Madrid, Spain
Mission Title: The Incredible Lightness of Monuments - March 11 Memorial
Mission Date: 25-06-2008
SCRIPT
- Go visit the FAM studio and interview them about the monument and how did they approach it. Ask them about difficulties in such a delicate task and their references and suggestions in the process of accomplishing it.
- Visit the square in front of the Atocha station, where the monument is. Show it in its context showing the way its atmosphere changes in different hours of the day. The square, the neighborhood. Interview people coming from the station about it. How much does architecture help remember?
- Show writings all over the transparent surface and then go downstairs. Tape the experience of memory as you enter it and look above, towards the station.
- Show the building at different times during the day, maybe from the same position, to show the changing quality of light.
- Tell the story of the structure, from its tragic beginnings to its current state. Have the people involve, the architects and those you talk to in the street, help you to tell th story in their words.
TRAVEL BAG
What role does architecture play in memory?
Though being called Fascinante Aroma a Manzana or FAM- which in Spanish sounds like “Fascinating Scent of Apple” - evokes soft, childhood memories, the Madrid-based architecture studio is most renowned for their evocation of a more painful memory. The young studio was chosen to design a monument to the victims of the Al-Qaeda-engineered train bombings of March, 11, 2004. The terrorists exploded 10 bombs in the Atocha, El Pozo and Santa Eugenia metro stations, killing a total of 191 people and wounding 1,755. Three years later, the FAM monument opened to the public in Atocha.
The simple 11-meter-tall monument's glass cylinder has been engraved with messages from the people of Madrid to the deceased. Beneath the cylinder sits an underground blue room, soundproofed and lit from above. Most monuments are heavy in their permanence, but the peaceful immersion into the silent blue room, peering up through the rays of sunlight into a glass heaven lined with messages to the dead creates an incredible lightness of being. Below the very Atocha ground, not far from where some of the bombs actually exploded, you can even look at the station and see it, soundless, while the words cut from light dance above your head. Rarely in our secular age do architects try to evoke something higher than themselves, an succeed without the heaviness of dogma, the kind that took out the stations in the first place.
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