Concept

The MementoPark

• Tourist destination
• Artistic action ground
• Educational centre:

A good site to revise for the examination topic “the 20^th century”

The Memento Park is not about Communism, but about the fall of Communism!

The MementoPark is divided into two parts:

1. The “A Sentence about Tyranny” park, commonly known as Statue Park;

Not irony – remembrance

• The “behind the scenes” wall – behind which there are no buildings, nothing,
• The end wall – which says once and for all: no further,
• And the road between them – which leads to nowhere.

2. The trapezium-shaped, atmospheric Witness Square (Neverwas town, Neverwas square), and the collection of buildings which are both the continuation of the statue park’s conceptual architecture and content, and the conclusion of the thought process.

2.1 The long base of the trapezium:

This is the main façade of the “a sentence about tyranny” statue park with the poem “A Sentence about Tyranny” by Gyula Illyés on a huge plaque in the middle. The park was conceived in the same circle of thought – the same silence resounds around the statues as is in the poem. Pain, grief, impotence, shame, shock, rage and defiance.

2.2 The two sides of the trapezium:

The two buildings along the side of the square house the functional content of the complex and the service centres.

• Artistic Centre: thematic exhibitions, conferences, film clubs, theatrical productions, concert venue.
• Tourist Centre
• Educational Centre: site for school history lessons.

The style of their façade is in tune with the park’s “empire” architecture, the scale creates the original design concept of space. They emphasize and counterpoint the brutal enormity of the gate-like “behind the scenes” wall. Within the two buildings is a tourist-artistic-educational minicentre (cinema, art shop, lecture theatre, theatre, exhibition hall, tourist services, hospitality, etc.)

2.3 The short top of the trapezium:

Opposite the main façade of the Statue park, in its original size, constructed with accurate weight proportions is the grandstand and dais of the Stalin statue and on top of it are the boots! Only the boots!

One square – along its axis the poem “A Sentence about Tyranny” and the boots – which guard the unshattered myth of the 1956 revolution, the anti-dictatorship uprising.

One square – which in its very being, in that it could even be, becomes the remembrance site of the fall of Communism, the victory of Democracy over Dictatorship.

One square – which uses Hungarian symbols to tell the story of a Central and Eastern-European turning point in history which can be understood anywhere in the world: about dictatorship, about democracy.

For Witness square…

… is Széna Square, Budapest in 1956. Wenceslas Square, Prague in 1968, Palace Square, Warsaw in 1981, Opera Square, Timisoara in 1989, Potsdamer Square in Berlin, Square of the National Assembly in Sofia.

Ákos Eleőd

Concerning his prize-winning design