Madrid. Memorial for the victims of March 11 2004. Fam Studio. 2007
Project type
Its members, Esaú Acosta, Mauro Gil-Fournier, Raquel Buj, Miguel Jeanicke and Pedro Colón de Carvajal, won the competition held by the city council and the Ministry of Public Works and the Economy. Almost 300 proposals were presented for the competition, including many by world-famous architects, but the City of Madrid chose studio Fam, a young team established in Madrid in 2002.
The cylindrical glass memorial looks like a big lamp, about 11 metres tall, 8 metres in diameter and weighing 160 tons. The memorial's designers chose their materials carefully, using methacrylate crystal and silicone, which lighten the structure and appear to dematerialise it.
The outside of the memorial is made of 12 thousand blocks of glass; its innermost membrane is made of "Etfe" (Ethylene Tetra Fluor Ethylene), a clear, lightweight material.Messages of solidarity written by citizens in memory of the victims and for their families are projected on the walls inside the memorial at different times of day, depending on the light conditions. Another room is completely soundproofed, creating silence as the ideal condition for commemorating the victims.
The transparency of the glass allows visitors to see people moving about in Atocha station. This empty, soundless space is the most intimate, meditative, evocative heart of the memorial.
The tower - dome cost '5.4 million to build and was covered with a big sheet prior to its inauguration. Now it is perfectly visible in the middle of a round plaza across from Atocha station.
What makes this project so unusual is its capability of acting as a memorial not only with its iconic cylindrical architecture, but with the atmosphere it manages to create, speaking the language of transparency, silence, meditation and intimacy.
This is also demonstrated by what the designers call the "representation space": a dark room with blue walls barely lit up by the rays of light that come in through a small slit in the ceiling.
Laura Della Badia
