Shoah monument’s design for life
The winning design for Britain’s new Holocaust Memorial was unveiled on Tuesday. Survivor Ben Helfgott, who was on the judging panel, said he hoped the centre would “resonate for generations”
THE NEW national Holocaust Memorial will be designed by a team led by Sir David Adjaye, the Ghanaian British architect, who will collaborate with Ron Arad, the Israeli-born industrial designer.
Their project, which also involves landscape architects Gustafson Porter + Bowman, was the unanimous choice of the jury in a competition held to pick the best design for the £50 million project. It will be located in Victoria Tower Gardens, beside the Houses of Parliament.
A judging panel, which included Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan and survivor and former Olympian Ben Helfgott, announced the winning design at the Victoria and Albert Museum on Tuesday.
Ten finalists were selected from an original 92 entries.
Tel-Aviv born Ron Arad, whose influential firm is now based in London, said the winning design was intended to be something that should be “experienced” rather than just looked at.
The chosen concept features 23 tall bronze fins, with the spaces in between representing the 22 countries in which Jewish communities were destroyed during the Shoah.
Sir David Adjaye, whose work includes the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC, said: “The complexity of the Holocaust story, including the British context, is a series of layers that have become hidden by time. Our approach to the project has been to reveal these layers and not let them remain buried under history.”
Lili Pohlmann, 87, who survived the Nazi occupation of Poland and arrived in Britain in 1946, said she hoped the memorial, to be completed in 2021, would also commemorate the “righteous among nations”.
A learning centre, to include the testimonies of 112 Holocaust survivors, recorded specially for the memorial, will be built underneath.
Olivia Marks Woldman, chief executive of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, said it would be a “fitting tribute” to survivors who had “rebuilt their lives in the UK”. Jonathan Goldstein, Jewish Leadership Council chairman, added: “At a time when hate crime is on the rise, it is more important than ever to educate about the consequences of unchecked and senseless hatred.”
A planning application will now be submitted for the memorial to honour other victims of Nazi persecution, including Roma, homosexual and disabled people.
Questions were raised as to security issues and Mr Khan admitted that the monument could become the target of “criminal damage” and “hatred”. However, he said that “clever design” would “minimise the chances of antisemitic or other sorts of crime”.
There has been some controversy over the design, location and very existence of the project. Sir Peter Bazalgette, chair of the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation, admitted there would be a meeting “in the next few days” with the Imperial War Museum who have called for the learning centre plan to be reconsidered because it would compete with its own new Holocaust galleries, opening in 2020.
Sir Peter said he was confident that both projects would “work well” together in the future.
However, Sir Peter Bottomley, the Conservative MP for Worthing West, became the latest figure to question the location, asking why the memorial was being built so close to the Imperial War Museum.
Barbara Weiss, a local resident and Jewish architect, also criticised the project designs saying “it looks like a ripped-apart ribcage from one side”.