When a community experiences tragedy and trauma, it’s transformed. It’s often transformed again as people join together to grieve and find a way to move forward. One Indiana town all too familiar with heartbreak is beginning this process, with students in Purdue’s landscape architecture program by their side.
In Delphi, Indiana, family members, friends and the entire community were devastated by the murder of Abigail “Abby” Williams and Liberty “Libby” German in February 2017. The girls never returned from a walk, and their bodies were soon discovered near the Monon High Bridge Trail. Nearly three years later, their killer remains at large.
The space at the heart of this effort is a park that pays honest and intentional tribute to the lives Liberty and Abby led. When people from around the world reached out with condolences and donations, the Erskins and Libby’s grandparents, Mike and Becky Patty, felt a pressing need to establish a memorial. Mike initiated the idea of a softball field and park complex, and set up a foundation.
The project has been a collaboration between the families ever since. “We want people to be able to come to the park and say, ‘This is a park we helped build,'” Diane Erskin says.
That idea will hold especially true for the 18 members of Purdue University’s landscape architecture junior studio class, instructed by Aaron Thompson, assistant professor of landscape architecture, as well as Professor of Horticulture Cale Bigelow. A College of Agriculture alumna introduced the Erskins to Bigelow, a turf specialist with expertise in sports turf construction and management. He has headed an effort within the college to harness resources, arrange introductions and tap alumni networks, like those who manage stadium fields, to support the park’s development, rallying turf industry experts and suggesting grant opportunities. “The nature of what I do is at the intersection of urban and rural communities, which introduces you to a lot of different areas and a lot of different people,” Bigelow says. “For this reason, I’ve been able to facilitate some introductions and get the grandparents talking to the right people.”
In fall 2018, Bigelow brought his colleague Thompson into the fold. Thompson decided it was a perfect opportunity for his junior studio class to put their newly acquired design skills to use and charged each of them with crafting a design for the Abby & Libby Memorial Park. For Thompson, the project highlighted an aspect of landscape architecture beyond the drafting board.
“At the core of landscape architecture, we spend as much time creating community as we do creating places. In this class, we spend a lot of time focused on how to read a site from an ecological standpoint, but we also try to understand it from the social landscape. We ask: ‘What are the needs of the community that will come together in that space?’ You can see how the Delphi project fits into that,” Thompson reflects.
This marked the first time students would draft a comprehensive space instead of certain facets, and also their first opportunity to incorporate the needs and visions of a client and the constraints that can impose.
External Link: Designing a Healing Space