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AIDS Memorial

Location
San Francisco, California

Date 2005

Description
The “Ephemeral Vigil” memorial was awarded an Honorable Mention for the 2005 AIDS Memorial Competition.  The site for the project was the Memorial Grove in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.  The driving idea for the project was the aim to capture something of the fleetingness of life by creating a luminous vigil that would appear and disappear relative to the intensity of the fog that surrounds the site on a regular basis.

Two walls of light extend up from the ground into the sky with varying degrees of perceptibility.  At the scale of the memorial Grove the light becomes denser relative to the degree of humidity in the air, and on clear nights the memorial is visible to the city beyond, above Golden Gate Park.