Aggie Muster

By the time Overland’s design to build the Bonfire Memorial was chosen, Bob Shemwell and his team had eighteen months to create a budget, hammer out the portals, create an underground support system, and immortalize twelve kids.

by Lisa Gartner

Photograph by Randal Ford

Madison says: There is something special about the Aggie Spirit out there and this artice reminded me of all the many reasons why I love Texas A&M. Bonfire is something which will never be forgotten. Gig ’em! (November 13th, 2009 at 2:04pm)

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The ground in College Station is alive: It shrinks or swells, spitting out or swallowing up groundwater from the persistent rain, and those expansions and contractions make it shift, breathe. On November 17, 2004, Bob Shemwell walked out of the rain and into Texas A&M’s maroon-draped Rudder Auditorium. A tall, soft-spoken man with brown hair and permanent creases in his forehead where his eyebrows tend to travel, Shemwell crossed the stage and took the podium. He had been invited back to A&M, his alma mater, to give a presentation, “The Story of the Bonfire Memorial,” the night before the dedication ceremony on November 18. Shemwell was the lead architect on the design team that first sketched, then created the memorial honoring the twelve students who died in the 1999 Bonfire collapse.

That night, he was worried. It had been raining for three days straight, and he was thinking about the soil out back in the polo fields. He was thinking about the hundreds of tons of stone he had spent nearly three years imagining and realizing in that space; the 50,000 people who would be walking through it the next day; and the hard rain that had been dripping through the soil, expanding it, making it breathe.

There are things that they teach you in architecture school, and there are things they don’t, as Shemwell puts it. You learn how to compact the sand base, fit de-watering pipes to get to the flood basin so that you can build on tough landscapes like that of College Station. It’s in the textbook. You can make slabs of stone that could crush skyscrapers sit still on a marsh the consistency of Play-Doh. These are things that they do teach you: The things that, to some extent, you can control. Sometimes those are the things that are easier to worry about.

Shemwell looked at the audience and said, “Nobody gives you a handbook that says this is how you be an Aggie, or this is what the words of the fight song are, and this is what the traditions are. It’s an oral tradition. It’s passed down from Aggie to Aggie.” He told them about working with the parents of the kids who had died so tragically, and so tragically young. That is one thing they don’t teach you in architecture school.

He told them about the three elements—Tradition Plaza, History Walk, and Spirit Ring—and his three design objectives. He wanted to commemorate the tragedy, along with Aggie unity and reverence for the Bonfire tradition. And he closed by telling the Aggies filling the auditorium’s 2,500 seats that it was their turn. “Whether you knew it or not, that by hearing the explanation of what this means and how it manifests what’s important about being an Aggie, what it says about the Aggie spirit, what it talks about your comrades who were killed in this tragedy—now it’s your responsibility to take that story and pass it on to those that are going to come behind.”

Applause, and he leaves, back into the fog over A&M. Bob Shemwell could not sleep that night. Imagine if you were General Motors, he says, and you had to build a car, and the very first one that you build has to be perfect. All the pieces have to work out just right the first time you build it. “Buildings are a lot like that,” he says.

Now imagine that that building was not a bank or a jail or a shopping mall, but something that was supposed to make up for twelve young men and women who had been stolen from the Aggie community. Imagine that you loved Texas A&M and were about to offer up the hardest, most complicated work of your professional life and hope and pray, like a little kid, that people would accept it. Imagine that to do so, you stretched a budget in ways most people have to go to prison to do; you haggled granite for the price of concrete from a quarry in China; you tried your best but still offended a mother while trying to figure out the essence of her lost child. How could you not have trouble sleeping? And better yet, what safer place to rest your worries than on the drainage system of a polo field?

The first memorial to the fallen Aggies clinked onto the earth in 1999, when A&M seniors set down their rings at the flagpole, the polo field, Sul Ross’s boot, and anywhere else on campus that felt right. As one professor put it, the Aggie ring is “the most important thing about an Aggie. When you have the Aggie ring, you’re accepted into the brethren.” One of A&M’s traditions—which are many, and taken deathly seriously—is the Ring Dance: Before this event on Senior Weekend, seniors must wear their rings facing themselves; at the Ring Dance, they flip the rings to show their Aggie heritage to the world.

But as lovely of a gesture as it was, the rings were returned. The seniors’ parents weren’t too pleased to discover that the rings they’d spent hundreds of dollars on had been abandoned on campus, and besides, each owner’s name was inscribed inside. It was no feat returning them. One clever senior, however, scratched his name off his ring. It was just as the head yell leader told the campus in 1963 when John F. Kennedy was assassinated and the A&M community disassembled the Bonfire, log by log: “It was the most that we could give and the least that we could do.” The ring was never returned.

Bob Shemwell received his Aggie ring in 1982, when he graduated from A&M with a degree in environmental design. The sixth child of a colonel and World War II nurse, he was born in Virginia, then moved back and forth across the world, dropping brothers and sisters at universities as they went. Eventually his family settled in Copperas Cove, where Shemwell would see a picture of a girl drawing in an A&M brochure. “I said, ‘I can do that.’” He lived on the fourth floor of Crocker Hall and drew cartoons predicting the football team’s next victory for the school paper. In September, he’d wake up at five-thirty in the morning on weekends to go on cuts, where students sawed down the trees to be used for Bonfire.

“The Bonfire tradition, although it manifested itself in a big pile of wood that got set on fire, was not ultimately about that,” Shemwell says. “It was really about the fact that you would pile out of your bed early in the morning, go downstairs. You would meet people that lived on the first floor, second floor, that you would not ever meet your entire year, and you would spend all day working together. You would start to build relationships and friendships that would sometimes last your whole life.”

Shemwell works at the San Antonio—based architecture firm Overland Partners. In 2001 he found out from a young colleague and fellow former A&M student, Michael Bray, that the university was soliciting submissions for a competition to design a Bonfire memorial. They talked it over with the partners at Overland, and it was a go. They began holding workshops in their conference room, lunchtime brainstorming sessions that quickly involved forty people. “And a lot of them were people that went to UT,” Shemwell says, smiling. “Interesting.”

Over that table, a sketch began to take shape. They would use materials to signal meanings: granite for the abstract, the tradition, the spirit; bronze for those students who were injured or killed while working on Bonfire. The memorial would begin with Tradition Plaza, where Philo H. DuVal’s “The Last Corps Trip” would be etched onto an enormous stone wall. It would lead to History Walk, beginning with a raised, jutted stone reading “1909.” A stone would commemorate each year Bonfire burned, with the eleven-twelfth slot of each cut out to symbolize the month Bonfire burned. A small amber bulb would light shyly at night, to recall the warmth and the glow of each fiery celebration. Years with casualties—from 1909 to 2004, there were three—would be marked with a bronze plaque bearing the deceased’s name and class year. And perhaps most striking, yet least obvious, would be the thin layer of gravel over the pathway.

“You get that crunch crunch crunch as you walk out, and it changes your approach,” Shemwell says. “The acoustic nature of that sets up a certain sobriety to the place. Because of the crunch and the because of the length, you’ve had a chance to decompress and you’re not thinking about the bus that dropped you off or the car that you walked out of or even the fact that you walked over from campus. It sets up a journey that allows your mind and your emotions to take you someplace else and experience the memorial in a different way.”

Because that’s when you’d arrive at Spirit Ring.

There’s an A&M legend that has kept Aggies on their feet since 1922, and that’s the story of the Twelfth Man. Reportedly, when too many football players got injured in a game against Centre College, a sophomore named E. King Gill was called in from the bleachers to fill in a spot. Although he didn’t play, he stood on the sidelines, ready to go (the Aggies won 22—14). This is A&M, where football is the metaphor by which the rest of life bends; out of this game came the Twelfth Man tradition, in which students vow to step up and fill in for fellow Aggies.

The comparison was inevitable. Twelve Aggies were gone, and as Bob Shemwell and the Overland team leaned over their sketches, they began to envision bronze portals. Each portal would host an intimate encounter with each fallen student. “We said, you know people by what they look like, their face. You know people by their name. You know people by their signature, and at A&M, you know them by their class year,” Shemwell says. The other side of the portal would convey that person’s reputation, a reflection of that life told through family, friends, or even their own words.

The “real memorial” would be a granite circle that marked the spot of the Bonfire’s center pole and the time of the collapse; but to get to it, in its resting place in the center of Shemwell’s turf lawn, you would have to step through one of the portals. In turn, the portals would all be connected, forming an unbroken circle in the exact spot where the fence once circled the Bonfire. It would be a ring, not unlike the ones seniors had set down, the one with the name scratched off.

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