Casual Design Experience @ National Holocaust Monument
As promised, I‘m here to share my design experience at the National Holocaust Monument located in the capital city of Canada. It goes by the title “Landscape of Loss, Memory and Survival”
When considering visiting various architectural structures, I started making a list of ‘to-visit’ places. And it led me to this astounding structure designed by Studio Libeskind.
The most fascinating experience was visiting the structure on a proper winter day. Enjoying the isolation, I was able to move around freely and wander inside the monument.
As you can clearly witness that the monument was covered in a bed of snow near the entryway. The scale of the two freestanding precast concrete panels looks usual when perceived from this point.
But as you gradually walk through the ramp, the scale increases and leads you to the hidden entrance of the structure. The function of the ramp keeps progressing from a short parapet to a tall panel as you walk along it.
Design Attributes
Before getting into experiential details, let me describe the design intent of the structure which will be a guide for you to understand the space better.
The pictorial explanation by the architect and designer Daniel Libeskind describes the meaning and relation of the monument’s star-shaped layout.
The Memorial recognizes those survivors who were eventually able to settle in Canada and pays tribute to the millions of innocent men, women, and children who were slaughtered by the Nazi government.
The Monument is an encounter that fuses architecture, art, landscape, and research in ways that create an ever-changing connection with one of the worst periods of human history and deliver a potent message of humanity’s everlasting resilience and survival.
Now let’s get into the real-time experience inside the monument.
Insider Moment
This view of the internal ‘contemplation’ area of the monument on a sunny day captures the alluring shadows of the angled planes. The entire structure including the layout, furniture, and fenestration resembles geometric shapes.
The “abstracted pattern of triangle forms” that make up Canada’s National Holocaust Monument recalls various ways in which Holocaust victims were marked by the Nazis, according to Dov Goldstein, the monument’s project manager.
A single flight of stairs is added aligning to direct the view towards the parliament building. An intuitive way of introducing a staircase by cutting an angled wall highlights it even more. To elevate the significance of ‘the stair of hope’ necessary lighting has been incorporated. It feels totally surreal to visit the monument post-sunset.
The concrete walls of each of the triangle areas are meticulously painted with Edward Burtynsky’s large-scale, monochromatic photographic panoramas of current-day Holocaust locales, including death camps, forests, and killing fields. These intricate murals are added to influence the visitors and make them time-travel.
Every single aspect of this monument left me in awe. I found this breathtaking aerial view of the monument and the abutting view of the Canadian War Museum beside it.
If you would like to learn more about the design philosophy, I recommend you check this set of informative questions.
I hope this experience inspired you the way it did to me, and how the design intent was brilliantly applied to the actual structure. To build and design a structure is one thing, but to make people experience the actual feeling of an incident through a built structure is what makes this architecture marvel a unique practice.
Stay tuned, for the next Casual Design Experience with me!
Here is a more interesting way to capture the stunning progress of the monument being built: a time-lapse video.
