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Bamiyan Cultural Centre

An Argentinean team led by Carlos Nahuel Recabarren is the author of the Cultural Centre in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, that will create a new centre for communicating and sharing ideas.

Carlos Nahuel Recabarren with Manuel Alberto Martínez Catalán and Franco Morero, Descriptive Memory: The Eternal Presence of Absence

After a long period of turmoil, Afghanistan is beginning its second decade of democratic governance.

While the rehabilitation process in Afghanistan typically focuses on infrastructure, rebuilding can also advance the goal of national unity by promoting positive public discourse and cross-cultural understanding. As a result, ethnic diversity can be seen as a collective benefit, rather than a source of fragmentation and conflict.

To this end, UNESCO and the Ministry of Information and Culture of Afghanistan, with the financial support of the Republic of Korea, launched in November 2014 an open international architectural design project to design the Bamiyan Cultural Centre, a cornerstone in efforts to preserve culture, promote research and build community around culture, in order to build cohesion in a fractured cultural context.

The Centre will be located near the boundary of the World Heritage property, the Cultural Landscape and Archaeological Remains of the Bamiyan Valley. The purpose of the project is to promote heritage safe-guarding and cross-cultural awareness, and thereby contribute to the broader aims of reconciliation, peace-building and economic development in the country.

The winning project has been developed by an Argentina-based architecture team led by Carlos Nahuel Recabarren. The entry, entitled “Descriptive Memory: The Eternal Presence of Absence”, and four runner-ups were anonymously selected by an international jury of seven technical experts.

The design was endorsed by the Afghan President, H.E. Ashraf Ghani, who acknowledged UNESCO’s competitive selection process for the design of the new Bamiyan Cultural Centre, and voiced his dedication to protect Afghanistan’s cultural heritage. In this connection, the Afghan government will set up a major national culture program whose aim will be to value the country’s rich cultural diversity. The program will include a nationwide archaeological survey, a creative industries programs, and targeted activities to safeguard minority rights across the country.

The conceptual description states: “The Bamiyan Cultural Centre seeks to create a new vital centre for communicating and sharing ideas. Therefore, our proposal tries to create not an object-building but rather a meeting place; a system of negative spaces where the impressive landscape of the Buddha Cliffs intertwine with the rich cultural activity that the centre will foster. The Bamiyan Cultural Centre then is not a built but rather ‘found’ or ‘discovered’ by carving it out of the ground. This primordial architectural strategy creates a minimal impact building that fully integrates into the landscape, takes advantage of thermal inertia and insulation of the ground and gives a nod to the ancient local building traditions.”

While the World Heritage site is perhaps best known for the large standing Buddhas that were destroyed in 2001, the Cultural Centre is oriented more toward the future, encompassing the multi-layered heritage of Afghanistan’s long history. The international competition to design the centre marked the first step in this process.