"When the building collapsed, his world shrank to a triangle of air the size of a bathtub."

BarcelonaThe collapse of the Rana Plaza building—on the outskirts of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh—has gone down in history as one of the worst industrial disasters in recent history, with more than 1,130 fatalities. Rana Plaza was an eight-story building housing garment factories that produced garments for 29 brands, including Mango, Benetton, El Corte Inglés, and Primark. The day before, workers had been ordered to return to work despite the alarming state of the structure. There were no unions, and the threat of losing part of their wages forced them back into the factories. The accident caused the deaths of more than 1,130 people, although according to organizations that, ten years later, are still fighting for respect for human rights in the garment industry, the number of victims was much higher. fast fashion, It could have been avoided from the beginning.

Among all those dead, seventeen days later rescue teams found a survivor, Reshma Begum. "She was 19 years old, worked on one of the upper floors, and when the building collapsed, her world shrank to a triangle of air the size of a broken bathtub," explains the architect and writer Pedro Torrijos (Madrid, 1975) in his latest book, the essay Cathedral of rubble. Anatomy of collapse (Debate).

"It wasn't a rescue bubble, nor a particularly favorable room," says Torrijos. "It was, rather, a spatial coincidence: a crack in the chaos [...] Seventeen days. The number becomes a mist again. Forty hundred and eight hours. Twenty-four thousand four hundred and eighty minutes. Not in a sky. Crushed, full of cement dust, decomposing corpses, hunger, heat, hallucination."

While the name of Reshma Begum has made history, the names of the victims of the other disasters Torrijos discusses in the book have been swallowed up by the passage of time and by the circumstances of the tragedies in which they lost their lives. Cathedral of rubble It is the result of the proposal made to him to write a book about the DANA storm that affected Valencia in 2024 and how architectural and urban planning negligence can be deadly, but Torrijos wanted to go beyond this specific case, because he has seen how the DANA storm has become a "weapon." "It's a relatively short book, but I actually talk about many things. But I think the synthesis of them all is rescuing people, ghosts, not the ghosts from movies, but those left suspended in the dust and mud. Catastrophes aren't numbers, they aren't data, they aren't curves. They are people, they are lived by people. Numbers, in the end, become a kind of artifact that only serves as a weapon, as a political argument, or as a moral weapon."

Torrijos emphasizes that Cathedral of rubble It's a "literary essay," adding to his work as a popularizer of architecture and as a novelist. And the result is a very harsh critique of the system: "Narratives seek to define everything, whatever it may be," explains the author. "That already happened when the building's owner, Sohel Rana, was singled out as the culprit for the Dhaka collapse. But in reality, there are many culprits. Probably even ourselves, when..."

But not all those responsible have the same luck. Jesús Gil was convicted of manslaughter for the deaths of 58 people in 1969 during a Spar supermarket chain convention at a restaurant in a housing development in Los Ángeles de San Rafael (Segovia). Gil took responsibility for the case "formally," but "never apologized." "The closest thing to an act of contrition was a figure," says Torrijos. "First, he offered 300,000 pesetas for each deceased person." An amount that, even by the standards of the 1970s, was offensive. The families rejected the offer. Then he raised the stakes to one million. They rejected that too. The offer was 650,000 pesetas per death. Gil not only haggled over the compensation, but during his time in prison he set up "a small smuggling business." And all of this didn't prevent us from turning him into a kind of television and media myth decades later.

In contrast, businessman Harry Crandall and architect Reginald Geare committed suicide ten years apart following the collapse of the roof of the Knickerbocker Theatre in Washington under the weight of snow, a tragedy in which a hundred people died in 1922. ~BK