Spread across 1,000 acres of parkland in Washington, D.C., are memorials and figures of past United States presidents. However, a new edition will soon upset the status quo. In upcoming months, President Barack Obama, as well as people from across the world, will witness the opening of the first memorial on the National Mall to highlight a person who has never been a president.
On the west portion of the National Mall, the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial will open, situated between the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, near the Tidal Basin.
While Alpha Phi Alpha, a historically black fraternity, proposed the memorial in 1984, the bill to endorse it was not signed by Bill Clinton, the president at the time, until 1996. Three years later, Alpha Phi Alpha approached Jaan Holt, a Virginia Tech 1964 alumnus and professor in the College of Architecture and Urban
Studies.
Holt also serves as the director of the Washington Alexandria Architecture Center. Along with his team at the center, Holt organized a competition for the memorial’s design. At the competition in 2000, Holt’s team received over 900 entries both nationally and internationally for the design. On Sept. 10, 2000, the ROMA Design Group of San Francisco, Ca., was chosen as the winner.
Eleven years later, Holt will make his way to the National Mall to see the project come to a close. The memorial’s dedication ceremony was originally scheduled for Sunday. However, because of Hurricane Irene’s threats to the northern Virginia area, the dedication has been postponed for a date undetermined in September or October, according to CNN.
The Collegiate Times spoke with Holt to discuss his team’s process, his favorite moment during the project and advice for aspiring architects.
COLLEGIATE TIMES:
When did the development of this memorial project begin?
JAAN HOLT:
The competition was held in 2000, and we probably took a year to develop the whole competition event, so we started (around) 1999. We had a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts of about $50,000, but we also had some initial help from campus. The Alpha Phi Alpha people — the people that actually ran the whole Martin Luther King effort — came to us because they did not have a site. We helped them prime (the) site that’s directly in line with Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Jefferson. If you draw a straight line from Mr. Lincoln to Mr. Jefferson, you will see that the Martin Luther King memorial sits directly on that line. Then, of course, we ran the competition.
CT:
What were your responsibilities?
HOLT:
Our responsibilities were first to help them find the site. We studied the historical relationships of the various memorials that were already on the Mall and tried to find a free site that was large enough and could have historical references to both Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the whole Civil Rights Movement all the way back to the days of slavery. And it came to us — the relationship really was between Lincoln freeing the slaves and Jefferson, the author of the “Constitution.” The second thing was to run, publicize, organize (and) find the place to hold a jury for 900 entries, which were held at the Verizon Center. We had an international jury — I think it was a total of nine individuals — who looked at all those entries and chose the winner. The ROMA group was chosen as the winner, and they have been with the project ever since. It’s taken them about 11 years to raise the $120 million.
CT:
What was the most challenging obstacle you faced?
HOLT:
Having to face that this was actually going to happen, that nothing was going to stop us, that we were going to succeed in making this a reality in that location. You know, he’s surrounded by presidents there, and he obviously was not a president. So it isn’t so easy to get a location on the Mall.
CT:
What was your favorite part of the process?
HOLT:
My favorite moment was seeing the whole Verizon Center fill up with work that honored this individual coming from all over the world. It didn’t come just from our country. It came from everywhere — every country practically in the whole world sent something. It was quite a phenomenal expression of the universality of this individual.
CT:
Explain the final design.
A version of this article appeared in the Aug 27 issue of the Collegiate Times.
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