BOLOGNA Shoah MEMORIAL | Gianluca Nicolini

The memorial wants to be a space in which we can find the remembrance and the memory of the culture and history; in particular, in the Memorial of the Victims of the Shoah, we materialize one of most important and sad page in European and World history.

This is a big and open wound; in response to this, we propose an open project in the site, open to the city and open to the engage by the citizens; a project with a strong relationship with the city and her actors. The use of the public space as well as the remembrance of the victims of violence are the essence of the project.

The project is conceived as an architecture of two acts: the double condition of public space and memorial.

The first premise was to recognize the vocation of the site as an open square; with a very strong relationship with the city; the presence of streets, the bridge and the rail path with many points of view characterize the site.

The violence, the historic drama, is suggested in two dimensions: the void and the built. The void proposed in the project is the space created between the steel beams. This void or empty space could remind us the concept of the no–presences and absences of the people to remember, and the surfaces of the steel beams, rusty, symbolize the pain and the scars that we get by the violence.

So the first act is an act of landscape, where the square is cut, and carved creating a processional path into the Memorial, a place of celebration and reflection

The second act is a big projectual action that consists on building a large number of vertical elements in corten steel rising between paths; it is a dual play between void and architecture: the space for the visitor and the space for the memory.  The space for the visitors play the living beings; the society of the rising elements play the immateriality of the memories of the victims.

The list of materials is reduced: steel and concrete. The corten steel will be used in two ways: natural and rusty, each of them with different meanings. The natural steel is used as an element that remind us the main and essential values that societies must keep to live in peace that disappeared during Shoah. The rusty steel means the marks and scars that the human cruelty produced.

Concrete is used for the support of the rising beams.

The time is the invisible element that changes natural steel to the rusty, This change symbolizes the path of suffering endured by the victims of violence.

The heigh of the steel beams rises taller from the back to the front of the installation area, creating the strongest drama in the front side. Vertical elements incline several degrees away from the vertical like the people oppressed by sufferings and that makes our eyes go up and down. When they go up, they see the sky, the light, the sun…the hope.

Finally, one of the most important parts of the project is the humanization and appropriation of the steel walls. Society is responsible for making the Memorial.  The metallic elements are spaces for people to write the name of the victims, and express their feelings. These steel walls play as mirrors and blackboards, and by the writings, being transformed into witnesses of the pain and destruction provoked by the violence.