Re-imagining Trinity Site

The existing obelisk at Trinity Site was intended to celebrate a nation’s success of bringing an end to a world war. We seek to question the use of this monumental morphology as this could also be considered a commemoration for the use of weapons of mass destruction, with their subsequent threats and ongoing effects.

Revising the competition requirement for a memorial that commemorates the “last” atomic bomb, we encountered the necessity to account for every single detonation and possible test site, while discrediting the current obelisk’s monumental quality. Around the existing monument, a new cluster of obelisks is created, each pointing at the epicenter of where the very first atomic bomb exploded in 1945. The proposal’s core involves a sometimes walkable, sometimes fractured crater that can be observed in the distance. Each obelisk accounts for an event in locations of the world with its root extended in such directions. Additional ones are marked without extensions, as not every explosion is officially accounted for.