Profile

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Washington, D.C
Completed 1993

Lead Designer: James Ingo Freed

Museum and memorial building with permanent and temporary exhibition space, conference, research and educational facilities
 

Click on image to enlarge

This building is not simply a museum, but a living institution dedicated to research, teaching, contemplation and commemoration.  It has been designed to offer several layers of reality that the visitor penetrates one by one to arrive at the core of the experience: the evocation of the Holocaust and its aftermath.

The hybrid brick and limestone exterior helps to unify stylistically dissimilar neighbors. The main façade on 15th Street, however, is a screen that aims not for synthesis but for spatial and emotional disengagement from the city. The museum is organized internally around the skylit Hall of Witness, a three-story arrival, distribution and circulation center that infuses stairs, walls, layered space and shadows with suggestive disquiet. Devoid of literal reference to the Holocaust, it speaks instead through dualities of dark / light, transparency / opacity, openness / constriction. Architectural form is abstract and open-ended so that different people read the building differently, each sifting it through his accumulated personal experience; the museum is a resonator of memory.

Exhibitions are arranged chronologically in descending rotations around the central space. The experience concludes in the hexagonal Hall of Remembrance, a quasi-freestanding memorial chamber filled with light and the emptiness of loss. Unlike the more public Hall of Witness, this solemn space and its eternal flame invite quiet contemplation.
 

Major Components

36,000 s/f permanent exhibitions; 8,000 s/f temporary exhibitions; 16,000 s/f Archives / Research Center/100,000-volume Library; 7,500 s/f Hall of Witness; 6,000 s/f Hall of Remembrance; 3,600 s/f Hall of Learning; 4,300 s/f Education / Conference Center; 5,500 s/f Meyerhoff Theater (415 fixed seats); 2,000 s/f Cinema (180 fixed seats); 1,300 s/f bookstore; commissioned art (Joel Shapiro bronze and Richard Serra steel sculptures, Ellsworth Kelly and Sol LeWitt painting installations); 18,000 s/f ceremonial courtyard (Raoul Wallenburg Place).

Awards

Pei Cobb Freed & Partners services

Architectural Services; Interior Design of public spaces; coordination with associate architect on construction documents and construction administration

Associate Architect

Notter Finegold & Alexander, Washington, D.C.

Structural

Weiskopf & Pickworth, New York, NY

Mechanical / Electrical

Cosentini Associates LLP, New York, NY

Exhibits

Ralph Appelbaum Associates, Inc., New York, NY

Lighting

Jules Fisher & Paul Marantz, New York, NY

Theater

Jules Fisher Associates, New York, NY

Profile   Projects   Contacts   Contents