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The National Capital Commission has unveiled a redesigned plan for the controversial Memorial to Victims of Communism that is much smaller than the original design.

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Drawings revealed Thursday at the NCC board meeting show a scaled-down version of the memorial that covers just 37 per cent of the site instead of the 60 per cent coverage in the original plan. The highest point will be eight metres, not 14.35 m. The walkway will be five metres high, down from 11.

“It’s very customary to go through multiple iterations of a design” for a monument, said NCC chief executive Mark Kristmanson, adding that the Memorial to the Victims of Communism “is still very much a work in progress.”

Among the changes are lowering the memorial’s “bridge of hope” to 5.1 m from the original plan of 11 m, reducing the number of “memory folds” to five from seven and planting more trees, 26 instead of 11.

The NCC made no mention in its public update of any plans to change the location of the memorial. The memorial is planned for a vacant area of land on Wellington Street near the Supreme Court of Canada, once intended for a new federal court building.