Memorial for the Civilian Victims of the Massacre in Irpin and Bucha
Considered the strategic critical point of resistance of the City of Irpin, the Soborna Street Bridge, which connects Irpin with the Bucha Neighborhood, was destroyed, and on this battlefront, which established a house-to-house, wall-to-wall defense , was the scene of a bloody massacre of civilians, where on March 6, 2022, between 9:30 a.m. and 2:00 p.m., 279 civilians died, mainly the elderly, women, and 50 girls and boys. This tragedy is called “The Irpin and Bucha Massacre”.
The commission from the Irpin authorities was very clear: the Memorial must be an artistic, modern, sensitive work that allows the construction of a space for remembrance and memory, gathering relevant aspects of the Irpin community and landscape.
Project Type: Memorial
Project Premises
The Place
Life and Nature:
Irpin’s landscape is defined by forests of tall, slender trees — straight trunks with leafy crowns at the top — creating a vertical rhythm that shapes the environment. After the massacre, the cemetery expanded into the forest, leaving these trees as silent witnesses of life and continuity.
The Irpin and Bucha rivers feed a system of lagoons and lakes, adding to the area’s natural richness.
This is the first image of the project: a living forest, a space to inhabit memory through nature.
Death and Violence:
The other defining image is the destruction caused by mortar bombs and their deadly shrapnel — scars etched on homes, streets, bridges, and even trees.
The Irpin and Bucha massacre revealed the brutal capacity of this violence, leaving behind craters and devastation.
This is the second image: the shattered landscape of war — a space marked by death and violence, now transformed into remembrance.
Project Fundamentals
A Forest of Altars / Wooden Shards
The Memory Square
The Refuge of Memory
Drawing from the intersection of violence and nature, the project envisions 279 wooden altars to honor each person who lost their life in the attack. These shard-like structures will form an artificial forest, arranged in groups or “families” of trees, evoking the slender, towering forests typical of the Kyiv region.
At the heart of this artificial forest will lie a space for reflection, prayer, and gathering—a place where families, friends, and community members can come together to honor the victims, share memories, and find comfort within an atmosphere of quiet contemplation.
Beneath the ground, a subterranean refuge will be built to safeguard the eternal memory of each victim. This exhibition space will house graphic material, testimonies, and historical records of the tragedy, ensuring its preservation and raising awareness so that such events never happen again.
Architectural Proposal
Our architectural project proposes, for this Memorial space, the construction of a new landscape that dialogues and is part of the natural landscape of Irpin: on the one hand and from an elevation perspective, we propose the generation of a forest of 279 trees-wooden- vertical-structures that, in their capacity as a sign and symbol of this fusion between nature/life.
And on the other hand, the violence/death, is expressed in plant as these trees outline the contour of a mortar bomb that assume the idea of the shard, and between which small spaces and random paths are generated, enabling a special space of commemoration, bringing to presence the absence, to celebrate the memory and the remembrance of the 279 victims killed by the Russian army in its attempted assault on Irpin and Bucha: the construction of a Forest of Trees-Shrapnel’s.
A Forest of tree-shards to host 279 Altars.
Each one of the Trees-Shrapnel’s will be built through tall and slender self-supporting laminated wooden beams of different heights ranging between 4 and 6 meters, to signify that in this massacre were killed children, young people, adults, and the elderly.
In the corners of intersection and meeting of each of the structures of the Trees-Shrapnel’s, will be constituted the Individual Altars, which will allow relatives and friends to celebrate the memory and remembrance of each of the victims of the massacre. This interior altar-space in the shape of an angle, builds the possibility of taking shelter in a different way in the trunks of this new forest.
The floor of this Forest of Trees-Shrapnel will be made of crushed quarry stone gravel, which will allow to mark, through sound, subtly the step when walking, producing an immediately perceptible difference between exterior and interior, when entering the space of the Memorial, intending a change of rhythm, attitude, and disposition of the visitor at the moment of his entrance. Building a new rubble floor with this gravel.
In this way, all these materials build a minimalist space from a learned austerity.
Each of the tree-shards will contain a personal and intimate altar of remembrance at its core, honoring each of the victims. These structures will be scattered in an irregular pattern, forming a shockwave around a central void: the Memory Square. This empty center, accessed through a sunken gallery or staircase, symbolizes both the crater left by mortar fire and the open grave of a mass burial, revealing the truth of what was meant to be hidden.
From this rupture in the earth, visitors descend into the Refuge of Memory—a subterranean museum space that preserves the memory of the victims through graphic material, testimonies, and historical documentation. It also includes a projection and conference room to further disseminate the story and ensure it is never forgotten.
The underground areas are constructed with reinforced concrete walls, clad in thin wooden rods recycled from the laminated beams of the tree-shards above, creating a material and symbolic continuity throughout the project. The structural walls of the access stair and exhibition hall extend upward to the surface, forming seating strips in the plaza. These openings not only offer places for rest and reflection, but also allow natural light to filter into the Refuge of Memory, softly illuminating the space and connecting both worlds—above and below—through architecture, memory, and light.
A Void clearing in the Forest for the Refuge of the Memory
