By Ryan Menard
By next spring, Northeastern hopes to be home to its own veterans memorial honoring past and present students and alumni who have died serving their country.
The memorial, which will be erected in place of the wooden gazebo along the walking trail connecting Forsyth Street and the Snell Library quad, will hold as many as 800 names. To get the community involved in the memorial itself, the committee heading the project is holding an open contest to design the memorial. The person who submits the winning design will receive $10,000.
Chairman of the board of trustees Neal Finnegan thought of the idea when he came across a dusty World War II veterans plaque while digging through school property to research the school’s history. The 200 names from that war alone grabbed his attention.
“Northeastern paid a very high price during that war,” Finnegan said. “The kind of kids that were going to Northeastern during the time were the kind that were patriotic and raised their hand.”
Finnegan stressed that, though the memorial will be built amid a controversial war overseas, the commemoration does not support any pro- or anti-war sentiments, but rather pays respect to those who fought and lost their lives in battle.
“This doesn’t have any spin to it,” he said. “I don’t think we’re doing enough to let people know what our share of various missions was.”
Though the memorial will be designed with as many as 800 names listed, the committee currently has somewhere between 250 and 400, including those Finnegan found on the WWII plaque. The committee is undertaking the laborious task of matching names of deceased from military records to school enrollment registrations, which requires hours of painstaking research.
“We are making every effort to find the names of the young men, and maybe women, who died,” Finnegan said.
The committee to develop the memorial was diverse, including ROTC officials and architecture professors.
George Thrush, chair of the school of architecture, said he sees the proposal as an opportunity for the university to stand out in the city and for students to try to make their mark on campus.
“As Northeastern becomes a much more significant part of the city, we need to be much more thoughtful about how we approach something like this,” Thrush said. “There were good examples and bad examples of this in this city and elsewhere, and if we want to avoid the bad, we should have a design competition.”
The contest will neither be a binding contract tying the winner to the construction nor a finalized blueprint of the project, he said, but will be what he calls an “idea contest.” The winning entry would be used either in whole or part and the designer may or may not be invited to help with the construction process.
Though the contest is open to architects and designers all over the world, Thrush hopes students will try to lend their thoughts. He said he has already received several interested calls from around the world.
“We are hopeful that we will get a lot of interesting designs out of this,” Thrush said.
Thrush said he hopes that the final design will follow the theme of modern memorials by giving a heavy, serious tone to commemorate the seriousness of the subject and making the memorial an experience for everyone who walks through it.
Many students said they are in favor of the idea.
“I think it’s a good location,” said Rebecca Torcia, a freshman psychology major. “It’s important to show how we remember people who went here and support them.”
The money needed for the project, from contest prizes to construction, will consist of donations and fundraising and will not be paid by students, Finnegan said.
Entries for the contest must include two-dimensional and three-dimensional models for the memorial, and will be judged by a panel including Thrush, Finnegan, various architects and Northeastern faculty. The winning entry wins $10,000, second prize gets $5,000 and third gets $2,500.
The deadline for the competition is 4:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 14.
