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District: Miguel Hidalgo
Architect: Gaeta Springall Arquitectos
Build: 2012-2014
Floor area: 15,000 m2All photos courtesy Gaeta-Springall Arquitectos
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Gaeta-Springall Arcquitectos is a Mexico City-based firm, founded by Julio Gaeta and Luby Springall in 2001. They have won several competitions and have worked in different scales and programs in architecture and urban projects. From the beginning, both have combined professional practice with teaching and research, from the conviction that different platforms complement a better way of doing and thinking. At the end of 2013, the office won the national competition for the Mexican pavilion at the 14th International Architecture Biennale in Venice, where their exhibition Condemned to be Modern is on view until November 23, 2014.
An exhibition of their work will open July 11, 2014 at the architecture gallery, Aedes, in Berlin.
Mexico’s drug war accounted for more than 60,000 deaths between 2006 to 2012, with yearly casualty per capita tolls worse than Iraq or Afghanistan. The bloodshed and violence that took over large parts of the country those years marked the controversial, conservative presidency of Felipe Calderón. ¿How do you deal with such a dark, dubious legacy?
Well, you build a memorial. A hasty competition carried out by the local Architects Association that was rejected by some of the citizen organizations that originally supported the project, awarded the project to Julio Gaeta and Luby Springall. Covering 15,000 sqm of Chapultepec Park –on a swath of land owned by the Ministry of Defense, which generated further tension around the project– the memorial is composed of 70 rusted steel slabs scattered among trees, surrounding a central space with a geometric reflection pool. The memorial’s design intentions, unfortunately, haven’t been forceful enough to quiet the controversy surrounding it. Its most significant feature is the fact that people can write on the slabs with chalk, leaving anything from messages to a loved one lost to violence to political slogans rejecting the war. Still, the chalk eventually washes away into nothing, like the voices of the powerless. I (Marios Ballesteros)
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