Texas A&M’s Bonfire Memorial is included as one of America’s 37 most beloved national landmarks in a new book by bestselling author and architectural historian Judith Dupré.
The book, “Monuments—America’s History in Art and Memory,” includes the Bonfire Memorial along with iconic structures like the Washington Monument, Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Lincoln Memorial.
The Bonfire Memorial was built to commemorate the 12 lives lost in the Nov. 18, 1999 Bonfire collapse. Robert Shemwell ’82, of San Antonio-based Overland Partners Inc., was the lead architect of the memorial’s design team. Shemwell is an Outstanding Alumnus of the Texas A&M College of Architecture.
“One of the very unique things about this memorial,” Shemwell said, “ it requires active participation. You inhabit it. It doesn’t become complete without you there.”
The design was selected from nearly 200 entries in a yearlong international competition coordinated by faculty in the college’s Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning. It was dedicated five years to the day after the tragedy.
“There is a palpable, physical sensation of having left ordinary time and entered an eternal dimension,” writes Dupré of the entering the memorial’s centerpiece, the granite Spirit Ring, which was built where Bonfire once burned.
She compares the Spirit Ring, which features 12 16-foot tall gateways, one to commemorate each of the 12 Aggies killed in the tragedy, to Stonehenge and other ancient ceremonial circles.
“Whether old or new,” she writes, “such stones consecrate a cyclical ordering of time as it has always been marked, and affirm that the present moment, along with what once was and will be, is part of the sacred continuum.”
Dupré also writes of the technical challenges faced during the memorial’s construction. One hurdle was created by the Spirit Ring’s stone portals, which could not be set in the site’s damp soil due to their immense weight; a suspended foundation system was devised to absorb the movement of the portals.
An underground drainage system was devised to handle College Station’s almost 40-inches a year rainfall total.
“Every tool of art, architecture, and landscape was used to mitigate various site challenges, including an adjacent parking lot for several thousand cars that was visually jarring,” she wrote. She was especially impressed by a berm, which she termed “a cradling mound of earth” that was constructed to block the view of the lot and situate the memorial.
“Monuments” is a lavishly illustrated, 250-page coffee-table size book that takes readers on a journey with Dupré to well-known structures such as the Jefferson Memorial as well as lesser-known sites such as a memorial to photographer and linguist Clover Adams in Washington, D.C.
She uses anecdotes, interviews and her experiences of visiting each monument to report on America’s most notable landmarks and examines the reasons—political, psychological, and emotional—for building them.
Dupré writes in the book’s introduction that monuments “urge us to find ways to give meaning to our brief time here and, in the face of loss, to reach for the grace that will allow us to rededicate ourselves to life.”
She has also written “Churches,” “Skyscrapers,” and “Bridges: A History of the World’s Most Famous and Important Spans.”
Publishers Weekly calls the book “vintage Dupré … The stylish architectural historian examines 37 monuments for what they reveal about those they commemorate, those who designed them and those who visit them.”
