Plaza del Servicio a la Patria / La Metropolitana

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Text description provided by the architects. The architectural plan incorporates a Memorial, a cultural centre, an open air theatre and an outdoor sculpture project. The site responds to its natural surroundings and uses them to create both spatial and visual circulations. The Armed Forces Memorial (cenotaph) is the main element of the square. A metallic structure covered in COR-TEN steel bears white marble interiors, engraved with the names of all the military personnel who lost their lives fighting against the organized crime. The cenotaph settles on a mirror of water that elevates towards an open niche, where a waterfall will meet the cenotaph's resting base.

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Another element of the construction is the Armed Forces Cultural Center. This building's main purpose is to teach and inform through multimedia installations the Armed Forces' organic structure. These installations also comprehend a summary of the Armed Forces' history and main achievements, as well as a visual catalogue of their technology and armament.

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Within the same area, an additional interactive installation expresses the relationship between the late military personnel and the design principles of the architecture and sculptural projects. The open air theatre can accommodates 200 people and emerges from a talus that elevates both the garden and square; it delimits the entrance of Campo Marte (the armed forces main meeting point), and has been strategically built underneath a vast canopy of preexisting trees.

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Thirty-two white marble monoliths were projected and scattered throughout the gardens. Each one of the monoliths form irregular solids that measure equally in weight and volume, whose geometry emerges from the subdivision of the cenotaph's internal volume. The monoliths were originally conceived as if the national territory was scattered across the square's landscape, respecting our nation's political division and zoning. Finally, standing in representation of each Mexican province, they bear a fragment of contemporary poetry created during the same period in which deaths were recorded on the Memorial; written by authors native to the corresponding federated entity.

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