An Afghan Museum That Mimics Ancient Buddhist Monasteries

Regardless of style or purpose, we tend to accept that buildings are just that: built, on top of the earth’s surface, to be bigger and taller than we are. For centuries, the people of the Bamiyan Valley of Central Afghanistan has flipped that script. The Valley sits between the mountains of Hindu Kush, and since the 1st century, the surrounding cliffs and tributaries have been home to ancient monasteries and chapels, built out of caves and foothills. Twenty centuries later, that’s not set to change: the Afghan government and UNESCO recently announced that the winning design for a competition to build a local cultural center would be a series of brick-lined passageways and rooms built directly into the land.
The winning team, a small firm from Argentina called M2R, had a lot to grapple with. In the 6th century, the people in the Bamiyan Valley of Central Afghanistan carved two Buddha sculptures into the cliffs to mark the most western point of Buddhism’s expansion on the ancient Silk Road. They were massive—one stood almost 200 feet tall. Buddhists would meditate near them in the sandstone caves; monks visited from China to pray. The statues were integral not just to Buddhism, but to Bamiyan culture, which in more recent years had become more Muslim than anything. Locals even had a homespun fable about the statues, that they were ill-fated, star-crossed lovers from different religions, and that’s why they turned to stone.

M2R

Then, thousands of years later in 2001, the Taliban destroyed the idols with dynamite, in an attack against pre-Islamic idolatry. In 2003, after the Taliban had fallen from power in Afghanistan, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) declared the site a historic landmark, an action that immediately made locals, worshippers, and archaeologists ask: Will the Buddhas be rebuilt? The debate lasted for years. German archaeologists were keen to rebuild the statues, but UNESCO operates under the Venice Charter, which says that any monumental reconstruction has to be done with the original materials.

Designing Absence, Not a Monument

UNESCO eventually ruled not to. Instead, it staged an architectural competition for a new cultural center in the Bamiyan Valley that would both memorialize the destruction of the Buddhas, support archaeological work through storage, and allow for events. M2R’s winning proposal is called Descriptive Memory: The Eternal Presence of Absence. Judging from the renderings, it’ll be a peaceful piazza, like a contemporary version of the sanctuaries built into the foothills centuries ago. Excavating the landscape is part strategic, says project lead Nahuel Recabarren, because the soil there can store large amounts of heat, which helps to insulate the caves from the cold. It’s also deeply symbolic, because it mimics the work of the Buddhist monks who, ages and ages ago, built caves into the landscape for their sanctuaries.
M2R faced a design challenge similar to one put to the architects for the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York City: when you’re honoring a tragic disaster so recent that the people visiting your site are the same people who bore witness to the tragedy, what’s appropriate? In this case, M2R have taken a counter intuitive approach to construction by harnessing the negative space left by the Buddhas. “We had to find an adequate way in which architecture could respond to the meaning and history of the place,” Recabarren says. “We thought that, given the breathtaking landscape and the deep cultural significance of the area, the Cultural Center should not impose itself over the site. Much of recent architecture has become obsessed with image and visibility, but not every building can be a monument.”