PLANT provided landscape design and project and construction management services for Dereck Revington Studio’s competition-winning memorial.

Dedicated to the workers who perished while building the Niagara Region’s Welland Canal between 1913 and 1932, Revington’s design for the memorial comprises three primary elements encompassed by a sheltering and contemplative Grove. The Lock bed is cut into the sloping grade of the site, with a timeline running down its centre, marking the fatalities. At the north end of the timeline, the Gates of Remembrance rise from the Lock bed, appearing as a book of steel into whose pages the names of the fallen are cut. The Steel Veil is stretched between the banks over the cut at waist height where the timeline ends. Its north face is mirror-polished stainless steel, its south, black and shadowed. A limestone plinth placed before it, and inscribed with the names of the sponsors, provides a place for repose and reflection. A grove of lindens surround this intense ensemble of sculptural elements and landforms.