Building the unbuildable: The US Holocaust Memorial Museum

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. is a memorial among monuments, a bastion of history on the mall of the nation's capital. This paper examines the creative process, focusing on the education of architect James Freed in the design of a building, whose primary mission is "to guard memory against oblivion...to inform Americans about the murder of six million Jews and millions of other victims of Nazi tyranny from 1933 to 1945." Like the topic itself, the building is subject to interrogation about the validity of purpose, the propriety of place, the complexity of program, the impossibility of prognosis. How does the history of the destruction of European Jewry relate to an American public? How may the building contribute to the formation of a more moral and ethical society? How can the spectator imagine the unimaginable? Will the museum use the Holocaust as a metaphor for human suffering, thus obliterating its initial meaning, its very raison d'etre? Will this big and brutal and magnificently crafted and conceived structure etch the Holocaust into our collective memory, thereby sharing in the act of bearing witness? What is retrieved is often forgotten. Still, we must hope that this institution dedicated to learning, teaching, and research will help to banish ignorance, racism, and intolerance. Like Elie Wiesel's passionate words and deeds, and Claude Lanzmann's shattering documentary, Freed has produced a building in the service of humanity, a forum for a nation of immigrants, a warning to future generations, to the time when all living memory of the Holocaust has past.