The Subprime Monument

Idea by

Eduardo Mediero

HANGHAR

http://www.hanghar.com

Madrid, Spain

Eduardo Mediero is a practicing architect from the Polytechnic University of Madrid, where he graduated with honours, and MArch II Candidate from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. After working with RCR Arquitectes, Sou Fujimoto Architects or El Equipo Mazzanti he returned to Madrid and founded HANGHAR, an experimental architecture and design studio focused in the limits between practice and theory.

Call for ideas 2018

"That which lies here in ruins, the highly significant fragment is the finest material in the creation. For it is common practice to pile up fragments ceaselessly and to take the repetition of stereotypes for a process of intensification, in the unremitting expectation of a miracle." Walter Benjamin

# Economy

How ought we handle the unfinished? Might it lead to unexpected situations?
The Monument deals with the material consequences of the real estate bubble of 2008. Its
burst, lead by an unstable economical model, left behind a bleak landscape of housing developments that illustrate the irrational expenditure of resources consumed during those years.
The Tower of Babel is taken as the general typological form; a direct reference to the greediest project ever conceived of. It is composed of an architectural artefact of our everyday existence, the house; appropriating a form that is not authored. This fragment, that carries its own meaning, is diluted in the general image of the monument while being part of the rational organisation of the whole.By stacking the ubiquitous form of the house the project is anchored to the common imaginary of society and simultaneously creates a semantic void through an excess of visual noise that constructs the unifying form of the monument.