Seneca falls

The National Park Service joined forces with the National Endowment for the Arts to sponsor an open competition to design a monument to the first women’s rights convention in America. The fragmentary remains of the gathering place and the surrounding land would be the centerpiece of the newly established Women’s Rights National Historical Park. An almost ruined building, a lost manuscript: the site challenged designers to create a presence from an absence, a monument to a vanished time that is also a place to gather in the present. The monument is a sanctuary, a place of meeting. The simple quadrangle of open space creates a setting for the chapel, but is also a gathering place in its own right. As if by a heaving of the earth, the grou... More