By: James Cirrone

Larysa Kurylas, a Ukrainian-American designer and architect, designed the Holodomor Memorial in Washington D.C. and came to the University of Maryland School of Architecture Monday to give a dynamic presentation about her sculpture. She was joined by several of her colleagues who helped pull the project together. 

“Holodomor” in Ukrainian roughly translates to “kill by hunger.” Josef Stalin carried out the Holodomor famine when he seized almost all food from Ukrainian peasants in 1932-1933. By all estimates, millions of people died. 

Kurylas said it started out as a simple idea— wheat.

“The wheat was selected because it was the weapon that they used. It was confiscated from farmers, causing the loss of life,” Kurylas said.

Wheat was one Ukraine’s main crops at the time, and it was utterly devastating to the Ukrainian population when it was seized from farmers. 

Mary Kay Lanzillotta, a partner at Hartman-Cox Architects, managed the Holodomor memorial project. 

“The idea with all of these memorials is that people remember the suffering and the sacrifice,” Lanzillotta said. “It’s providing that memorial aspect, but also with a touch of education.”

If you take a look at the wall of wheat in the sculpture, you can see that the wheat slowly disappears as you go farther to the right. Kurylas shared that this was meant to symbolize the theft of food from Ukrainians.

“There’s literally a void, and that void is the loss of life, but it’s also the deliberateness in my mind that somebody—somebody dreamed this up, you know, on purpose to starve the farmers,” Kurylas said.

The memorial was dedicated in 2015, but its story stretches back almost 10 years prior. 

Congress authorized the Ukrainian government to establish a memorial in Washington D.C. in 2006. After that, there was a contest to see who would get to design this new memorial. 

Kurylas heard about the contest in an offhand conversation with a sculptor she knew. Her design proposal won over 52 other plans – including a plan put forward by the sculptor she heard about the contest from. The project began once Kurylas’ idea was approved by the National Capital Planning Commission and the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts in 2008.

Once Kurylas’s proposal was approved, it was time to start the real work. Co-Sculptor Lawrence Welker’s job was to gather wheat and scan it into the computer to make it look perfect for when it would eventually be etched into the wall of the sculpture.

The only problem was that he didn’t know where to get wheat. Luckily, Kurylas did. 

Kurylas drove to Winnipeg to her Uncle Mike’s 2000-acre wheat farm to get wheat for the memorial project. From there, Welker hauled the wheat into his shop and agonized over the scanning process until it was “perfect.” 

Once the wheat scanning process was complete, it was time to call a contractor. The man they landed on was William Stann of Forrester Construction.

Stann later said that this was his first time working on a historical memorial, and he was incredibly glad to have worked on something that had such an impact.

“It’s about people, it’s about collaboration, and it’s about doing something that means something,” Stann said.

The exhibit, while exploring how we commemorate human death at this scale, also sought to give a detailed timeline of the design process.

The Holodomor Memorial demanded a lot of hard work from a relatively small and tight-knit group of people. But Larysa Kurylas, a person with Ukrainian ancestry, felt a deep need to build something with gravity and meaning.

“As a Ukrainian-American architect, I felt duty-bound to participate in the competition and to get the message of this memorial right,” Kurylas said.