‘Can or should architecture be deployed to speak of the Holocaust?’
Updated: Oct 26
‘Architecture’s role in a Holocaust museum is fraught,’ Kerstin Thompson said in an interview the Melbourne Holocaust Museum published in October 2022. Her practice, Kerstin Thompson Architects, designed the museum’s new building in Elsternwick. Asked how architecture shapes a site of memory, she put this question: ‘Can or should architecture be deployed to speak of the Holocaust?’
Hers is a historical question. Answering it means establishing what happened, where it happened, who carries its memory, and on what evidence. Historians who work on difficult and traumatic pasts are trained to work through each of these.
The first step is to separate what is remembered from what took place. The museum exists to record a history that happened in Europe. No building in Melbourne witnessed it. What the museum commemorates and what its site has seen are different histories, and a design that confuses the two claims an authority it does not have.
The second is provenance: what the site itself has witnessed. In 1984 a group of Holocaust survivors in Melbourne set out to establish a museum and research centre. With a donation from Mina Fink, in memory of her late husband, Leo, they secured an old double-storey building, formerly a dance school, and opened it in March 1984 as the Jewish Holocaust Centre, renamed the Melbourne Holocaust Museum in 2022. That is the history this building was present for: survivors acquiring a place and turning it to the work of remembrance.
Architecture can speak for what its site witnessed. It should leave the rest to the people and records that hold it.
The third is testimony. The history the building did not witness is carried by the people who lived through it. Thompson makes the same point: it is ‘the content – the artefacts and museum programs – and in the case of MHM its people (particularly the survivors and their families), that can attempt to speak of the unspeakable.’ Historians are trained to judge exactly this: who may speak, with what authority, and how a voice is carried without being spoken for. This history belongs to the survivors, their families and the testimony they gave, and the building’s authority to speak stops at its own walls.
Together, these give a historian’s answer to Thompson’s question. Architecture can speak for what its site witnessed. It should leave the rest to the people and records that hold it. Thompson’s design does this. It uses ‘a decidedly abstract architecture that recognises that the Holocaust remains outside of representation’, and it keeps the survivors’ building, whose corner turret ‘remains a defining feature of the streetscape’. Inside, she says, the turret is transformed into ‘a dramatic lightwell illuminating the memorial space’. So the memorial takes its light from the building the survivors acquired in 1984, the part of this history that happened on the site.
Thompson asked her question of a Holocaust museum, but every design team working on a site with a painful past faces a version of it: a place where people were harmed, or where a community still feels a loss. A building cannot stay silent on that past. What it shows, and what it leaves out, will be read as its answer. For that answer to rest on evidence rather than assumption, the history must be established before design begins.
That is the work of Site Intelligence: archival and documentary research, commissioned at acquisition or early feasibility, which establishes what a site has been, what it still carries and who holds its history. Design Narrative Strategy takes those findings into the design brief, so the team knows, before design starts, what the building has the authority to say.
Sources
Kerstin Thompson, interview with Tahney Fosdike, ‘In conversation with Kerstin Thompson’, Melbourne Holocaust Museum, 10 October 2022, https://mhm.org.au/2022/10/10/kerstin-thompson-interview/
Melbourne Holocaust Museum, ‘Our history’, https://mhm.org.au/our-history/
Jewish Holocaust Centre, ‘About us’, https://www.jhc.org.au/about-us/
‘Melbourne’s The Jewish Holocaust Centre gets a new name’, J-Wire, 20 April 2022, https://www.jwire.com.au/melbournes-the-jewish-holocaust-centre-gets-a-new-name/
