Holocaust Memorial - Part 2

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

I choose this project because this is the project I felt had the most emotional influence on me that I have visited before. For some it is the 9/11 memorial in New York, I’ve also heard others talk about the plantation in Charleston giving them the chills walking through it.  This is the first time I could put my feelings of a project to words, even if it was just to myself as I walked around.

On our trip to Berlin, we visited the project twice. The first time at about 9 or 10 pm. The second time was at about 2 in the afternoon. They were very different experiences however both still caused discomfort.

The site is in the Friedrichstadt neighborhood of the city on a street corner across the Grober Tiegarten. The project consists of 2,711 concrete slabs arranged in a grid pattern over a sloping ground. The slabs vary in height as they go across the ground. Towards the street edges the slabs may reach the height of your knees. Walking towards the center of the site they tower over you at maybe 16 feet.  The lengths of the slabs are near the length of a person, which lead to the memorial resembling a cemetery of above ground tombs.

The three topics are interdependent of each other and directly affect the others.

Scale- The scale of the entire project has an overwhelming scale over the street. As you walk through the maze, the project slowly competes with you, and it easily wins. With the walls gradually growing while also focusing on the end of the isle as you walk, the project does not give you a meter of where you are in the space. It is difficult to differentiate your position within the project causing it to feel even larger.

Use and Program- The project is a memorial meaning its purpose is to remember those who were killed during the holocaust. It’s meant to occupy a significant area of land and its meant to be noticed. At night it is the area of the neighborhood that is not filled with streetlights. It is a darkness in the developing, modern city that cannot be lit up. Representational of a cemetery, it appears just like tombs would in  

Affect- Walking towards the center, the walls of the maze slowly grow around you. Within a few seconds the sky all of a sudden feels so high above. It can be compared to the feeling one would get when slowly falling to the bottom of the ocean. You can see the surface where the air awaits. Feeling uncomfortable, you want to get to the outer edges where you can see above the slabs. The sounds of car driving by all of a sudden are drowned out from the concrete slabs blocking it from reaching you. You can only hear the whispers of other people walking through the memorial but you can’t tell what direction they are coming from. You forget what direction your facing and you get trapped into a state of speed walking through the maze.