Holocaust Education Center
By merging orthogonal elements and rounded gaps and surfaces, the architect has treated the external facades, made of black steel plates, and
has fenced the entire plot with a low hedge in Cor-Ten steel plates pierced with 150 holes as reminders of the 1,500,000 children dead.
The main entrance underpasses the winding glazed wall, into the double-height space,whose curvature follows the panoramic staircase upwards.
The two-storey building provides almost 800 sqm of floor space of educational environment set up around a foyer, a library, an audio visual room,
a lecture hall with 150 seats, a childrenÅfs room, and a garden of Anne FrankÅfs roses on the back side, on ground level.
The second level remarkably integrates permanent and temporary exhibition rooms to hanging passageways and overflowing perspectives.
Structured with a steel frame system and finished with concrete floors, plaster boards and stone for walls, the overall architectural composition is
the result of the interlacing-intersection of two boxes, which hold certain symbolic meanings.
Among antithesis and osmosis, organic alike and geometrical, filled up volumes and voids, the distortion of Holocaust and its inhuman constriction is seen as inseparable from desire and repose of the victims. Rather than a memorial,
an outspread memory dedicated to the future is a ring bell for times when the awareness diminishes.
Hope and ambition often grow up within death and defeat, and peace can only be true after wars and through respect for human beings.
