With the help of 19 students, the Vandal Healing Garden is set to finish construction by the time school starts next fall.
Most of the workers actively working on the project itself are 19 students from the Design-Build Program of the College of Art and Architecture.
The Healing Garden is a project to memorialize and remember all the Vandals who have passed away while enrolled at the University of Idaho, spurred by the murders of four UI students on Nov. 13, 2022.
Blaine Eckles, the Dean of Students at UI, said: “Through the Design-Build program, we’re actually using their {the student’s} labor, it’s a beautiful thing because students can design and literally build what they’ve designed.”
The planning and design of the Vandal Healing Garden began in the spring of 2023. Syringa Riley, an architecture major working on the garden, joined the project around this time. She shared that during this time, the University was brainstorming and figuring out what to build.
The planning and drawing of designs continued to the fall semester of 2023. Corbin Averitt, an architecture major working on the garden, joined the project in the fall. He detailed how his time spent planning and designing the garden went towards listening to community members.
“I did a lot of a lot of the listening, talking to a lot of different people. That was a lot of the first semester was gathering all of this knowledge that we could have our surroundings,” Averitt said.
Aaron Magalsky, an architecture major working on the garden, shared: “So much first semester was about listening and gathering people’s opinions and their thoughts on what they wanted to see out of the garden. And now we’re really being able to put that into reality and see it come to life.”
Magalsky also shared a personal connection to the project. Magalsky personally knew Hudson Lindow, a UI student who drowned in Paradise Creek in 2022. Magalsky shared the process of including Lindow’s memory in the garden.
“We have tried to implement multiple ways to represent not only the four but also the individual within the community, and the community as a whole to show the layers that compose the vandal family and all that means for us,” Magalsky said.
The workers suggested that the entire project has more than 40,000 cumulative hours put into planning.
John Gross, an architecture student working on the garden, shared that the entire process of designing to construction has been efficient and swift.
“Going from a design to actually constructing something within that time period is pretty crazy. I mean, like average, construction takes a lot longer and design will take years,” Gross said.
Gross also shared that having 19 student workers building the garden every day speeds up construction. The university is handling all contracting and supply acquisition, there are fewer middlemen in the project, making its efficiency improve.
Riley shared her thoughts on taking on the project.
“It’s an honor. Like I mean, I think everyone when we first heard that we might be like on it, I was a little bit like overwhelmed just because it’s like so much bigger than all of us individuals and so to think that like we can have a hand in something so big for the campus was like pretty empowering,” Riley said.
Ben DeWitt can be reached at [email protected] or on X @BenDeWitt321