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Facts and Feelings
Designing the new Holocaust History
Museum
by Dorit Harel
The New Holocaust
History Museum – view from above Architectural
illustration by Shalom Kweller
(click to enlarge
image)
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The great challenge in designing the
new Holocaust History Museum was meeting the basic perception of
the museum curators—to present historical information and personal
experiences from the Holocaust, while creating a multi-sensory
experience and a sense of identification with the Jewish world
that was destroyed. In coordination with the designer of Museum's
building, world-renowned architect Moshe Safdie, the design of the
museum was based on several guiding cornerstones: a
chronological-thematic axis presenting the history of the
Holocaust according to an evolving narrative, while emphasizing
the Jewish aspect and personal stories. In addition, the
exhibition contains a variety of original artifacts from Yad
Vashem’s collections, including personal effects, certificates,
diaries, oral testimonies, video footage and works of art.
A multi-sensory experience
Aside from providing information, an
experiential dimension was integrated into the museum’s design,
giving visitors an overall impression of the time, place and
atmosphere. Unique settings, spaces with varying heights, and
different degrees of light accentuate focal points of the
unfolding narrative. For example, together with the museum
curators’ perception of how to present the Warsaw Ghetto, one
exhibition gallery is a reconstruction of the ghetto’s Leszno
Street. Visitors walk through the gallery on original
cobblestones, surrounded by sights and sounds of the street
produced by personal artifacts, film footage and enlarged
photographs of that period.
The exhibition is also presented on
several levels, from the general narrative to the personal story.
The task was to depict the many individual experiences while
considering the visitor’s capacity to absorb the wealth of
material presented. The design of the exhibition thus uses special
materials and colors, enabling visitors to distinguish easily
between the levels, and choose the depth they wish to reach within
a topic.
The visitors’ route
One of the basic guidelines for the
museum’s design was to create a visitor’s route dictated by the
evolving narrative, with a beginning, middle and end. A central
180-meter walkway (prism) was built with exhibition galleries on
either side. Between the exhibition galleries are impassable gaps
extending along the breadth of the prism floor. These gaps
constitute a physical obstacle, guiding the visitor into the
adjacent galleries, yet always enabling eye contact with either
end of the prism. Displaying items from different events, the gaps
symbolize turning points in the Holocaust, and serve as chapter
headings for the evolving narrative of the exhibition. The prism
is therefore a longitudinal axis of historical memory, crossed by
the visitors as they move from one gallery to the next and from
one subject to another.
The first display visitors encounter
is of the Jewish world that once existed in Europe, providing an
initial acquaintance with the people whose story will later be
told. Commissioned from a renowned artist, this large-screen
multimedia display presents visitors with an entire world—a
vibrant and multifaceted culture of joy and sadness, difficulties
and deliberations, exploration and education. After viewing the
exhibit, visitors must physically turn their bodies in order to
walk down to the museum floor, thus turning their back on the
world that once was and parting from it as they begin their
encounter with the events of the Holocaust.
Yad Vashem’s decision to incorporate
the new Hall of Names into the new Museum Complex resulted in its
integration into the visitors’ route. In meeting with its
architectural design, a circular walkway was created between the
upper and lower sections of the Hall of Names, so that the files
housing the Pages of Testimony—symbolic tombstones of the
victims—surround the visitors, while above them hangs a collage of
Pages of Testimony and images of Holocaust victims. Thus the story
told by the new Holocaust History Museum reverberates between the
Jewish world that once was and the personal and collective memory
of that world, housed in the Hall of Names.
The author is the designer of the
new Holocaust History Museum
Copyright ©2004 Yad Vashem The Holocaust
Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority |
