30 Years Later: The Oklahoma City National Memorial

Husband and wife architectural team Hans and Torrey Butzer were living in Berlin, Germany, in late 1996 when a contest in Progressive Architecture magazine caught their attention. The competition called for designing a memorial to the victims of the tragic bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995.

Together with associate architect Sven Berg, they submitted a unique design entry and suddenly found themselves among the five finalists of the two-stage competition. The rest, as they say, is history.

Urban Land caught up with Butzer Architects and Urbanism co-founder Hans Butzer in Oklahoma City to collect his thoughts on both the process of designing such an important monument as well as how it continues to draw global admiration 30 years later.

Urban Land: You were living in Germany at the time of the competition for the memorial. Tell us how you came to Oklahoma City and never left.

Hans Butzer: We developed a design concept sight unseen. I’d never been to Oklahoma City. Our design was selected on my 31st birthday, and we were surprised to find ourselves among the five finalists. After that, we made it to Oklahoma City and saw the bombing site for the first time.

I was supposed to start my Harvard graduate degree in fall of 1997 just after we won the competition, and Harvard let me defer for a semester to give us time to set up the project. We started the schematic design drawings while in Cambridge, where our office was set up. I finished my graduate degree and we immediately moved to Oklahoma City so that we could be on the job site every day and see it built.

It was through that experience that we really developed a relationship, not just with the contractor. Torrey was literally on the job site every day and got to know every single person there, whether they were laying stone, hauling bags of cement, digging holes, or laying irrigation lines. That helped us learn more about the people who were literally building the memorial but also communicating to them just how important their work was to the larger mission of building a memorial that spoke to the community and the tragedy of those lives lost and lives changed forever.

BAU_Butzer Architects and Urbanism

After the memorial was finished we were still not sure we would stay. For the next few years I was entertaining job offers, and the more we spoke to people in other cities the more we realized what we had in Oklahoma City we could never find anywhere else. The community was so welcoming of us, of our ideas, and the city seemed to be ready to want to make some big urban moves.

We decided to stay in 2000, and that’s when I started the Oklahoma City Studio at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, which helped me, in parallel with our own practice, contribute to the changing landscape of Oklahoma City.

We have tried to continue to advance urbanity in the city, and the memorial is one piece of many where Torrey and I have tried to continue the city’s renaissance. We love the city, we love the people, we love the community so much. There is so much to work with. They are such great listeners and hungry for ever-better urbanism.

UL: The international competition to design the memorial was the largest ever undertaken at the time, with 624 entries. What was the process like and what set your design apart?

Butzer: It was a well-run competition. The two stages made really good sense, and we liked the fact that it was truly open, which was similar to Europe. They were truly open-minded and looking for the best design. The jury identified five different types of design strategies, and our design was the best of those that crossed all the different disciplines. In phase two we shifted to presenting everything in large watercolor drawings, which was very emotional and really pulled you in and added more detail to the different elements, combined with a physical model lit at night.

BAU_Butzer Architects and Urbanism

Clearly our design concept resonated. The first straw poll of the 11 competition jurors was already unanimous. You never know what the secret is, you’re just trying to listen and respond and do what you believe in.

UL: What was the inspiration for the design and how has it evolved?

The memorial’s mission statement is a remarkable document. When we look at what made this competition so unique and also well run and organized, the community on its own recognized that there were so many opinions and feelings and it needed structure. There were 350 volunteers and they formed committees to help focus their energies, and together they wrote this mission statement that describes their collective ambitions and aspirations for a memorial. They never said what it should look like; they just did a remarkable job describing what it should communicate or try to invoke in those who visited.

For Torrey and me, the inspiration really came from listening and trying to understand the intent of that mission statement, then looking at the site itself and its urban conditions. Torrey and I are urbanists, this is what we do, we’re all about designing for city and community. So we looked at the site and its existing topography and coalesced these forces into a singular response that is about bringing people into the center of the site where they can look backwards, look outwards, and see the complex layers of what it means to have died, to have survived, and to have been changed forever. We shaped a space that was safe and inviting, that feels different no matter what time you come. Ultimately, it was the stories of those survivors and family members and the vision of the community that inspired us.

UL: So here we are 30 years later… how has the memorial stood the test of time?

Butzer: It appears that the architectural language that Torrey and I employed walks that line between being specific enough but also being sufficiently abstract that it can withstand interpretation by many over time. The architectural elements are hopefully fairly consistent over time, but it’s the landscape context that we created that helps us appreciate that the site itself is literally transforming, while also having the power to transform.

The design tends to answer the basic questions of where, how, when, why, and what. The gates help define the edges of where—easing people from the hustle and bustle of the city into this safe memorial space—where we tell the more intimate aspects of the story. You can think of it as a story, with these different characters bouncing off each other, communicating a perspective or memory of what happened there, and we as the authors are trying to mediate the intensity of each of the characters’ perspectives to tell the story in a balanced way. There are different ways to look at it, but each piece has its purpose. The elements of the design are very intentional.

UL: How has the memorial helped the city and global community to heal from that tragic event 30 years ago?

Butzer: From our perspective, the Oklahoma City National Memorial helped the world understand Oklahoma City as, yes, a place where a great tragedy took place, but it also communicated to the world how resilient we are as a community, as a people on the southern Plains. People respect resilience. You are defined by how you deal with the worst of moments, and Oklahoma City showed it knew how to honor those 168 lives lost and care for the survivors and the rescuers, but it also knew how to build and rebuild and move forward without forgetting.

That is so much of what we can appreciate here 30 years later. The theme for the memorial is “A Day of Darkness. Years of Light,” and that so beautifully captures what the world has come to appreciate and what Oklahoma Citians have come to appreciate about themselves.

Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum

UL: Can you speak to the role that civic leaders played in the transformation of downtown Oklahoma City over the past three decades?

Butzer: You’ve got to start with (then-Mayor) Ron Norick having the wisdom to appoint local attorney and civic leader Bob Johnson to, in a certain sense, run the show and not let the process become something political. They were able to quickly get the city and the state and the federal government to back off and give the community space to decide for itself how to respond. It takes leadership to know when to step back. Leadership isn’t always from the front.

Once the memorial was completed, then the question was how do we expand on the MAPS projects. [Note: The Metropolitan Area Projects program was initiated in 1993 under Norick as a public/private partnership to implement a new one-cent citywide sales tax to fund selected projects.] You could see the building confidence with each successive mayor—first Norick, then Mick Cornett, and now David Holt. Each has been agile enough to shift their focus and strategy on how to continue building the city.

UL: You live in Oklahoma City. Do you ever visit the memorial?

Butzer: The memorial is ever-present in our lives as a family. We’ve participated in one way or another in all but one Oklahoma City Memorial Marathon. We’ve enjoyed a close relationship with the Memorial Foundation [and] Museum, and now are working on a project with them to expand the Museum.

We’re part of all major decisions they make on the site. When they decided to upgrade the light fixtures and the chairs, we were there with our three daughters in their pajamas, standing on the site at night figuring out how to do it better, incrementally making the design easily maintained while still conveying its important messages.

UL: Will the memorial continue to be as relevant over the next 30 years?

Butzer: Yes, absolutely. When you talk about leadership, you have to talk about Kari Watkins, the original president and CEO of the Oklahoma City Memorial and Museum. She understands that you can’t count on people just wanting to come to Oklahoma City to see a historic site where things happened. For Kari and her team, the question is always what does what happened here mean to us today? It’s that attitude that positions the museum as this leading force.

They’ve come to realize that the role of civics in a well-functioning society is terribly important. The bombing represents a few individuals’ way of disagreeing with something, and we need to recognize that there are different ways for us to disagree with others. They realize as busloads of students from across the state come to visit the memorial, yes they will learn about something that happened in 1995, but maybe just as important is they learn that there is a lesson to be taken forward and they have the power to be a positive voice in their community. That is using the memorial as a backdrop to continue this evolving legacy.