The National Medal of Honor Museum
Design Competition
Arlington, TX

107,600 sq ft • 10,000 sq m

Davis Brody Bond was one of the three finalists in an invited competition to design the National Medal of Honor Museum Museum, which will house exhibits, archives, and artifacts relating to the 3,500 American men and women who have been awarded the medal, the nation's highest honor for valor in combat. The task was challenging from the outset, and it felt even more so after we listened to the stories of those who have received this medal — powerful narratives, full of sacrifice and loss, but also of humility and gratitude, and in all of them, a sense of comradeship. The museum is about recognizing not only the individual National Medal of Honor recipients, but also, more broadly, the good we do for each other.

The challenge for the design team was how to give these powerful narratives a physical form. We faced similar questions when working on the National September 11 Memorial Museum, as we listened to similarly moving stories of courage and sacrifice. The key difference between the projects was that at the 9-11 Museum we inherited powerful physical reference points and a defined sense of place — the remains of the twin towers, which gave early clues as to the shape and form of the museum — whereas the selected museum site in Arlington, TX was not a battlefield or a place of loss. Though a lovely urban district (Richard Greene Linear Park, adjacent to both the Cowboys and Rangers stadiums), it did not have the DNA of the Medal of Honor story embedded in its land. We needed to create an entirely new place that conveyed the meaning and purpose of the medal in built spaces, a landscape, and an exhibit program.

We began with the stories — stories that did not have a physical form or dimension. Out of these stories there were themes that emerged again and again: timeless American ideals of courage, patriotism, sacrifice, integrity, and humility. As we embarked on the design of the museum, an excerpt from Pericles’ nearly 2500 year old funeral oration for the fallen soldiers of Athens became a guiding principle: “For heroes have the whole earth for their memorial. / Their memory abides and grows, not in any visible form but in people’s hearts. / Take them as your model knowing that happiness depends on being free and freedom depends on being courageous.”

This timelessness of this message was captured in images from nature: the humbling and vast sky, of sea and land, and the grounding of our world from time immemorial in the elements of the earth. These are aspects of our world that have not changed in thousands of years. We took note of how the site, even amidst the stadiums and towers, had the great gifts of the sky, the water, and the land. We wanted to give the museum an iconic presence and stature amidst its large scale neighboring structures, yet felt strongly that theatrical exuberance was not the right strategy for an institution that lists humility as one of its core values. The final design solution makes a virtue of simplicity, clarity, and economy of gesture — a composition of pure forms. With most of the museum program embedded beneath the earth, the visible elements of the composition progressively disclose themselves to visitors with a significance and intensity different from anything else in this district.

(Renderings and Diagrams by Davis Brody Bond, MVVA, and Synoesis