168 Chairs Will Be Memorial at Blast Site

One hundred sixty-eight stone-and-glass chairs--one for each of the people killed in the Oklahoma City bombing--will be erected at the site of the blast as a memorial.

The design was selected Tuesday after an international competition.

The chairs, their backs and seats made of stone, will appear to float above glass bases during the day. At night, lights will illuminate each inscribed name.

Across a reflecting pool, the Survivors Tree--an elm scarred by the blast--will be surrounded by a low circular wall inscribed with the names of the survivors.

“When you see an empty chair, you see the emptiness, the absence,” said Torrey Butzer, an Oklahoma native who now lives in Germany with her husband. She and her husband, Hans-Ekkehard Butzer, who both graduated from the University of Texas Architecture School, designed the memorial with Sven Berg.

A 15-member committee of victims’ relatives, survivors, community volunteers and design professionals unanimously chose the $9-million design from five finalists, whittled down from 624.

Organizers, who plan to raise the money privately, have already collected $2.5 million. Construction is expected to begin next year.

The winning design “just exudes the spirit that we were looking for,” said committee member Cheryl Scroggins, whose husband, Lanny, was killed in the blast. The committee was swayed by a plan to preserve the building’s outline, which many victims’ relatives view as sacred ground, she said.

Other designs in the competition envisioned a 60-foot leaning granite wall to symbolize both the fall of the building and the pioneer spirit of a barn-raising; a series of glass walls recalling the fence surrounding the bomb site that serves as a makeshift memorial; and a series of buildings filled with victims’ belongings, engineered so the sun would illuminate each victim’s area at noon on his or her birthday.

The 168 chairs will sit in nine rows to evoke the nine floors of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, destroyed in the April 19, 1995, bombing. Nineteen of the chairs will be smaller, representing the 19 children killed in the blast. Tall evergreen trees will replace the walls of the building.

Survivors’ names will be carved not only on the wall surrounding the elm but on pieces of salvaged granite to be hung on the only remaining part of the federal building, a parking garage topped with a plaza.