In celebration of the United States’ 250th anniversary, HCM hosted a firmwide competition inviting staff to envision a contemporary pavilion, monument, or public space that reflects America’s evolving identity and shared future. The competition encouraged proposals that moved beyond traditional memorials, creating inclusive places for gathering, reflection, and dialogue. Grounded in real sites across the United States and its territories, the designs explored themes such as unity, diversity, freedom, and belonging, with the goal of imagining how America could honor its past while looking ahead to the next 250 years. The competition showcased the depth of creativity across HCM, with four standout designs ultimately earning top honors.
Honor Award
The Continental Connect Commons
Elijah C. Miller
The Continental Connect Commons is a civic observatory for water, stewardship, and democracy located at the confluence of the South Platte River at Commons Park in Denver, Colorado. Rather than commemorating power through a traditional monument of conqueror, this project transforms an underutilized park into a civic landscape where water becomes the medium for reflection, gathering, and dialogue.
A circular civic basin descends toward a shallow reflective water feature, functioning as an amphitheater, public forum, and living indicator of changing environmental conditions. Above, a lightweight canopy hovers over the basin like a civic horizon, creating a space where landscape, atmosphere, and public life converge. Pathways extending from the basin trace major American watershed systems, connecting local landscapes to national ecological networks.
Positioning water as the central civic medium, this space reframes monumentality through participation, environmental awareness, and collective responsibility, proposing stewardship—not ownership—as the defining value of America’s next 250 years.
Merit Award
The Living Archive: A New Smithsonian Experience, By the People
Chris Peterson
The Living Archive: A New Smithsonian Experience, By the People proposes a participatory national institution for America’s 250th anniversary and the generations that follow. Rather than treating history as fixed, the project creates an evolving civic archive continuously authored by the American people.
Through a central Smithsonian hub and a network of traveling collection pavilions, individuals from communities across the country are invited to contribute meaningful objects, photographs, recorded narratives, and hopes for the future. These personal artifacts become part of a shared national repository.
At the heart of the building, an immersive Listening Room transforms thousands of individual voices into a collective sensory experience. The project reimagines the national monument as an act of participation, revealing America as diverse, unfinished, and continually made by its people together over time.
Citation Award
Framing the Nation
Ryan Kautz
Framing the Nation transforms the American streetscape into a living window to the past. Installed in cities, suburbs, and rural communities across the country, each monumental freestanding frame reveals the life of its surroundings as they may have appeared 250 years ago.
Within the frame, an interactive digital display recreates the people, movement, sounds, and daily activities of 1776 and other time periods throughout history. Using AI, historical characters respond to the present. A passerby waves, and someone from the past waves back; a child moves, and a child from another century mirrors the gesture. The boundary between observer and participant begins to dissolve.
Rather than asking Americans to visit a single monument, Framing the Nation brings the commemoration to them. Each installation connects a specific place to its own history, creating a distributed national memorial. Hundreds of frames, thousands of stories, and one shared anniversary.
HCM People’s Award
The New World – The American Dream
Chrisvin Rathnakumar
Created to honor 250 years of the American journey, New World is a monument to the enduring pursuit of the American Dream, not as a destination, but as a continuous journey toward possibility. Rather than commemorating a single event or individual, the monument celebrates the collective aspirations of a nation shaped by many places, many people, and many generations. The monument is composed of 56 vertical elements, representing the 50 states, Washington, D.C., and the five inhabited U.S. territories. Among them, thirteen soaring arches stand as gateways to the American experiment, honoring the original thirteen colonies—the first entryways into a new world of opportunity and hope.
These open portals are carefully positioned within the landscape, framing unique views of mountains, water, sky, and horizon. Each framed vista becomes a moment of discovery, reminding visitors that the American Dream is not defined by a final destination, but by the freedom to imagine what lies beyond. Visitors enter New World along a continuous elevated path that gently weaves through a landscape of arches and columns. The journey is intentionally non-linear, allowing moments of pause, reflection, and discovery.
As perspectives shift, layered gateways align, new horizons unfold, and the surrounding landscape becomes an integral part of the monument itself. Architecture becomes a vessel for movement, transforming the act of walking into a reflection on the countless journeys that have shaped America. Set within the waters of Acadia National Park, with mountains rising beyond the horizon, New World exists between land and sky, history and future, permanence and possibility. It is not simply a monument to where America has been, but an invitation to continue its story. Every arch is a gateway, every view a possibility, and every step forward a reminder that the American Dream remains an ever-evolving pursuit carried by generations past, present, and future.
HCM is excited to continue this competition as an annual tradition, fostering collaboration across all offices and studios while celebrating the creativity and diverse perspectives that strengthen our design culture. By creating opportunities for exploration, innovation, and shared learning, the competition helps cultivate an inclusive environment where ideas can thrive and inspire future generations of designers.
