La Vitrina

The Segundo Ensanche de Pamplona was conceived as a rational civic field. The monument interrupted this logic at its most ambiguous point.

Situated at the southern end of the Avenida de Carlos III, it converted the civic expansion into a ceremonial terminus — substituting the logic of the modern city with the authority of the regime. The result: a dead plaza generating a void in the urban fabric; a symbolic barrier between the Ensanche and the new neighbourhoods of Lezkairu; a place incapable of sustaining the daily civic life of a democratic city.

The project responds simultaneously at three scales. The cube aligned with the block grid eliminates the axial exceptionality of the monument. The plaza, redesigned as a civic field, restores the language of the Avenida de Carlos III. And the project as a whole transforms the place from a dead end into a hinge between two neighbourhoods that have long remained divided by what was placed between them.

Inside the vitrine, the monument is reinterpreted as an artefact. Its meaning is inverted.

The intervention does not erase the historic structure — it reinterprets it, so that the building itself becomes evidence within a space of interpretation, investigation and public learning. The memorial museum is organised as a spatial arc, not a linear narrative. The entry compresses: light softens, sound diminishes, the acoustic character of the city is absorbed.

At the centre of the dome, a dark acoustically absorbent sphere suspended inverted interrupts the symbolic programme of the original frescos — physically interrupting them while preserving them intact. The images associated with the regime are no longer presented as spectacle. They remain in suspension, accessible for study, but removed from the visual hierarchy that once defined the building.

The transparent walls of the vitrine are transparent from the interior, allowing a continuous visual connection with the democratic civic life in which the vitrine and the exposed object exist. The confrontation with history is not the conclusion. The city is.

The project transcends the building to address the urban hierarchy established by the monument.

The arcaded wings — whose transformation was mandatory per the brief — are not simply eliminated but reprogrammed as civic infrastructure. A narrow water channel runs along the upper part of the transformed arcades, accompanied by a pedestrian path. Water and people travel together along the structure toward the mirrored cube. At this point, their paths diverge: the water returns to the plaza, falling to the ground level basin at the base of the cube; the visitor ascends via a vertical elevator to the elevated civic esplanade.

The elevated plaza above the cube is not a roof in the conventional sense. It is a new civic public surface that rises above the buried monument, from which the landscape of Pamplona — mountains, old town, Ensanche, newer barrios — becomes visible as shared common ground. Following the tradition of Pamplona's civic miradors, this elevated landscape redistributes the privilege of height as public resource.

The authoritarian monument once erected itself above society. Now society rises above the monument.