Spain's memorial to 191 people killed in the Madrid train bombings is powerfully symbolic, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor
ON March 11th, 2004, 10 backpack bombs exploded on four rush-hour commuter trains bound for Madrid's Atocha station, killing 191 people and wounding more than 1,800. It was the worst terrorist attack in Europe by Islamic extremists, and it brought down Spain's conservative government just three days later.
Last month, on the third anniversary of the bombings, King Juan Carlos and Queen Sophia inaugurated an extraordinary memorial to the victims - a hollow cylinder of glass bricks, 11 metres high, opposite Rafael Moneo's 1992 extension to Atocha and located, rather surprisingly, on a traffic island above the station.
Beneath it is a "meditation chamber" which is lit during the day by daylight flooding through the glass cylinder and at night by a ring of uplighters at its base. An inner plastic membrane carries hundreds of messages of condolence left on notes with bouquets or recorded on a computer in the aftermath of the attack.
It is an amazingly powerful symbol of people's rejection of violence and has won instant popular appeal. All day long, from 10am to 8pm, visitors stream through a double set of steel-and-glass security doors into the chamber, which is large enough to accommodate up to 200 at a time, and gaze upwards into the dazzling light.
The otherwise dark chamber with blue walls, ceiling and floor, has no furniture apart from a long black-coated steel bench with circular concave indents where one can sit in contemplation of life and death.
Names of all the victims are engraved on a frosted glass panel between the first and second entrance doors.
When the sun is strong, as it often is in Madrid, the chamber is flooded with light. And that was the intention of its designers - five young architects, all aged 26 at the time they won an international ideas competition sponsored by Madrid City Council and the Spanish government for an appropriate memorial to those who died.
Esaú Acosta, Raquel Buj, Pedro Colón de Carvajal, Mauro Gil-Fournier and Miguel Jaenicke, who had formed Estudio FAM in 2002, beat 288 other entrants, most of them from Spain, to win the highly sensitive commission. FAM, incidentally and curiously , is an acronym for "Fascinante Aroma Manzana" (fascinating apple scent).
But there was nothing flippant about Estudio FAM's inspired idea for Atocha, now brilliantly realised. For them, it was all about light. The use of methacrylate glass and bonding silicon gives lightness to the monument, while the messages of solidarity are "projected in different moments, in relation with the sunlight", they explained.
It was at the request of Spain's Association of Victims of Terrorism that the architects dropped their initial proposal to emblazon the names of the 191 dead within the cylinder and opted instead for the messages of condolence/solidarity. That's why the names - including that of a Muslim, Itaben Mohamed - are listed at the entrance.
Backlit for clarity, the names are all listed alphabetically, ending with "y a todos las victimas del terrorismo" (and to all the victims of terrorism). "No fear, no revenge, just peace" reads just one of the messages in many languages. At the very top, in larger letters, is the eternal dedication "In memoriam". It is all very moving indeed.
The height of the glass cylinder, at 11 metres (36 feet), is a direct reference to the date of the attacks, which is known in Spain as "3/11". Composed of 12,000 glass bricks, it is claimed by Estudio FAM as the largest purely glass structure ever built. At night, when it glows in the dark, it has been likened to an oversized crystal lamp.
According to Madrid's mayor, Alberto Ruiz Gallardón, "it is a monument that, in addition to astonishing with its beauty, will perfectly symbolise the pain of the victims and of all the citizens". And so, on March 11th last, survivors and relatives of those killed observed three minutes silence after King Juan Carlos laid a wreath at its base.
The Atocha memorial came from the same school of lateral thinking as Maya Ying Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. Two polished black granite walls, set at an an angle of 125 degrees, are made up of more than 60 panels inscribed with the names of some 58,000 US soldiers who died in that terrible war, or are still missing.
UNVEILED in 1982, the Vietnam memorial has become the popular site in Washington, attracting more than four million visitors a year. And it's easy to see why. What it conveys is an overwhelming sense of loss, made all the more poignant because the names are inscribed in the chronological order of death - and there are just so many.
The angular wall is not an upstanding one, but rather set in what the Chinese-American artist who conceived it describes as "a rift in the earth". So you go down into a sort of valley where the granite panels become larger and larger, standing up to three metres high; these coincide with the years when US casualties were greatest.
"We the living are brought to a concrete realisation of these deaths," as Lin has said. "Brought to a sharp awareness of such a loss, it is up to each individual to resolve or come to terms with this loss. For death is in the end a personal and private matter, and the area contained with this memorial is a quiet place, meant for personal reflection."
And that, indeed, is what happens. The impact of the memorial is powerful. Young and old stream up and down the pathway, trying to take it all in. Some leave flowers, flags or wreaths. Others take imprints of names on paper. Many have wept when they finally find the name of a loved one. Nobody who goes there is left unmoved.
The Irish National War Memorial in Islandbridge, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, is equally moving, in a different way. Commemorating the nearly 50,000 Irishmen who died in the First World War, it is a tranquil formal garden, with a stone cross as its centrepiece flanked by pergolas and pavilions containing book rooms with all their names.
It is instructive to compare these memorials with the dreary stone slab on Talbot Street, opposite Connolly Station, which commemorates the Dublin and Monaghan bombings on May 17th, 1974.
It simply lists all the names of the 33 innocent people who died, but is as lifeless as they are. It is sadly uninspired, and uninspiring.
