Mapping out humanity at its worst
Architectural historian recreates details of Auschwitz as potent three-dimensional evidence
You can run your fingers over Birkenau, the small white nubs of its barracks arrayed in a pale grid on the wall at the Royal Ontario Museum. It’s not the main attraction of The Evidence Room, the museum’s presentation of a University of Waterloo project made for last year’s Venice Biennale of Architecture. That would be the nearby replica of an Auschwitz gas column, a precise rectangular composition of L-bracket and steel mesh, painted out all white and outfitted with dummy Zyklon gas material, to complete the picture — but it suggests its completist’s take.
The Evidence Room, washed out in flat white, from photographs and documents to architectural models to a recreation of a gas-chamber door, means to be both exhibition and document, a clarifying view into what most, to no reasonable argument, would see as humanity at its most monstrous.
The Nazi extermination of six million Jews, almost a million of them at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest and most lethal of the German concentration camps, represents the apex of humanity’s capacity for inhumanity to its own. That much we know. The Evidence Room, with its precise attention to the mechanics of atrocity, means to offer a different view.
“One of the problems in learning about anything, really, is that the eye objectifies things,” said Robert Jan van Pelt, the installation’s creator. “That is why it all becomes white. We want you to touch, to think with your fingertips. We do not stress the visual here.”
While that’s not entirely the effect — ghostly images, whether drawings or photographs, have a powerful spectral presence; typewritten notes and architectural drawings from Nazi archives rendered in pale bas-relief take on the stony significance of ancient artifacts —
The Evidence Room is, indeed, a fresh perspective on a cataclysm whose historical presence is unmatched.
Birkenau, in its proportional array of buildings, is not the work of a monster but of Fritz Ertl, a master architect and a graduate of the Bauhaus school where he was a student of Modernism’s towering master, Mies van der Rohe. This is what
The Evidence Roomdoes, or at least mostly: it departs from rhetoric to examine its central tragedy as one of cold precision, professionally executed and designed to the last detail.
For 30 years, van Pelt, an architectural historian at the University of Waterloo, has focused his research on that aspect of the place, separating emotion and story from the mechanics of fact. Nothing in this room is imagined or contrived: architectural models — of gas chambers, crematoria, barracks, train depots — are built from plans salvaged from the camp’s own architectural office. Images and documents are drawn from official archives.
“I’m not an artist and this is not my vision. I’m a historian,” said van Pelt, cleaving a neat line between the content found here and its presentation. “Everything here I will stand for as having a relationship to an historical event. I am in that sense under oath.”
He walked toward a white door, its surface scored with the texture of an antiqued wood. On one side is a peephole, guarded by a rounded cage (victims inside the gas chamber would strike at the glass, a final effort to survive, prompting from the Nazis a design solution, van Pelt said). On the other is a heavy metal latch, which van Pelt lifted, ceremoniously, before slamming it down with a swift, jarring thwack. “That’s the last sound people in the gas chamber would hear before they died,” he said.
It’s more than a little theatrical, but maybe van Pelt can be forgiven a moment of drama. It’s been a long road to get here. Over 30 years and several moments where he believed his career might be over before it began, van Pelt has emerged as a leading authority on Auschwitz’s function as a finely calibrated factory of death.
Van Pelt, who is Jewish, had a personal connection — his uncle had been killed there and his father-in-law was a survivor — but the path would not be straight. After graduating with his PhD in architectural history, no school would allow him to teach the architecture of the camps, let alone delve into research on them.
“I was unemployable, basically, because I dared to ask the question: ‘Who are the architects of Auschwitz?’ ” he said. “As a teacher, this was the key issue: Only when you find the bottom of any human activity can you start to build a moral framework to teach a new generation. And this was a discipline whose greatest crime had never even been discussed.”
Waterloo, founded by Laurence Cummings, a former American medic on the scene at Hiroshima, provided his one chance. Cummings had made Night and
Fog, the 1956 Auschwitz documentary, mandatory viewing for first-year students. “He wanted students to know that technology had the capacity to be used for evil as well as good,” van Pelt said. He began there in 1987 and has been there since.
In the 2016 film Denial, van Pelt, played by Tom Gatiss, appears as an expert witness in the 1997 libel trial brought by David Irving, a British historian widely discredited for his position that the Holocaust did not occur, against Deborah Lipstadt, an American historian, for including him in her book Denying the Holocaust.
That The Evidence Room appeared the same year as the film presents an interesting confluence. Van Pelt’s testimony was built on his architectural expertise. Compounding photographs, drawings and eyewitness accounts with the crisp architectural renderings of the camp, Van Pelt was able to conclude, to the satisfaction of the judge, that Auschwitz was not a camp for prisoners but for extermination. (Irving had sued Lipstadt not for calling him a denier, but on the grounds that the Holocaust itself did not exist to be denied.) The defence prevailed and Irving lost the case; The Evidence
Room, in its clarifying whiteness, is more than1,000 pages of his expert testimonial, come to life.
From his work for the trial, van Pelt produced a book, The Case for Auschwitz (“Talk about an ironic title,” he chuckled darkly) in 2002 and a reputation as one of its foremost authorities (“When you Google ‘Auschwitz expert,’ my name comes right up,” he said).
In 2007, when Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena came to Waterloo to give a lecture, van Pelt gave him one of his books, which Aravena devoured; the two men exchanged emails and carried on with their lives.
Then, in 2015, Aravena approached him with a proposal. He had just been appointed the curator of the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale and could The
Case for Auschwitz be presented as an exhibition? Van Pelt said it could but, in truth, didn’t really know. Enlisting Donald McKay, an architect friend, as his chief designer, they conceived of The Evi
dence Room as a near-literal forensic project: a physical embodiment of the design research van Pelt had done as an expert witness in the Irving trial.
“Every police station in the world has such a room like this,” he explained, where crimes are reassembled and facts are built. The three main elements — the gas column, the door and the gas hatch — were easy enough inclusions. “They were chosen by history, not by us,” he said.
Protestations to the contrary aside, The
Evidence Room is as esthetic as it is factual, its many intricate models and basrelief documents throwing crisp shadows on the enveloping light. It can make for conflicted viewing, an uneasy welding of beguiling form and ghastly function (“That was a criticism of the German government: they felt it was too beautiful,” van Pelt said). But its marquee features aside, The Evi
dence Room lives most vividly in tiny details: an architectural rendering of a gas chamber before and after1943, when Hitler commanded the camps be converted from labour to extermination camps. Before, the chamber had been used as a morgue, a place to store bodies, with its doors swinging inward; after, its doors now swinging outward became a cold practicality, with the thousands inside mounded up against it, struggling to escape.
A key fragment — a gas hatch, where Nazi commanders would drop deadly Zyklon gas into the dark space packed with as many as 2,000 people — is recreated here on the wall. Van Pelt points out its dimension — 30 by 40 centimetres — and then refers back to a ghostly white order form, for a “gas-tight hatch” in precisely that dimension, on Third Reich letterhead. The Evidence Room elides, or at least mostly, ghastly spectacle and harrowing atrocity for that which can never be lost in the fog of memory and post-traumatic stress. It is instead drawn from the tight precision of design and construction. Without such pinpoint professionalism, it argues, atrocity at this scale could not have been possible — and because of it, it was.
“I was unemployable, basically, because I dared to ask the question: ‘Who are the architects of Auschwitz?’ ” ROBERT JAN VAN PELT