Brumadinho Memorial by Gustavo Penna Associated Architects

_project: Brumadinho Memorial
_architecture: Gustavo Penna Associated Architects
_location: Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, Brazil

The most beautiful way we, humans, translate emotions into words is through poetry. We don't write only about love or happiness. What's shockingly surprising is that we also write beautiful verses about anger, revenge, and especially loss.

Architecture might be our tectonic form of poetry. Memorials all over the globe are landmarks of our conquests and accomplishments as a society. But they also mark tragedies. And although they perpetuate these hurtful moments, it doesn't mean they aren't beautiful.

Gustavo Penna, a Brazilian architect, was responsible for one of these undesirable landmarks: The Brumadinho Memorial. In 2019, after a dam collapsed, 272 souls were lost under a trail of destruction and mud that engulfed everything and everyone it encountered.

Gustavo's idea was to invite the visitor on an introspective journey as the tragedy unfolds, and architecture is the main protagonist in telling this story.

The first impression is a geometric façade that contrasts with the organic nature of the natural environment surrounding the Memorial. The orangish concrete is also one of the more noticeable features of this first sight: it was pigmented with the mud from the tragedy.

Through openings in the façade - the idea was not to have only one entrance; it is up to the visitor to choose the path they want to take - we enter a darker room, and that's when the architecture strikes us with its first act. This dark room - with a few openings in its ceiling - is where a small reflecting pool is, with a gemstone surging from the water and representing the ones who lost their lives on January 25th, 2019, at 12:28 pm - the exact time a beam of light enters every year to enlighten the gemstone.

As the light guides you out of this first room, you are out in the open again, now with a very long pathway in front of you. Again, the architecture becomes narrative, giving you a single vanishing point to look at and instinctively explore it.

This pathway is probably the most meaningful part of the concrete poetry. It symbolizes the small crack in the dam that was the genesis of this shameful disaster. The insignificant crack, which must have been centimeters in length, is now represented in a 230-meter-long pathway. On the walls, on both sides, are the names of those lost in the tragedy.

There are two rooms throughout this pathway: Memoria, in which are the personal belongings of the deceased, and Testemunho, which shows the visitors how the tragedy was and how it was reported in the news.

As you move towards the end of the crack, there's a giant square sculpture, the Crying Head, a perfect square, which lies unbalanced - the perfect geometric form created by humans that has its tears flowing through the geological topography of the area affected by the tragedy in its faces.

This might be the last act of architecture telling the story, the tears flow towards the end of the path, a cantilever platform with a cascade that faces nature, where once was all mud.

It's the end of the architectural intervention, but not of the complete story. There is a garden, home to 272 trumpet trees, that will probably last more than the concrete itself. And that is probably the most impactful reflection we can have. As we try to control the unforeseeability of nature, to fulfill man's insatiable greed, tragedies such as this show us that our most valuable asset is time. And as we pass by this world in the blink of an eye, nature will still stand.

_article written by Gabriel Alencar
_film by Architecture Hunter
_images by Jomar Bragança, Pedro Mascaro e Leonardo Finotti