New Period of Memorial Places? The Possibilities of Architectural Thinking that form Individual and Collective Process of Remembrance

The connections between architecture and remembrance are well-known and have several layers of meaning. I would like to express a possible interpretation of this relationship, focusing on some contemporary memorial places in Europe and Budapest, which are strongly based on architectural viewpoints. At the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, some very impressive examples can be recognized that are not narrative, do not have a direct message or ideological atmosphere, but can involve the spectators to participate in the very complicated process of memory (we can mention Peter Eisenmann's well-known Mahnmal-project in Berlin or Gunter Demnig's concept of 'Stolpersteine'.) The topic is extremely complex in Central-Eastern Europe, where the history of the 20th century caused a lot of traumas. In 2014, I was the leader of a postgraduate architectural school's architect group which won a competition for the World War 2 memorial place of Eotvos Lorand University. We wanted to mark the whole garden of the university instead of just putting a sculpture in it. The sign designed by us is huge (250 m long), and at the same time almost impossibly small (1 cm high); and it was realized on the facade of the university's historic buildings. The names of the victims and the most important data known about them are carved into these bronze stripes. In 2015, we won the Piranesi Award Honorable mention of the Architectural Days of Piran. By throwing some example projects, I would like to give a possible answer to the very complex question of remembrance and architecture. The new types of monuments seem to start a new period, when the architectural thinking becomes increasingly important in thinking about memorial places. Our research at Budapest University of Technology and Economics helps to discover how architects can capture locality, and how they can build databases to be used from the very first step of the design process. This research is always a multidisciplinary effort joining not only the various branches of architecture, but also involving IT specialists, meteorologists, civil engineers, economists, etc.