The Pulse Memorial & Museum aims to memorialize the tragedy of the terrorist attack at the Pulse Nightclub, Orlando, on June 12 2016. The competition sought to create a memorial on the site of the tragedy, along with a pedestrian way called the Survivors Walk, that together will act as a sanctuary of hope and healing to honour those impacted by the tragedy: 49 lives taken and the affect on their families, 68 injured victims, all the affected survivors, first responders, and the healthcare professionals who cared for the victims. The Pulse Museum, conceived for a site near the memorial, will become the permanent home for artifacts and the archives of the tragedy. As a lasting legacy of the global outpouring of love witnessed in the weeks and months following the shooting, together the memorial and museum will contribute to provoking conversations to educate, enlighten, inspire reflection and rumination, and change mindsets.
The memorial was conceived as a heart-shaped promenade of colour formed by 366 rainbow gates, one for each day of the 2016 calendar year, traced through a grove of trees. Inviting reflection as well as acts of community solidarity, the memorial was designed to become an active and deeply intimate journey into the memory of those who were taken, including a passage through an intact stretch of the existing nightclub site, forming a break in the heart of the colonnade procession. This pause into the darkness of those events affirms a sacred space where words of love and loss are illuminated onto the walls. The continuous promenade is also an invitation beyond trauma, a celebration of joy, diversity, unity, acceptance and hope that were manifest in the exuberance of those taken. The Memorial spills out and connects to the Survivors Walk following that traces the paths of the heroic acts which unfolded over that night.
Just west of the nightclub/memorial site, a Museum was proposed to proclaim a common humanity by embodying a towering human form as an iconic landmark for the Pulse district, a figure of hope that connects the terrestrial to the celestial. This tower culminates in a pulsating rainbow beacon of 49 colored columns of light, activated by human touch. The observation deck at the top is proposed as a place to take in the panorama of the district, and contemplate the common pulse that unites each of us.
