The results of that journey are profound. The Holocaust Museum, which opens to the public next week in Washington, is a rare example of contemporary architecture that dares to use design as a powerful means of emotional and psychological expression. The building could have been a plain backdrop to the harrowing exhibitions-a classic modern museum, with clean lines and abstract shapes, typical of Freed’s firm, Pei Cobb Freed & Partners. Instead, for the heart of the building, the vast three-story Hall of Witness that visitors will first encounter in the museum, Freed turned to the tough language of early modern industrial architecture, with its massive, sober brick walls and its crisscrossing of muscular steel girders. In a way, says the architect, it’s a critique of modernism’s lofty ideals, which were supposed to solve man’s problems. That was the architecture of technology and industrial progress. Here the message is: it was horribly twisted to build factories of death.
Nothing would have been worse than to try to replicate the architecture of the death camps; what the Hall of Witness does instead is evoke a terrifying power. Some of the elements are especially suggestive: tall, bulky peaked-roof forms that could be watchtowers; bridges that refer to those over the Warsaw ghetto; strips of steel embedded in the brick walls, like the reinforcement the Nazis needed to keep the ovens from exploding from round-the-clock use; archways shaped like the ovens’ doors. But the hall is also rich in more symbolic gestures-a fissure of glass that cuts across the granite floor; a flight of stairs made ominous by its skewed perspective, wider at the bottom than at the top, and, most powerfully, the way the gable of the glass roof veers off its axis.
The outside of the museum presents a different face. To fit into the formal Washington streetscape, the front of the building is a stately neoclassibrance, Freed also took a different, more conventional turn, with a subdued modernist design. Meant as a contemplative refuge for visitors at the end of the exhibition, it’s a solemn, skylit room-the memorial part of the project that will have an eternal flame. Narrow slots of glass give a glimpse of freedom outside, one framing the Washington Monument, another the Jefferson Memorial.
The disjuncture of these parts is intentional, an effort to create a place that tries to embrace the enormity of the nightmare–a place to see evidence, to study, to reflect, and at the center, a place of displacement, an echo of a world gone mad. “I wanted to make a scream,” says Freed about the Hall of Witness. He has. Risking to put meaning back in architecture, he has made a space of terrible beauty.
