WOODROW WILSON MARKER — “MISSING VOICES”

A simple but technically advanced intervention questions legacy and promotes communal gathering.

Princeton held a competition for an installation to best wrestle with Woodrow Wilson’s complicated legacy. The main design challenge was to acknowledge both Wilson’s triumphs – his ambitious foreign policy and advances in higher education – and his shortcomings, in his racist proposals for federal employees and support for segregation. Understanding history is not a culmination of a single voice but of many. Bronze plaques embedded in the granite paving symbolically demonstrate the power of incremental over monumental and the equality of all voices.

Using excavation and surgical insertion, we create a new overlay of engagement. Open space is preserved and enhanced for social and collegiate gathering. Both media-driven and physical elements celebrate missing voices.