The Brooding Soldier Canadian Memorial Sint-Juliaan Langemark

The Brooding Soldier is a Canadian war memorial near the Belgian town of Saint Juliaan in ‘The Westhoek’. It was designed by F. C. Clemenshaw and unveiled on 8 July 1923. The Brooding Soldier, popularly known as ‘Den Canadien’, is dedicated to the more than 2000 Canadian soldiers who lost their lives in the first gas attack during the Second Battle of Ypres in World War I. The Brooding Soldier was protected as a monument in 2009. The site has been on the Unesco World Heritage List since 2023 as part of registration Cemeteries and Memorial Sites of the First World War (Western Front). (wikipedia)

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission that maintains the memorial park on behalf of the Canadian Battlefields Memorials Commission commissioned me to create a design that better connects the memorial park behind with the immediate surroundings of the ‘Brooding Soldier’. The visitor should be prompted to move further into the park. A roadside granite path winds through a woodland garden to a new memorial site. The circular memorial site will allow visitors to experience a contemplative moment in addition to the ritual of remembrance. The new memorial will be built with the same material, namely granite, as the monument with pedestal of ‘The Brooding Soldier’. In this way, the entire site will form a single unit. Creating the impression that everything has always been like this was my starting point.

These photorealistic render images may not be used or distributed without permission from design agency Andy Malengier BV