Archinect - News

Steven Holl and SKUPINA-designed Terezín Ghetto Museum advances

2024-02-02T15:16:00-05:00

Steven Holl Architects is advancing toward the start of their Terezín Ghetto Museum project in the Czech Republic. The firm was named the winner of an international competition to design an extension of the existing museum in 2022 and will deliver the project on the site, which was first constructed as a citadel in 1780. The Schematic Design phase was completed in March.

Commemorating the lives of an estimated 33,000 Jews that were lost under Nazi occupation in Terezín between 1939 and 1942, the Museum is an important tool in the culture sector’s response to antisemitism and will result in a “hopeful new presence” in a country whose social fabric is seen by some as being strained by hate groups and far-right extremists.

Image courtesy Steven Holl Architects

SKUPINA, the 21-year-old studio founded in Prague by Marcela Steinbachová, is included as the co-architect of the scheme. The pair had previously collaborated on a small renovation project for the interiors of the Franz Kafka Soci...

Renderings of the Holocaust Museum for Hope & Humanity in Orlando unveiled

2022-04-14T17:18:00-04:00

The Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Florida (HMREC) has just revealed architectural renderings for the new Holocaust Museum for Hope & Humanity in downtown Orlando, Florida. It aims to be the world’s first Holocaust museum designed around survivor and witness testimonies.

The USC Shoah Foundation will serve as a content and creative partner in the development of the new museum. This is the first time the Foundation has teamed with a Holocaust Museum to design and implement a ground-up and permanent museum-wide exhibition.

Recently featured on Archinect: 'Everyone Talks About Silver Linings, It's Hard to Talk About Opportunities': A Conversation with Elizabeth Leber, Managing Partner at Beyer Blinder Belle

The museum will occupy a lakefront site and span 43,000 square feet. It has an estimated construction budget of $45 million, with its design led by Beyer Blinder Belle Architects and Planners (BBB). The firm will collaborate with museum experts Ralph Appelbaum ...

UK court blocks Adjaye’s controversial Holocaust Memorial

2022-04-08T11:44:00-04:00

David Adjaye and Ron Arad’s design for a UK Holocaust Memorial has been halted by the country’s High Court following a legal challenge. As reported by UK outlet Building Design, the £100 million ($130 million) proposal was ruled to have been in breach of a one-hundred-year-old law which protected the site from development.

The case was brought to court by the London Historic Parks and Gardens Trust, who appealed a previous decision by the UK government that the project could proceed. Opponents of the scheme included senior religious figures, local community groups, and some Jewish leaders and Holocaust survivors.

The scheme was due to be constructed in London’s Victoria Tower Gardens. Those who filed the legal challenge claimed that the plans did not comply with the London County Council (Improvements) Act 1900, which prohibited Victoria Tower Gardens from containing an...

'Barbarism': Russia appears to have targeted Kyiv’s Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial in a potential war crime

2022-03-02T12:43:00-05:00

Russian forces have bombed Babyn Yar, a ravine in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv where thousands of Jews were executed by Nazis during the Second World War. At least five people were killed and another five were injured in the incident. Located at the site is an artist-conceived memorial to the Holocaust massacre currently under construction. The status of the memorial is currently unclear.

The attack was part of the Russian military’s attempt to disable a nearby central TV tower, killing five in the process. Jewish groups across the world decried the act, stating that it was “an attack on Jews around the world” and citing that such targeting of cultural property is illegal under Article 38 of the Geneva Convention. The Ukraine Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the attack an act of “barbarism.”

Ukraine’s Jewish population is technically among the largest in the world and, in the past, has been used as proxies in the Kremlin’s “Fake News”-fueled disinformation campaign to delegitimize the government by associating it with certain factions that prefer a kind of hard-right ultranationalism.

The monument commemorates a two-day massacre that occurred on the site in September 1941 in which at least 33,700 Jews were murdered by SS men in a gulch north of the city’s center. It already contains a wonderful small synagogue from the Switzerland-based German architect Manuel Her...

Holocaust Museum LA expansion takes another step forward

2022-01-28T14:09:00-05:00

Holocaust Museum LA's proposed $45-million expansion has taken a small, but important procedural step forward. Earlier this week, the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks issued a notice of exemption from the California Environmental Quality Act for the proposed Jona Goldrich Campus, which would expand upon the museum's existing subterranean building in Pan Pacific Park.

The proposed Belzberg Architects-designed project includes the expansion of the existing museum and the construction of a new pavilion. The pavilion will include a new learning center, a dedicated theater to showcase an installation by the USC Shoah Foundation, a 200-seat theater, two classrooms, a 2,500-square-foot exhibit space, and a pavilion housing a boxcar from the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland. Concession areas, administrative offices, and restrooms are also included.

Previously on Archinect: Hagy Belzberg provides a personal touch with new Holocaust Museum LA expansion

According to Urbanize Los Angeles, the expansion is expected to increase the museum’s annual capacity to 500,000 by 2030. It is reported that around $22 million has so far been raised to begin construction. A groundbreaking is set to commence later this year.

Influential New York architect Stephen B. Jacobs has passed away at 82

2021-12-24T16:39:00-05:00

Sad news this holiday as Real Estate Weekly is reporting that industry icon Stephen B. Jacobs has passed away last week at the age of 82.

Jacobs was a Holocaust survivor who went on to become one of New York’s most influential architects.

Born in Lodz in June of 1939, Jacobs was interned at Buchenwald and credited an underground resistance group with his survival.

“I have fleeting memories,” Jacobs said of his experience. “I have memories that are not chronological, particularly the last few weeks because that was a very traumatic and dangerous time because they were trying to liquidate the camp.”

After being liberated, Jacobs moved with his family to Washington Heights in Manhattan, where he went on to study at the Art Students League of New York before eventually enrolling at the Pratt Institute, where he earned his Master’s degree in Architecture in 1965.

Jacobs enjoyed an illustrious and multifaceted career which began in the offices of Whittlesey, Conklin and Rossant and was...

More legal holdup for David Adjaye and Ron Arad’s planned UK Holocaust Memorial in London

2021-11-23T14:35:00-05:00

The Ron Arad and David Adjaye-designed UK Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre in London is facing another legal challenge this week after years of back-and-forth between a slate of opposition groups and the UK government.

The Times of Israel is reporting that a High Court judge has granted permission to an appeal effort authored by a group called the London Historic Parks and Gardens Trust.

The plan had previously been given the all-clear back in July following a public inquiry begun by opponents whose qualms stem mainly from the memorial’s design and proposed location in the historic Victoria Towers Gardens. Adjaye has said he was “stunned” by the backlash, indicating that he felt the proposed design revolves around educational access and an intended “crescendo” effect at a public inquiry held last October. The architect also insisted the updated proposals left much of the park’s landscape altered but still available for its previous public use.

The same group initiated that pu...

Elizabeth Diller is drawing personal lessons from her design for the Jewish Museum's Edmund de Waal exhibition

2021-10-18T16:40:00-04:00

The personal has never been a hallmark of Diller’s work in architecture and design. But working with de Waal’s emotionally charged travelogue, she said, had a transformational effect. “Seeing the world of his family through Edmund’s eyes,” she said, “I saw my family history also.” “Edmund dug into his past,” Diller added. “I didn’t. I couldn’t bear it.” Designing an exhibition based on de Waal’s book has changed that.

Six rooms designed by Elizabeth Diller give viewers a glimpse into de Waal’s inner world informed by his relatives, the Ephrussis, who, like the architect’s own Polish family, was forced into exile during the Holocaust. Diller said she wanted the exhibition spaces to reflect the displacement felt by the storied art-collecting family and chronicled by de Waal in his fiction. The author referred to Diller as “the great dramaturge of space.”

Diller had previously designed a 2016 exhibition at the museum which focused on the lifework of French architect Pierre Chareau.

The exhibition "The Hare with Amber Eyes" goes on view starting November 19th. More information can be found here.

The full weight of history: Daniel Libeskind's brick memorial to Dutch Holocaust victims opens Sunday

2021-09-17T17:12:00-04:00

Daniel Libeskind will have the memory of an entire lost city on his mind at Sunday’s official unveiling ceremony of the National Holocaust Memorial of Names in Amsterdam.

“I grew up in Poland in Lodz, a city that had hundreds of thousands of Jews. There was nobody Jewish left. It taught that you should never give in to authoritarianism. You should never bow your head to fear,” the 74-year-old architect said in a recent interview about his forthcoming memorial for the victims of the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018.

Image courtesy Studio Daniel Libeskind © Kees Hummel.

Libeskind took the memory of his birth city into his design for the Jewish Museum in Berlin, one of the architect’s first major commissions when it opened in 2001.

Image courtesy Studio Daniel Libeskind © Kees Hummel.

Now, 20 years later, Libeskind’s latest project pays tribute to the memory of the Dutch Jewish, Roma, and Sinti populations that fell victim to the Holocaust.

Image courtesy Studio Da...

David Adjaye's controversial UK Holocaust Memorial gets final approval

2021-07-30T08:00:00-04:00

David Adjaye’s proposed UK Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre in Westminster, London is going forward after gaining approval from the Minister of State for Housing Christopher Pincher this week.

The memorial has drawn a considerable amount of backlash in the Commonwealth since being announced in 2017. After a campaign against it by non-profits like the Royal Parks charity, the plan was officially recalled by Pincher’s predecessor in November of 2019 and rejected unanimously by the Westminster City Council four months later over its supposed intrusiveness and unsettling tone.

A public inquiry into the project was then held by an independent planning inspector whose recommendations were thus handed to Pincher’s office for approval in early spring. Adjaye said before the inquiry process that he felt anti-Semitism was behind some of the criticism of his £50 million ($70 million) plan.

Previously on Archinect: UK Holocaust memorial plan faces resistance from Royal Parks

Adjaye Assoc...

Daniel Libeskind designs new exhibition at Auschwitz-Birkenau

2019-05-23T16:02:00-04:00

Daniel Libeskind, the architect famous for the Jewish Museum Berlin, has added another holocaust memorial project to European soil.

Rendering of 'Through the Lens of Faith,' by Daniel Libeskind

On July 1st, Libeskind will present a new temporary exhibition at Auschwitz-Birkenau, perhaps the most infamous concentration camp used during World War II. Titled 'Through the Lens of Faith,' Libeskind designed a corridor-like structure adjacent to Auschwitz's main gate, complete with portraits of Auschwitz survivors taken by photographer Caryl Englander. Photos of the survivors are accompanied by text descriptions of how faith was critical to their survival during their time in Auschwitz.

Rendering of 'Through the Lens of Faith,' by Daniel Libeskind

Libeskind's design for the exhibition is uncharacteristically restrained, allowing visitors to focus less on his design than on the portraits of the survivors and the stories they share in text.

UK Holocaust memorial plan faces resistance from Royal Parks

2019-02-11T15:04:00-05:00

A Holocaust memorial proposed for outside Parliament would have a "significant harmful impact" on the area, the Royal Parks have said. The landmark is planned to be built at Victoria Tower Gardens on Millbank, alongside the River Thames. Royal Parks, which looks after the space, said it could not support the plans as the Grade II listed park was a "highly sensitive location".

A star-studded design competition ended in October 2017 with the selection of Adjaye Associates and Ron Arad Architects as the winning team to plan the UK Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre.

South view. © Adjaye Associates and Ron Arad Architects

"Adjaye himself said last week that 'disrupting the pleasure of being in a park is key to the thinking' of the project," writes The Observer architecture critic, Rowan Moore, in his commentary published by The Guardian. "Certainly a memorial to the Holocaust should have impact. It should not slip by unnoticed. But there is a difference between the intended disruption of a work of art and the clumsiness of a bad brief."

Aerial Plan. © Adjaye Associates and Ron Arad Architects.

Landscape architecture firm Gustafson Porter + Bowman, Plan A, and DHA Designs also contributed to the winning scheme which is now being rejected by the Royal Parks charity.

New photographs show Daniel Libeskind's National Holocaust Monument in greater detail

2017-10-11T20:11:00-04:00

A new set of photographs of the recently opened Canadian National Holocaust Monument have been released and help give a better understanding of the Daniel Libeskind-designed space: how it sits in its surrounding landscape created by Claude Cormier, and what atmosphere the large-scale, photographic landscapes by Edward Burtynsky create inside the fortress-like exposed concrete structure.

We were able to publish an initial, limited set of images a few days ago, shortly after the monument opened, and it managed — not entirely unusual for a Libeskind project — to spark first reader comments.

For a more detailed project description click here; scroll down to see the new photographs of the monument.

All photographs courtesy of Studio Libeskind.

First photos of Daniel Libeskind's newly opened National Holocaust Monument

2017-10-02T16:13:00-04:00

Last week we mentioned the Canadian National Holocaust Monument celebrating its grand opening in Ottawa. The stock of available imagery has been very limited for the last years and consisted of mostly the same aerial rendering in a few variations.

Now we've received new photographs that give a better understanding of the completed monument design — a collaboration between Studio Libeskind, Lord Cultural Resources, Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, Montreal-based landscape architect Claude Cormier, and holocaust scholar Doris Bergman.

"This monument not only creates a very important public space for the remembrance of those who were murdered in the Holocaust," Daniel Libeskind said in a statement, "but it also serves as a constant reminder that today’s world is threatened by anti-Semitism, racism and bigotry. Canada has upheld the fundamental democratic values of people regardless of race, class or creed, and this national monument is the expression of those principles and of ...

Libeskind-designed Canadian National Holocaust Monument opens in Ottawa

2017-09-27T14:30:00-04:00

Canada today (27 September) inaugurated its first national Holocaust Monument, in Ottawa, an endeavour ten years in the making. [...] The monument’s design and construction was a collaboration between the New York-based architect Daniel Libeskind, the Montreal-based landscape architect Claude Cormier, the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky and the University of Toronto professor Doris Bergman, an expert on the Holocaust.

"From above, the monument is the shape of a skewed Star of David," The Art Newspaper writes, "which [...] recognises the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, but also other groups who were persecuted, such as homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses."

Remembering the Holocaust via Anish Kapoor and Zaha Hadid Architects' Memorial

2017-04-13T12:58:00-04:00

In a week in which the White House Press Secretary stated that Hitler never gassed his own people, it's worth taking a moment to remember the Holocaust. In the U.K., the United Kingdom Holocaust Memorial Foundation and the British Government have enlisted some of the top design firms in the world, including Anish Kapoor and Zaha Hadid Architects, to design a Holocaust Memorial. Kapoor and ZHA's proposal, which places a purposefully awkwardly-sited bronze-cast meteorite partially below ground, is simultaneously disturbing and contemplative.

As the architects explain in their statement, "Meteorites, mountains and stones are often at the centre of places of reflection, especially in the Jewish tradition. They call on the vastness of nature to be a witness to our humanity. A memorial to the Holocaust must be contemplative and silent, such that it evokes our empathy. It must be a promise to future generations that this terrible chapter in human history can never occur again."

In the video ...

Transborder wins competition for Holocaust-Center in Oslo

2017-04-06T20:23:00-04:00

In tough competition with leading Norwegian offices (Snøhetta, Jensen & Skodvin, Jarmund Vigsnæs and Carl Viggo Hølmebakk) the young practice Transborder Studio wins the invited competition for an extension of the Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities. The center is located in Oslo, Norway, in a villa from 1917.

Villa Grande has a turbulent history. Most affected is the villa by its notorious inmate during the occupation period leaving imprints of paranoia and nazi philosophy on the architecture. The villa’s narrow, somewhat claustrophobic exhibition rooms are fitting as framework for exhibiting one of mankind’s worst traumas. But the extension that will house an expanded HL-center exhibition activity should give a new spatial dimension and become a counterweight to this world of heavy architectural symbolism. Our proposal creates a subtle framework for new narratives of conditions of minority groups in the world. By cultivating the edge of the “castle plateau” wit...

Shortlisted concepts for UK Holocaust Memorial revealed

2017-01-27T18:39:00-05:00

On the somber occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the 10 shortlisted proposals for the UK Holocaust Memorial Design Competition have been publicly revealed. The proposals were designed by the 10 star-studded teams who were invited to submit concepts this past fall.

Here are the 10 shortlisted concepts for the Memorial and the Learning Centre.

↓ Adjaye Associates and Ron Arad Architects
With Gustafson Porter + Bowman, Plan A and DHA Designs

↓ Allied Works
With Robert Montgomery, The Olin Studio, Ralph Appelbaum Associates, Allied Info Works, Arup, Curl la Tourelle Head Architecture, PFB Construction Management Services Ltd, BuroHappold and Nathaniel Lichfield & Partners

↓ Anish Kapoor and Zaha Hadid Architects
With Sophie Walker Studio, Arup Lighting, Event London, Lord Cultural Resources, Max Fordham, Michael Hadi Associates, Gardiner & Theobald, Whybrow, Access=Design and Goddard Consulting

↓ Caruso St John Architects, Marcus Taylor and Rachel Whiteread
With Vogt Landscape Architects, Arup Lighting and David Bonnett Associates

↓ Diamond Schmitt Architects
With Ralph Appelbaum Associates, Martha Schwartz Partners and Arup

↓ Foster + Partners and Michal Rovner
With Simon Schama, Avner Shalev, Local Projects, Samantha Heywood, David Bonnett Asso...

The search is on for the UK Holocaust Memorial design team

2016-09-20T18:32:00-04:00

Britain may soon have its own national memorial dedicated to Holocaust victims and survivors. Prime Minister Theresa May recently announced the official launch of the [UK] Holocaust Memorial international competition...The winning team will design the new Memorial and a below-ground public Learning Centre located beside Parliament in London's Victoria Tower Gardens. Plans for the memorial competition were first revealed by David Cameron this past January.

"Architecture is a field of repression": Daniel Libeskind on childhood memories, trauma, and architecture

2015-11-19T17:05:00-05:00

"You repress almost everything to produce a building," states Daniel Libeskind during a long and wide-ranging conversation with the architectural historian Gillian Darley in the context of the exhibition Childhood ReCollections: Memory in Design at the Roca London Gallery.

"Everything is repressed because it has to fit into the context, it has to be stylized, it has to appeal to clients, it has to be normal," he contends. "But I always thought, try to show what has been repressed in architecture. It’s very difficult because people don’t like it."

Their conversation touches on a number of Libeskind's central concerns and makes frequent reference to both his biography and his oeuvre. Here are some of the highlights (check out the full video below):

On his childhood:

"I was lucky to have that experience of... the mythology of New York, which is arriving by boat as an immigrant. You know, woken up, 4 o’clock in the morning by my mother with my sister, go up, wake up, 'you’re going to see Ne...

Proposal for the future of Auschwitz-Birkenau

2014-11-11T14:51:00-05:00

When a well-intentioned Alabama teenager tweeted a smiling selfie taken at Auschwitz-Birkenau, she attracted a deluge of hatred and outrage from across the internet. Lambasted as disrespectful, insensitive and inappropriate, the selfie was later explained as a means of memorializing her visit to the camp for her father, who had passed away exactly a year prior to her visit. Her gesture was by no mean the first or last of its kind, and represents an inevitable schism in memorial politics – as traumas recede from lived-past into historical contexts, how should cultural inheritance be balanced against personal experience? And how can this balance be articulated in the memorial space?

Currently, Auschwitz-Birkenau is memorialized in a variety of ways, but the structures themselves are not being actively preserved. In 1947, the Polish government established a memorial to all victims, and opened an exhibition of prisoner paraphernalia at Birkenau in 1955. Auschwitz I, the original death ca...

Italy’s planned Holocaust museum moving to EUR, Mussolini’s expo site

2014-09-05T13:07:00-04:00

The Holocaust museum planned for Rome since 2005 could open next year in a new, bigger location at EUR, named after the Esposizione Universale Roma, in time to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. After almost a decade of delay and €15m spent to acquire a plot of land, the first Museo della Shoah quietly stalled before construction even started.

Daniel Libeskind design wins Canadian National Holocaust Monument competition

2014-05-12T14:00:00-04:00

Team Lord of Toronto was announced today as the winner to design the new Canadian National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa, Canada's capital. The team's proposal, titled "Landscape of Loss, Memory and Survival", was selected out of six finalists who were invited to present their concepts to a jury of professionals and then to the public during the national design competition.

Led by co-president of Lord Cultural Resources Gail Dexter-Lord, the Toronto-based team also includes Daniel Libeskind (architect), Edward Burtynsky (artist–photographer), Claude Cormier (landscape architect), and Doris Bergen (subject-matter advisor).

More info about the project on Bustler.

Six finalists listed for last phase of the Canadian National Holocaust Monument competition

2013-10-30T19:49:00-04:00

Six finalist teams were invited to develop design concepts for the National Holocaust Monument that will be built in the Canadian capital of Ottawa. The two-phase national competition began with a Call for Qualifications in May 2013. The teams — which had to be led by a Canadian citizen — consist of architects, artists and other design professionals from around the globe.

Some notable architecture team members include David Adjaye, Daniel Libeskind, Gilles Saucier of Saucier+Perrotte, and Jeffrey Craft of SWA Group.

Libeskind's design selected for Columbus Holocaust memorial

2013-05-08T17:58:00-04:00

The specially appointed Holocaust Memorial Artist Selection Committee overwhelmingly favored Daniel Libeskind’s design for an 18-foot tall brushed stainless-steel memorial accompanied by a 40-foot walkway and memorial words etched in limestone.

After a daylong meeting in which the panel heard extensive presentations from all three artists, Richard H. Finan, chairman of the Capitol Square Review and Advisory Board, which will make the final decision on the design, strongly opposed Libeskind’s proposal. He said a memorial with a Jewish religious symbol would immediately open the state to legal challenges from the American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations because of the separation of church and state.