Place of Memory, Tolerance and Social Inclusion

Barclay & Crousse won the international competition Peru's Ministry of Culture opened in 2008 for a museum confronting the internal conflict of 1980–2000, between the state, Sendero Luminoso and the MRTA, which the Truth and Reconciliation Commission estimated killed some 69,000 people. Sandra Barclay and Jean Pierre Crousse, who had built their practice reworking the Peruvian coastal desert as raw material, set the building on the edge of the cliffs above the Costa Verde in Miraflores, stacking pigmented concrete volumes that cantilever toward the Pacific and are threaded internally by ramps and light shafts rather than a conventional stair-and-corridor plan. The rough, sand-toned concrete deliberately withholds decoration, treating the building itself as a neutral container for an exhibition design that does not shy from naming perpetrators on both sides. Completed in 2015 and inaugurated that December, the Lugar de la Memoria houses a documentation centre, library and permanent galleries devoted to the conflict's causes and victims. It won the Gold Hexagon at Peru's XVI Architecture Biennial in 2014 and the Oscar Niemeyer Prize at the Pan-American Architecture Biennial of Quito in 2016.