Monuments are (…) only possible in periods in which a unifying consciousness and unifying culture exists. Periods which exist for the moment have been unable to create lasting monuments.
Sigfried Giedion, José Luis Sert, Fernand Léger
Less frequently than in previous times, instrumental politics and public spirit have managed to meet in the same symbolic form. When such a connection has been cultivated, the emerging object is what might be called a monument, a kind of aspirational architecture that combines historical knowledge and aesthetic integration in a rather allegorical container that packages everything that deserves to be remembered and passed on to history in a permanent form. (Christ and Gantenbein, 2017) Monuments are among the few architectures -along with mausoleums, as Adolf Loos recalls in his 1931 Trotzdem Gesammelte Schriften 1900-1930- that occupy a place in the art world, and as such, the narratives they commemorate and provoke tend towards the sacralisation of history, endowing it with a certain divinity, distance and allure. (Masheck, 2013) However, this is also their weakest link. Now more than ever, monuments are a perennial target of contemporary thought, insofar as the forms and spaces in which human memory is centralised are always insufficient to accommodate all stories, all bodies, all peripheries and all political interactions. Indeed, the very formal existence of the monument is often claimed to be discriminatory, since “the language of figures and the writing of signs cease to be useful because there are no longer enough whole figures, nor enough complete signs, to express all the possible combinations of thought”. (Quatremère de Quincy in Mostafavi, 2017) The crisis of the traditional monument is the material consequence of the crisis of political representation.
Moving from public memory to celebratory architecture seems a task doomed to failure, as it remains a mystery to politics how the symbolic form of a totalising event can bring a unifying sense of culture into the present. (Naginski, 2017) Faced with a progressive fragmentation and distrust of colonial, republican and modern architectures, faces, texts and images, monuments have begun to merge with other ecologies in order to secure their existence. In the form of cultural institutions, demonstrations or models of informal literacy, they now function as counter-monumental bases that redirect the public’s interest towards their own experience rather than a given one. Monumentality as a quality of an architectural work vis-à-vis these and other modes of democratic and technological citizenship is now deployed as an artifice of public communication rather than a historical motif. Narratives and generalisations of progress, some of the main fuels of the allegorical machine, have lost their momentum in the public sphere and are being rudely tested by reality. The National Museum of Memory in Bogotá is a case in point.
In 2015, the Colombian government, the National Centre for Historical Memory and the Colombian Society of Architects called for an international competition for a new museum and memorial space in Bogotá. The commission was to create an architecture that would pay profound tribute to the victims of the country’s armed conflict and celebrate the negotiated end to one of the most enduring war fronts of modern history. The National Museum of Memory (NMM) was to be a monument to peace, a building that would embody the pain of the past while creating a new sense of hope for the future. (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica and Sociedad Colombiana de Arquitectos – Bogotá y Cundinamarca, 2015) Out of 72 entries, the proposal by MGP Arquitectura y Urbanismo (Colombia) and estudio.entresitio (Spain) won first prize.
The proposal is structured around a geometric grid of alternating squares that create a dynamic interplay of scale, light, and spatial relationships. The grid serves as the basis for an intricate network of corridors and staircases that create a peregrination through different thematic rooms and spaces of introspection. The monumental areas seek a solemn atmosphere and an iconic presence. Together, the interior and exterior aim to reinterpret the history of collective resistance and the search for peace. The project is crowned by walkable terraces with suggestive sloping volumes decorated with the primary colours of the Colombian flag. This section reinterprets the city’s range of mountains and creates a space to appreciate the urban and natural environment. Despite the monolithic character and visual heaviness of the volume, the first floor is designed to be permeable and integrated into the surrounding public space, creating a networked ground in an area of heavy vehicular traffic and poor pedestrian conditions. (estudio__entresitio, 2015)
Construction began in 2021, five years after the prize was announced. The building was due to be completed by the end of 2022, but construction was quickly halted due to budget constraints and doubts about the building’s structural performance. Cracks, deformed non-structural elements and a far cry from the concrete finish shown in the competition images left the city with a dying grey shell. (Semana, 2023) The failure of the NMM coincided with the stagnation of the peace accords, almost as if the building expressed the political reality of the moment: peace as a decadent and unattainable enterprise, a broken-down corpse waiting for the political class in power to resuscitate it. In time, a series of posters appeared around the building. Perhaps the most revealing read: ‘This is where the window to the territory is being built’. Colombia’s centralised politics has long contrasted with the periphery, where the armed conflict predominantly unfolds. In this dynamic, the periphery remains dependent on and defined by the centre, which often imposes its own narratives, policies and forms. (Behnke et al., 2015) The NMM paradoxically exposes this imbalance, based on the administrative remoteness of the periphery, while public investment to build a monument dedicated to national unity ends up in the heartland and not in the hotspots where the war still rages. As long as the museum does not serve its function, the image of the territory projected from the centre will remain one of regression and decline.
Reference List:
Behnke, C. et al. (eds) (2015) Art in the periphery of the center. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
Christ, E. and Gantenbein, C. (2017) The Monument, Harvard Graduate School of Design. Available at: https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/course/the-monument-fall-2017/ (Accessed: 5 January 2025).
estudio__entresitio (2015) National Museum of Memory. Available at: https://www.entresitio.com/work/project/mmec-museum-of-memory-of-colombia (Accessed: 12 January 2025).
Giedion, S., Sert, J.L. and Léger, F. (1993) ‘Nine Points on Monumentality’, in Architecture Culture 1943-1968. A Documentary Anthology. Columbia Books of Architecture.
Masheck, J. (2013) Adolf Loos: the art of architecture. London ; New York, NY: I.B. Tauris (International library of architecture, 1).
Mostafavi, M. (ed.) (2017) Ethics of the urban: the city and the spaces of the political. Zürich, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers.
Naginski, E. (2017) ‘The Public Image of Demos’, in Ethics of the urban : the city and the spaces of the political. Lars Müller Publisher, pp. 87–106.
Semana (2023) Investigating the possible deterioration of works held in the Museum of the Memory of Colombia, Semana.com Available at https://www.semana.com/nacion/articulo/un-elefante-blanco-investigan-posible-detrimento-patrimonial-en-obras-del-museo-de-memoria-de-colombia/202311/(Accessed: 10 January 2025).
