Last week on Veteran's Day, an ambitious World War I memorial opened in on the Notre-Dame-de-Lorette cemetery in northern France. Designed by the Parisian architect Philippe Prost near the battlefields where nearly 600,000 soldiers died in the conflict that began one hundred years ago, the Ring of Remembrance memorial is a massive oval made from blackened concrete and copper panels. The 1,076-foot ring does not sit flush to the ground; a section of it is balanced above the green farmland "to remind us that peace will always remain fragile," the architect writes.
The 579,606 names of the region's World War I casualties, mostly French, British, and German, that are imprinted on the copper panels are not ordered by nationality or rank; they have been ordered alphabetically, "to give shape to brotherhood, to unite yesterday's enemies," Prost told the Telegraph. Photos, below:
· Philippe Prost's elliptical concrete memorial marks the WW1 centenary [Dezeen]
· All Memorials posts [Curbed National]