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When Oregon Senate President Peter Courtney toured the Oregon State Hospital in Salem a decade ago, he encountered a room lined with shelves holding thousands of corroding copper canisters filled with cremated human remains.

“He was shocked to discover the urns in their locked-away place in the basement,” said Daniel Mihalyo, co-founder of Lead Pencil Studio, a Seattle-based art and architecture firm. “They were really just forgotten souls.”

Courtney’s discovery in the historic psychiatric hospital served as the inspiration for the design of a more prominent home for the unclaimed remains of approximately 3,500 deceased patients. Mihalyo and his colleague Annie Han designed a memorial that incorporates a historic building on the Oregon State Hospital grounds. They’re expected to finish building it this summer.

The approximately $500,000 memorial is the final piece in the larger $508 million project to renovate and expand the state-run hospital built in 1883, said Jodie Jones, administrator for the project.

“That has been part of the task of this project – to take these remains and put them in a proper resting place,” she said.

Mihalyo said he and Han sought to recreate in the memorial Courtney’s experience when he first gazed on the water-damaged urns in a hospital room dubbed the Library of Dust. Courtney’s tour and subsequent widespread media coverage provided the impetus for creation of a memorial for the patients whose remains went unclaimed after they died at the hospital from the early 1880s to the 1970s.

“The overarching idea of the project was for us to get out of the way of the story,” Mihalyo said. “We didn’t think a big artistic flourish would work. We wanted it to speak for itself.”

Although the cremains will be transferred to new ceramic urns created by Mihalyo and Han for the memorial, the original copper urns will be incorporated into the design. The empty metal canisters will be placed on shelves inside a 118-year-old building that was preserved and moved from its original location to another part of the Oregon State Hospital campus during the renovation project. One wall of the historic building was replaced with a glass pane so that visitors will be able to see the copper urns in much the same way they appeared when Courtney first saw them, Han said.

“It was important to us how this project came about,” she said. “When we got down there to look at those containers that are existing, it was really powerful to see that … all those belonged to specific individuals. We just feel it was really critical to have those containers visible to visitors.”

A plaza adjacent to the historic building will be surrounded by a columbarium wall holding the new ceramic urns and displaying the names of the deceased and their dates of birth and death. Jones said she likes that visitors will be able to experience both the cremains’ past and present.

“The idea is as you’re standing there you can look to one side and see how they were and then look to the other side and see how they are,” she said.

When Oregon State Hospital officials put out a request for artist proposals for a memorial, they mentioned that the 1896 building could be part of the project, Mihalyo said. The building has served various uses over the years, including an infirmary and a paint shop; it was formerly attached to the crematorium.

“We applied because we were really interested in the idea that we would be able to work with this historic building,” Mihalyo said. “It had all this human history that was pretty important to the project.”

Publicity surrounding the remains has led to some claims by relatives, and officials hope that the memorial will lead to more, Jones said. Claimants will have the option of taking home both the new urn and the original copper urn, she said. That will create voids in the columbarium wall and on the shelves holding the copper canisters.

That’s part of the beauty of the memorial, Han said.

“Those forgotten can say, ‘I’m here; I’m still looking for my family,’ ” she said.