Memorial | Luzern
A memorial for the deceased of the Swiss Armed Forces | LucerneStudy commission for art and architecture | 2021
Architecture: Daniele Marques & Rainer Schlumpf
Collaborator: Clara Maria Puglisi
Artist: Barbara Hennig Marques
A place for reflection on life and death, a place of power within the given competitive perimeter. The large plain of the Allmend, the meadows and the horizontal elements of the environmental design of the AAL are the dominant features of this area. We create the place of rest through a kind of excavation, which on the one hand generates a contemplative space, and on the other creates a relationship between the immateriality of the sky and the gravity of the earth through the act of vertical movement. The result is a "Sunken Garden", a "Hortus Conclusus", which can be reached from various directions, from all parts of Switzerland, across the meadows and along the existing paths. Following a spatial dramaturgy of narrowing and widening sequences of rooms with stairs and ramps, visitors are prepared for and attuned to the place of remembrance. The main room defines a large gathering space with an adjoining intimate space of reflection. A two-part artistic intervention interacts between the two spatial areas and addresses the relationship between life and death, existence and memory as well as the earthly and spiritual. The atmosphere of the memorial site will be shaped by the changes and the weather of the seasons and by the delicate cirrus shape of the planted Prunus Serrulata (flowering cherry). The composition of U-shaped retaining walls is built of stamped concrete mixed with the local soil. The intimate space widens into a horizon of memory, which is reminiscent of a vast hilly landscape in the form of a geological lighter vein, and which is completed with an inscription applied with an earth and ore coloured spray.