ‘Yes, I’ve lived in darkness now for five years, I would like an opportunity for this place to help me move on with my life and … feel uplifted, and think about my loved one that I lost and the fond memories I have of them with a smile on my face.”
An emotional journey
In recent years, memorials for Sandy Hook in Connecticut — which some members of the SWA Group helped create — and San Bernardino, Calif., to name a few, have come to fruition while many more are currently in development.
Route 91 remains the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, with 58 people killed immediately and in the days after the shooting. About 800 festivalgoers were wounded.
“Memorial designs are becoming more frequent today than they had been in the past, which is a shocking reality, but our objective was not to take a blueprint from other memorial designs and repurpose it for Las Vegas,” Derek Sola, design principal at JCJ Architecture, said. “We felt that to the family members, survivors in our city in general, that it deserves the sacred space that is unique to Las Vegas.”
Designing a memorial to encompass the magnitude of this tragedy became a challenging task for many of the five final teams, they said.
But the challenge wasn’t technical so much as emotional. For many, the wounds are still fresh from the 2017 shooting less than 6 years ago, said Henson of Olin + Andy Scott. Balancing the various opinions of the community while trying to keep the exhibit appropriate for those in all stages of their healing journey was important.
And while many of these groups have experience doing office towers or memorials from wars fought decades ago, rarely have other projects brought out the same emotional response from both the community and design teams, they said.
“While there may be things in common from one to another, and especially as we have a category now that’s growing, the nature of the tragedy, the site, the time, the people involved … it’s all so unique,” Murdoch said.“This has to emerge on its own terms from its own conditions.”
Henson described it as “impossible to not feel” the emotions of each participant the team spoke to in their listening sessions. Many of these groups spoke to dozens — and some, thousands — of people across the U.S. about what they would like to see in a memorial.
It is an especially personal journey for teams like Murdoch, whose daughter knew one of the Route 91 victims, Chris Roybal; Aaron Neubert Architects + studioStigsgaard, which has a local office in Las Vegas; and Sola and his local team, who also knew people affected by it.
Aaron Neubert, principal at Aaron Neubert Architects, said he had been warned of how emotional this project would be before his team began. Some listening sessions were so impactful that he and Martin Stigsgaard would go hiking to process everything they had heard.
Despite the difference in their designs, the teams share a common gratitude for the opportunity to give back to Las Vegas and speak with those connected through this tragedy.
“No matter what happens as far as what team is selected, well, our friendships will certainly continue on and we’ll support the community in any way possible,” Sola said.
