The proposal for a National Memorial and Documentation Center in Bucharest is founded on the Communism timeless effect throughout the Romanian society. Placing a symbolic dimension that brings together visions and emotions of the astringent past into the everyday life, would become a cultural catharsis for both new and old generations.
At the border of the new city “hyposignification” and the old city “hypersignification”, Izvor Park has been highlighted as an irremediably trace of the communist systematizations. Therefore the memorial aims to fill the physical and symbolic absence with memories of people and places, relinking and making them visible on the urban palimpsest once again. It becomes the synthesis of the past Places in a present Non-Place – “Khora” and “Pleople’s House” trace itself.
The project is gradually organized as an initiatory journey to a metaphysical cultural experience. The entire spiritual framing crosses three layers: the phase of silence enhanced by the natural surrounding guiding to the speechless monolithic volume; the phase of limitation - a powerful architectural gap constrains the perspective to the sky; the final phase of presence reveals the whole interior cage, the only escape being the sky. Texture austerity, abstract light and the spiritual load of the faded darkness amplify the inner tension leading the ways to the commemorative space of the memorial itself.
