Projects

2021 James Templeton Kelley Prize: Calvin Boyd’s “Pair of Dice, Para-Dice, Paradise: A Counter-Memorial to Victims of Police Brutality”

Rendering of pedestrians looking into negative void memorial

by Calvin Boyd (MArch I ’21) — Recipient of the James Templeton Kelley Prize, Master in Architecture I

Animation showing the National Museum of African American History with Calvin Boyd's counter-memorial burning besides it.
The counter-memorial aflame after the addition of too many counter-voids and their lenses – simply one of many future realities. Will America get its act together, or will it burn?

This thesis is a proposal for a counter-memorial to victims of police brutality. The counter-memorial addresses scale by being both local and national, addresses materiality by privileging Black aesthetics over politeness, addresses presence/absence by being more transient than permanent, and lastly, addresses site by being collective rather than singular. The result is an architecture that plays itself out at over 18,000 police stations across America and at the Washington Monument on the National Mall. The two sites are intrinsically linked through the architecture itself: negative “voids” at police stations have positive counterparts aggregated at the Mall.  

Floor plan of the Ferguson Police Department
Plan of Ferguson Police Department. This counter-memorial implicates, rather than separates, the guilty party. Every time a fatal instance of police brutality occurs, an architectural void is carved out from the responsible precinct’s station.
Floorplan of the counter-memorial at the National Mall.
Plan of the counter-memorial at the National Mall. The giant scaffolding takes the shape of the Washington Monument’s shadow and holds space for all 18,000 police precincts in America to be represented.

 The critical question here is whether or not the system in which police brutality takes place can be reformed from within, or if people of color need to seek their utopia outside of these too-ironclad structures. This counter-memorial, when understood as an instrument of accountability (and therefore a real-time beacon that measures America’s capacity to either change or otherwise repeat the same violent patterns), ultimately provides us with an eventual answer.  

Visit the 2021 Virtual Commencement Exhibition to see more from this and other prize-winning projects.

Collage showing Counter-memorial in the TV news.
Several states over, a news anchor reports from the National Mall in Washington D.C. as yet another monument is added to “the Wall” – one for every unjust murder. [Washington D.C. – date redacted]
Exterior perspective of the counter memorial in Washington, DC.
The counter-memorial is an interruption in a landscape meant to be representative of American ideals. And as it fills up over time, its function as an instrument of accountability assumes primacy over any one historical moment.
Interior Perspective at the base of the counter-memorial.
At the base of the counter-memorial, visitors locate their precincts and leave flowers – again, all with the knowledge that every death adds a counter-void to the memorial despite its large but limited capacity.

 

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