A memorial for the commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust located in Bologna, Italy, built in less than two months that is distinguished by being emotional using the sensitivity to tell the past.
Designed by Rome-based office SET Architects, the Bologna Shoah Memorial is close to the newly installed high-speed train station. It stems from the will of the Jewish Community of Bologna to donate a new symbolic place to the city; a work that in addition to evoking the memory of an extermination, leads the visitor to perceive the space in an empathic way.
The Memorial is placed at the center of the existing square as a sculptural and massive object with its 10 meters of height and width. Externally it looks like a full and compact volume, while at the inside is emptied; the Cor-Ten steel interlocked plates form a grid that, in an obsessive repetition, recalls the geometry of the beds of the concentration camp dorms.
The passage between the two blocks is characterized by a paving of gravel, typical of railway embankments (to remember the so-called "Judenrampe"); as it runs through it, it narrows, causing the visitor a state of estrangement that leads him to a personal and intimate reflection on the theme of the Holocaust.
