JAMES INGO FREED
The Holocaust Memorial Museum
I
felt there had to be a way of making a building talk. How to do it?
How to develop a whole architecture out of it? I suggested it be done
tectonically. If you look at an oven, there are ways of building it which
lead to a certain kind of artifact, and the artifact is very important to
me. In the camps, they used a very direct, straightforward way of putting
on a door. Having been trained at the Illinois Institute of Technology, I
recognized that way of putting steel together as having grown out of
the Industrial Revolution . There is a way of making the tectonics of this
industrial technology very elegant. I didn't want to display this elegance,
yet I did want to understand it. There was an aspect of technology in–
volved in the Holocaust, and it really defied the imagination to think
that the state policy was to absolutely do away with a people, and to
redefine how these people wou ld be recognized. The "Arbeit Macht
Frei" gate at Auschwitz, for example, was part of the whole discipline
that the Nazis observed of trying to make everything invisible until the
very end.
Dachau, established in 1933, was the first of the concentration camps,
where the ground rules for how to run a concentration camp were es–
tablished. An immense number of people were there . The images of
Dachau that stuck with me were in no way directly translated into the
Museum building, because I had one overriding goal: I did not want the
building to be a "theme park," a replication of the Holocaust. When
working out a museum such as this one, there is always the question of
the container and the contained: the building is a container, but it is a
container that is much more related to the contained than most other
containers. The Museum had to be something that partook of the flesh
and blood of the Holocaust somehow, somewhere, but not directly vis–
ible.
I wanted to be able to work directly with real materials to make a
building that would be more than just a memorial, more than just a
monument. I felt strongly very early on that one could not build a
memorial which would be simply a sculpture. [n my opinion, that would
not carry any message. Memorials are things where you memorialize
Editor's Note: This essay was first presented as a lecture at th e Architecture
League, New York City, in the fall of 1993.
