Canada’s new National Holocaust Monument is ‘about you’: Hume
The new National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa isn’t a building or a sculpture. “It falls between these things,” says its designer, Daniel Libeskind.
By Christopher Hume, Urban Issues and Architecture
Tues., Oct. 3, 2017
OTTAWA — Even if the name wasn’t there for all to see, there can be no doubt about the meaning of Canada’s National Holocaust Monument. Its enclosed spaces, precariously angled walls and raw concrete surfaces speak the language of pain, fear and isolation. There is nothing heroic here — how could there be? — only the offer of an experience not easily forgotten.
Located across the road from the Canadian War Museum in the LeBreton Flats area of Ottawa, the recently opened monument is a powerful addition to the landscape of the capital. Falling somewhere between art and architecture, this is the first memorial of its kind in the country. Devoid of rhetoric and (mostly) of figurative imagery, it’s an abstract structure that would rather evoke a response than make its point overtly.
The designer, Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind, has acquitted himself brilliantly. More than any other contemporary practitioner, Libeskind has mastered architecture’s narrative possibilities. Until the monument, the best example of his story-telling skills was the Jewish Museum in Berlin. When opened in 2001, it was completely empty. Still, tens of thousands showed up to see it. Even without artifacts or exhibits, the building told the history of a people with clear and undeniable eloquence.
The monument, which addresses a more specific episode, has fewer means at its disposal. But it’s also free from the limits of conventional architectural structures. Other than the need to memorialize, it serves no purpose. What it offers is pure experience.
“It’s not a building,” Libeskind explains. “It’s not sculpture. It falls between these things. There’s no didactic way to go through it. You have to create spaces for individuals as well as room for 1,000 people. It’s about your experience. It’s about you.”
Just in case there was any doubt, however, a series of black-and-white murals of various Holocaust sites have been painted on a number of walls. These images, based on pictures taken by acclaimed Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, add an extra layer of information. But they are unnecessary, intrusive and in some cases distracting. Even more out of place are the metallic panels — in both official languages — that document the Holocaust and its legacy.
This fear of leaving anything unsaid is at odds with a structure that is strong enough to speak for itself, that needs no explanation and that demands we engage with it through our imagination. If words are required, they should be somewhere else. It’s always hard to know when to stop, of course, and the monument reminds us once again why less is more.
At the same time, its hidden spaces, slanted ground planes and dark corners — all unexplained — add an appropriate note of mystery and perhaps of threat to the space. But Libeskind’s monument isn’t without hope: a lone stairwell leads from the ground to an opening in a vertiginously canted wall through which the attentive visitor can glimpse the Peace Tower. On the other side of that opening, a sunbathed balcony looks out over Ottawa and the world beyond. We feel ourselves back in the light, returned to the land of the living. Our response is a quiet sense of exhilaration — and the realization of the power of what we experienced below.
Unlike, say, Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, Libeskind’s piece is frankly abstract but not abstruse. Though from above, its outline resembles an elongated Star of David, even that’s not necessary to an understanding of the monument.
Libeskind, working with Burtynsky, landscape architect Claude Cormier, Holocaust scholar Doris Bergen and Lord Cultural Resources, won the commission through an international design competition launched in 2013. Best known in Toronto for the Crystal, his addition to the Royal Ontario Museum, and the L-Tower condo at Yonge and Esplanade, Libeskind now lives in New York where he moved after winning another competition to remake Ground Zero in Manhattan.
“How lucky we are to be in Canada,” he declares, smiling broadly. “It doesn’t make me feel good to live in America anymore. There’s a darkening of the world. The Germans have broken a historical taboo and elected members of a neo-Nazi party.”
“The opposite of love is not hate,” says Libeskind, paraphrasing Elie Wiesel, “it’s indifference. People forget. It’s not just looking backwards. If you stand here you can hear the voice of the victims of the Holocaust. We should be thinking of who’s not here.”
Christopher Hume’s column appears weekly. He can be reached at [email protected]
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2017/10...olocaust-monument-is-about-you-hume.html
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