Preliminary designs for Studio Libeskind’s long-awaited 10/27 Memorial at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh have officially been announced following a sensitive design consultation with families of the victims of the tragic 2018 mass shooting that left eleven worshipers dead and six more injured.
“The journey to unveiling the preliminary memorial designs has been a long and emotional one, but I am grateful for a process that prioritized our hopes that our loved ones are remembered for how they lived, not solely for how they were murdered,” said Diane Rosenthal, a member of the Memorialization Working Group who lost two siblings in the attack, which stands as the deadliest antisemitic hate incident in American history.
The group, which represents all three congregations included within the 70-year-old synagogue, was also able to visit the memorial to passengers of Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, in order to draw inspiration for its design.
A cluster of eleven sculptural open books representing each victim will be placed along a landscaped walkway leading into the reimagined 45,000-square foot Tree of Life building, which is also set to include an education and research center, as well as a small museum dedicated to studying the historical roots of antisemitism in the U.S.
Pittsburgh's Rothschild Doyno Collaborative is also involved in the design of the new structure. Reused limestone facade elements will be included in the expansion that also houses programmatic elements, including the “Space of Memory” and Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, framed by a dramatic “Path of Light” skylight feature.
Libeskind, himself a son of Polish Holocaust survivors, told the Associated Press: “To be inscribed in the Book of Life is to be inscribed in eternity, to be inscribed in memory. It’s not a cemetery. It has to be an affirmation of life.”
A groundbreaking for the project is expected in early 2024.
7 Comments
It’s even worse than I expected it to be. All the usual and meaningless Libeskindian formal cliches; all the half-baked, sophomoric Libeskindian blather; all the predictable Libeskindian gimmicks; all the guaranteed Libeskindian ugliness. Libeskind dishonors the victims with this tasteless and vulgar building. …. Did Daniel do this job pro-Bono, or did his office milk yet another tragedy for all the money they can squeeze out of it?
very nasty, personally hateful comment
It seems to me to describe the design accurately.
Grind away
Once again, Daniel Libeskind has appropriated a tragic event to promote his shallow and superficial brand for personal financial gain. Here he exploits the trauma solely as another excuse to force his typically discordant, jarring forms onto a site that deserves more respect. These crude volumes embody only Libeskind’s own crassness and his inability to design a site specific response to the killings. Libeskind would just as easily and just as mindlessly use these exact same shapes for a mattress warehouse or a sewage treatment facility. The pretense to symbolic meaning is as shallow as the man who created this pretentious rubbish. (The ‘Path Of Light’ is a particularly naive feature, something you might expect from a weak sophomore architectural student in a D-List university.) Daniel Libeskind’s only skill has been to build a career peddling his intellectually barren nonsense to the gullible and the ignorant, every one of whom willfully override their own gut instinct which tells them his design really is as silly and as devoid of real meaning as it actually looks.
It seems that unless you're the client...
I love it when people dust off their accounts just to keep making the same comments on the same posts. I guess every one needs a hobby but this one seems pretty sad.
As for the design, it could be better but DL carved himself a niche and he's milking it. Nothing special to see.
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