Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southeast Louisiana and coastal Mississippi in August 2005, killing more than 1,880 people and causing $125 billion in property damage which made it the costliest hurricane in American history at the time. Recovery was slow. The scars on the landscape endured.
This memorial proposal begins with a Southern axiom: to plant a live oak is an act of faith in the future, because those who plant one will never see it reach maturity. The design calls for more than 2,000 live oaks for each person killed or missing to be distributed across the affected parishes and counties of Louisiana and Mississippi in proportion to each community’s losses. Over generations, these groves will grow to create broad, shading canopies in park-like settings throughout the region.
For New Orleans, which suffered the greatest loss, a central memorial grove houses both a Memorial and an Interpretive Center. At its heart is a reflecting pool whose water level rises and falls twice daily with the tides of Lake Pontchartrain. The names of the dead, engraved into a portion of the granite slab within the pool that becomes visible at low tide and covered at high tide. Slowly worn by water over time, as individual memory gives way to collective history, contrasted with the live oaks, growing year by year, to affirm what the water obscures: that loss can become the ground for renewal.
