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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 ...

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.

Hagy Belzberg provides a personal touch with new Holocaust Museum LA expansion

2021-10-28T12:33:00-04:00

After exceeding its own ambitious annual attendance goals to the tune of over 50,000 visitors, Los Angeles’ Holocaust Museum is set to expand on its existing 28,000-square-foot facility with a new extension plan from its original designer Hagy Belzberg.

Located in Pan Pacific Park at the edge of the city’s Fairfax neighborhood, the expanded museum hopes to eventually host around 500,000 visitors annually and greatly enhance the educational mission to which its founding traces.

Belzberg’s updated plan features a new rooftop pavilion atop the existing building that is meant to house a boxcar taken from the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland. A new building will be introduced that includes space for a 200-seat theater, expanded gallery spaces, and a new educational center for the museum, which was founded by Holocaust survivors in 1961. An expansion of an interactive installation from the USC Shoah Foundation will provide a link for future generations of visitors.

The museum's exp...

"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...

Building a Memorial of the Shoah in Milan

2011-09-12T12:36:49-04:00

“We had to try to bring to the surface some sign of something that was absolutely invisible in Milan,” he continued. They didn’t want a traditional museum. Here “the content and the container coincide,” Mr. Morpurgo said. “You can’t put the Shoah in a museum under glass. It’s impossible.”

The NYT profiles the work of Milanese architects Guido Morpurgo and Annalisa de Curtis, who are working with a local foundation, to build a Memorial of the Shoah in Milan. The memorial will be located in the old depot under Milan's Central Station where Jews were put on trains bound for concentration camps during World War II.