Martin Luther King Jr. Remembrance

A great man of American progress, Martin Luther King Jr., is celebrated today across more than 730 memorial streets and sites in the United States. These places endure to remind us of our past trials and serve as a beacon for future generations. As we remember Dr. King, Terrain reflects on the importance of commemorative sites for community ethos and its philosophy for creating sites for observance. 

At Terrain, we believe that first, a space must gather. At the Hope House Park, constructed in 2021, Terrain utilized universal design principles to provide equal access to the park's amphitheater, playfield, and gardens. Recognizable placemaking, through the arrangement of a bandshell and a pavilion, shelter and signal to community members to congregate. These design elements welcome a diverse population to intermingle and provide a comfortable space to reflect.

Creating a moment in time and space to reflect is another primary goal of Terrain. The RRMC healing garden, which is currently under construction, intends to provide a reflective atmosphere by engaging all the senses in a very primordial way. Visually striking planting and rich materials prompt the user to engage with the novel environment around them. A person's feeling of spatial relationships morphs as they move from trellis sheltered seating to the open garden overlook deck, which guides the user into analyzing their own relationships to the world around them. Crafting the landscape's sounds completes the sense of the moment with a spectrum of water notes that percolate through the site via three different water features. These types of stimuli work to create a fascinating environment that prompts the user's brain away from direct attention to indirect attention - a state in which people are more capable of reflection.

These design strategies ultimately support public spaces that unite communities and open dialogues on our collective consciousness.

Fostering this sense of community is ultimately Terrain's highest priority in all public-use projects.

"Let us be those creative dissenters who will call our beloved nation to a higher destiny, to a new plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humanness."

― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?