The National Park Service & National Endowment for the Arts sponsored a competition to design a monument to America’s first women’s rights convention. 

The monument is a sanctuary; the simple quadrangle of open space creates a setting for the Chapel and a gathering place. The ground has been sloped grass plinth, creating a natural amphitheater. Accentuated by the slope, the Chapel’s foundation remains the datum to the site and, symbolically, the social movement that began here. 

The garden walls which protect and define the precinct are faced in red sandstone. The central ground plane has been sloped; the edges are made with finely-coursed face-bedded bluestone expressive of sheared rock. These materials reflect the scale and character of the town’s fabric. With alterations after the 1848 Chapel structure was removed, what remains are fragments requiring support, reminders of the fragility of the physical structure of a place.  

The Chapel walls are held by slender braces of stainless steel anchored to site walls and bricks of buff-colored concrete, infill areas requiring support. A flat-seam lead-coated copper covering protects the roof, while at the gable ends, the wooden trusses are dimly revealed through fine stainless steel mesh panels. At the location of the original doorway, a stainless steel pivot door symbolically opens only for the yearly celebration of the convention.