Your visit
starts in an unremarkable city park adjacent to a generic shopping mall. Local
kids are playing tag, while a man in short sleeves throws a stick for his dog
and a family picnics on the grass. You follow a concrete path, which turns into
a gently sloping ramp descending into the ground. On either side of you,
concrete walls rise to meet an angled green roof, slowly blocking out the
sounds of people enjoying the park. The laughter gets more faint, the excited
chatter less distinct. As you enter the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust
(LAMOTH), you get a hint of what Jews and other persecuted people must have
experienced on their way to Nazi concentration camps, gradually losing contact
with the small pleasures of the everyday world.
The architectural procession,
as designed by Hagy Belzberg, confronts you with what Hannah Arendt called “the
banality of evil,” a phrase that chills us still because it conflates the
quotidian with the horrific. Tucked into the side of Pan Pacific Park,
behind a parking lot servicing a post office and a shopping center called the
Grove, LAMOTH is easy to miss. Instead of aiming for the heroic or monumental,
Belzberg used a “layered strategy combining the urban and the metaphorical,” he
explains. By “urban” he means a design that fits into its park location and
works with the residential neighborhood just beyond. And by “metaphorical” he
means a building that alludes to the Holocaust without being literal or
specific. Because the museum deals with other genocides in addition to the one perpetrated by the Nazis, Belzberg steered away from any Jewish
iconography.
During his research for the
job, Belzberg visited many of the 16 major Holocaust museums in the United
States and related projects abroad. One that struck a responsive chord with him
was Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which stands in
the heart of Berlin and draws people who happen to be in the area as well as
those intent on visiting the site. “Seeing and hearing people having their
lunch or enjoying the outdoors actually added to the experience,” recalls the
architect, because it reminds you that some people’s lives continued during the
Holocaust while others’ came to a ghastly end.
He also appreciated that
Eisenman’s design — 2,711 concrete blocks of varying heights — engages people
and that its “symbolism is open” to interpretation.
Working with a small size
(36,000 square feet) and a limited budget ($14 million, or $389 per square
foot), Belzberg and his team created an intense experience by using a few
simple devices — such as compressing space in certain areas, releasing it in
others, and manipulating daylight everywhere. Soon after visitors move from the
open park to the narrow entry ramp, they begin to feel the mood change. As they
descend to the lobby, they find themselves enveloped by an exposed concrete
skeleton that is both sensuous in its curves and a bit ominous in its form. To
save money and time, the architects used shotcrete to create the fluid geometry
of the vertical walls and poured concrete only for the roof and floors. (After
spraying the shotcrete on steel reinforcing bars, workers troweled the walls to
give them their curves and smooth finish.)
LAMOTH, which was founded in
1961 by Holocaust survivors and had a Wilshire Boulevard location for a number
of years, still has more than 25 survivors working as docents. At the reception
desk of the museum’s new home, each visitor gets an iPod, which provides sounds
and images that help bring history to life. The first exhibition space,
entitled “The World That Was,” features a large “community table” with a
display that engages visitors as a group.
As people move through the museum
and the topics become more grim (Kristallnacht, the Nazi concentration camps),
the building’s sloping roof makes the rooms feel tighter and darker. At the
same time, visitors experience the exhibits less as a group and increasingly as
individuals engaging with a single screen or image. Daylight slips inside from
above and around the edges of walls — a precious commodity brought in as if by
stealth. One display looks at genocides in places such as Darfur and Rwanda.
Underneath the entry ramp, artifacts from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum
in Poland stand as silent witnesses.
But even as the rooms get more
constricted, the architects offer views to the other side of the circulation
loop where exhibits tell about the liberation of the camps and survivors making
new lives in Los Angeles. Near the exit, a presentation room gives visitors the
chance to hear a survivor talk about the Holocaust. Then as they leave, they
return to the park and the sounds of people going about their lives.
Just
outside the building, an existing sculpture dedicated to the Holocaust leads
visitors to an outdoor room that Belzberg designed in memory of the 1.2 million
children killed during the Nazi era. Wrapping the walls around the space,
glass-fiber-reinforced concrete tiles punched with 1.2 million holes of
different sizes and depths make a visual and tactile reference to the young
lives lost six decades ago.
The building earned a LEED Gold
Certification by insulating interior spaces with a 2-foot-thick green roof,
capturing rainwater and using it for irrigation, and including recycled fly ash
in the concrete, among other strategies.
In deferring so thoroughly to
its park setting, the museum lost a chance to project a stronger public
profile. But its refusal to preach and its dramatic procession of increasingly
intense spaces engage visitors in an architectural and philosophical dialogue
not easily forgotten or ignored.
Belzberg Architects
Los Angeles, California
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