Skip to main content

Trauma-informed spaces for collective healing

Highland Park Place of Remembrance Competition

Location Highland Park, Illinois
Client City of Highland Park
Expertise Research & Design Innovation, Master Planning & Visioning
Completion 2025 (concept only)

The Place of Remembrance was a design competition to create a memorial that offers refuge, reflection, and collective healing following the 2022 mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois. Grounded in trauma-informed design principles, the project prioritizes safety, choice, accessibility, and sensory awareness, recognizing that grief is deeply personal and experienced in many ways. Conceived as both a civic presence and an intimate sanctuary, the memorial is meant to be permanent, legible, and protective, while allowing visitors to engage at their own pace.

In collaboration with trauma-informed design specialist Rachael Dietkus, our team developed four design concepts that offer distinct yet complementary pathways for remembrance and healing. Garden of Earth and Light centers on sculptural and symbolic stones to support both quiet reflection and community gathering. Crossings emphasizes movement over destination, using bridges and winding paths to invite slowing down and self-directed engagement. Arches introduces a sequence of reaching forms that encourage shifts in perspective, revealing fragments of a story that gradually assemble into something whole. Resonance weaves moments of movement and pause, with sunken seating areas providing refuge and emotional respite along a central spine.

Across all four concepts, our design explores memory through landscape, materiality, movement, sound, and light. Each proposal responds to the dual sites of Port Clinton Square and the Rose Garden, weaving remembrance into the fabric of everyday life while offering moments of retreat and pause. Together, the concepts balance individual reflection with communal gathering, honoring the lives lost, acknowledging collective trauma, and creating space for remembrance, resilience, and ongoing connection.

In the wake of profound loss, this memorial will offer refuge, reflection, and a place to be held in remembrance. It will acknowledge collective trauma and take inspiration from memory and life, providing the individual search for reflection. In its permanence, it is visible and profound.  Made physical, it shelters and protects.

Collaborators

Rachel Dietkus

Trauma-Informed Design Consultant

All Projects