Axis Mundi Design | AIDS Memorial Park Competition

RIBBONscape, located in New York City’s Greenwich Village, is an urban park, garden and learning center dedicated to millions of New Yorker’s touched by the AIDS epidemic. It is a place for visitors to gather, hope, heal, and remember. The wedge shaped plane of the city block tilts up dramatically from 7th Avenue providing space for a learning center below, and a rooftop urban garden above.

The garden is inspired by the global sign of AIDS awareness, the red ribbon. The form folds in on itself creating a complex woven pattern of retaining walls. Planted among the walls are native New York plants and wild flowers that renew seasonally. A ribbon-like pathway moves through the garden allowing visitors to experience the garden from different vantage points. Along the pathway the walls thicken and vary in height providing places for sitting and areas to place wreathes and flowers. The park provides a living memorial and healing sanctuary for those touched by the global pandemic.

Design Team: John Beckmann, Jessica Marvin
Renderings: Jessica Marvin
©2012 Axis Mundi Design LLC

Located in New York City’s historic Greenwich Village, RAINBOW PARK provides a dedicated urban setting for the millions of New Yorker’s touched by AIDS, to heal, hope, and remember.

The park is comprised of thirty two triangular light emitting columns, each one representing the number of New Yorkers who succumbed to the disease per year since the Center for Disease Control identified AIDS in 1981. Beginning with the 15 deaths before 1981, the columns grow in height as the epidemic peaked in 1995 with the death of 8339 New Yorkers. Each Borough of the city is represented on the column by a color providing a visual mapping of humanity’s struggle with the pandemic itself. For all the promising prospects on the horizon, AIDS continues to invade our lives, violate our past, and rob us of our comfortable assumptions about the future. As we continue to battle the disease, new columns will be erected until the day arrives when we have conquered the disease.