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PARTISAN REVIEW
the outside. This is a building that wants to keep you inside; it doesn't
let you look outside. When you're here you have to focus on the words
from Isaiah on the wall, "You are my witnesses."
This concourse level has a temporary exhibit at one end, a theater at
the far end, a Serra sculpture, a cinema in the middle, and four confer–
ence rooms at the other end. But the interesting thing to me about this
space is the diagonal, and the invisible force implied by the slot cut in
the slab and running along the £loor to a brick wall. You always have to
cross the slot to enter the Museum. You cross the slot, you cross the
twentieth century.
The main space in the Museum is typologically related to the
Auschwitz courtyard, but not directly. I decided to use red brick at al1
times. It's luscious. We mixed different kinds together to get a brick that
is both good and yet, when you see too much of it, begins to be slightly
ominous. The use of red brick throughout the concourse wall is pleas–
ing, it's tactile, and it eventual1y is disturbing, because it evokes the sim–
ple brick walls of the concentration camp. This was done almost in a
compulsive way, because the brick really supports itself, nothing is hung
off the wall. Here I was interested in doing something visceral.
As you look at the wal1s, you find diagonal steel bracing which
comes down to arches, carrying the brick above. The brick wal1s are
bound with metal , which not only makes an elegant impression, but it
also brings back the binding of the camp ovens: the bricks were held in
place against the heat expansion with metal straps. In these straps, there's
such a metaphoric play: the constraints of history, the enslavement of a
people, the compression of physical torture - which never force them–
selves on one but linger like a suggestive stain in one's consciousness. And
that suggestive stain has to linger there , and you have to slowly begin to
be aware that this building is not made to be beautiful nor to suggest
any specific, raw evil; it's designed to bring you to that crack in the
building which says that it is not what it seems
to
be at first glance. The
ambiguities were necessary because I intended to establish a dialogue
about what happens to memory, what happens to invention, when time
passes.
It is significant that the exhibits can be reached only by technology ,
via steel elevators that take you in one direction only (up), and that the
exhibits can be exited only on foot, by walking your way around and
out of the narrative. Just as the refined technology of modern Germany
led to the efficiency and speed of the Holocaust, engineering the worst
out of the best Enlightenment origins, it could be escaped only by those
who walked out to salvation, across Europe, in the ancient way. Here
one circulates in the building by way of glass bridges . The image of
bridges became important to me as a means of distancing, for separating
