design: BIRO
project team: Hrvoje Arbanas, Anita Elez, Saša Košuta, Mario Kralj, Dora Lončarić
client: Municipality of Lovas
location: Lovas
status: public architectural competition, 3rd award
project year: 2019
Places of devotion and memory are assuming an important function in society – catharsis through empathy, education and connectedness. In this sense, memorials should affect the senses and emotions. Memorials designed as a magnificent structure laid out on a clearing inevitably become, except for one day each year when they provide a setting for obligatory political functions, mere forgotten decorations, with no capacity for providing catharsis to its visitors. It is precisely for this reason that the design project views the entire area in question as a memorial, conceived as a a procession of eternal tragedy through a landscape of apparent tranquility.
The field has seemingly healed the traumatic event, with the meadow overgrowing once more, covering the traces of the crime and allowing new life to begin again. However, the memory of the victims, rather than disappearing, is now focused on a single incision into the terrain, formed like an eternal scar. The memorial is, in this sense, not merely a single point of view, but the experiential entirety of the walk itself, filled with strong emotions and spatial charges as a memorial to the lives extinguished.
The concrete walls cut sharply into the soft structure of the meadow, forming a circular motive relation – a trajectory that leads visitors through five spaces, each with its own spatial features, as an articulation of five thematic sequences of the memorial park: an entrance and preparation area next to the access path, a gathering area next to the interpretation center, an educational path, a contemplation and prayer area, and the return path. The individual spaces can elicit different emotions and experiences, which is precisely what this memorial sets out to achieve: a silent anticipation of the visitors, who must explore it, pass through all the sequences and experience them with all their senses.