Design Team
At left, Alumni Association president Dick
Power congratulates Steve Fellmeth,
Marc Roehrle, and Mo Zell, winning entrants of a Veterans Memorial design
contest.
President Freeland and George Thrush (far right) were also on hand.
By Brian Lee
Northeastern Voice Staff
Marc Roehrle, Mo Zell, and Steve Fellmeth emerged victorious in an open design competition for a campus Veterans Memorial to be located next year at the intersection of Centennial Common and Forsyth Street.
The team was presented with an award of $10,000 for their winning entry.
The memorial, an initiative led by board chairman Neal F. Finnegan, will acknowledge fallen students and graduates who served the country. The trio, whose design was selected by a diverse committee of staff and faculty in an anonymous process, designed a single granite wall, woven with two horizontal planes. The committee noted its “elegance and simplicity.”
Metal dog-tag panels will represent each dead student soldier. The panels will face a private and reflective area in a garden protected by the wall. The other side, which overlaps the Centennial walk, is more public, has seating, and is ideal for ceremonial and public observances.
Roehrle and Zell are husband and wife, and adjunct and full professors in architecture, respectively. Fellmeth, an adjunct, is Zell’s former student.
“Whenever I see a Vietnam memorial,” said Roehrle, “it’s such a moving monument. It just gives you goosebumps. To have the opportunity to potentially be part of another memorial that has such a profound emotional power for all those who see it … I just thought that was a great opportunity.”
Said Dick Power, president of the Alumni Association and a ’63 graduate, during public remarks: “I can tell you that there will be names of friends of mine, and siblings of friends of mine; so it has a special meaning to me.”
Added President Freeland, who served in Vietnam: “There’s a painful irony — the presence of a war memorial on a college campus. College is about being young; college is about being full of life; college is about hope; it is about the future. So among the meanings and emotions that this memorial distills for us, it also inspires in us to use the knowledge and values for which this great institution stands, to advance the cause of human understanding and reduce the possibility that yet more young lives of Northeastern students and grads will be lost.”
There were two other prizes awarded among the 66 official entries to the competition. A second-place prize of $5,000 went to Neil Stroup, and a third-place prize of $2,500 was awarded to the team of Jeff Carnell, Yule Lee, and Jean-Luc Terahou.