Boston is already home to the New England Holocaust Memorial, designed in the 1990s by architect Stanley Saitowitz. It’s prominently located between Quincy Market and infamously brutalist City Hall. So, when a local foundation proposed a Holocaust museum, many asked, “Why?”
“We feel there is a need,” said Jody Kipnis, founding president and CEO of the Holocaust Legacy Foundation. “Our mission is to preserve and perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust for future generations. We also want to connect the Holocaust to modern-day injustices.” The Foundation is currently the leading voice behind the museum’s planning, the initial design of which has just been unveiled by a local firm, Schwartz/Silver Architects.
The proposed museum is to be located on Tremont Street along the Freedom Trail (which pinpoints a series of key Revolutionary War sites), yet also among several other Boston architectural icons: The site would be on-axis with the Massachusetts State House and just across the street from the Christopher Wren–inspired Park Street Church. Initial plans for a six-story structure with a large asymmetrical window on its main facade customized to showcase a rail car—one that is identical to those used to transport Jewish citizens to concentration camps.
Some local critics have accused the design of being “jarring” and “out of context,” but Schwartz/Silver design principal Jonathan Traficonte defended his scheme. He argues that the museum, like its neighboring buildings, are all “of their time.” While obviously not of a 1930s/1940s vintage, the Nazi era, the architect averred that it was important to give the building a 21st century architectural identity.
“We just got approval from the Boston Landmarks Commission to demolish a faux Georgian building from the mid-1950s to make way for the museum,” Traficonte said. “It was definitely not of its time. But the adjacent postmodern Suffolk University Law School building is of its time, as obviously the Park Street Church is. Our concern was designing a building of its time in a richly textured urban environment.”
In addition to the large angled window, another bold architectural choice is a metal veil covering the front facade, crafted from a stainless steel mesh that undulates like a sine curve. It’s meant to be symbolic of the Jews who drew their curtains to avoid being identified by the Nazis. As the veil gets closer and closer to the angled window, the sine wave doubles in intensity and metaphorically “draws back” the curtain, then presenting the death train. It will throw dramatic shadows in the right weather, Traficonte said.
A visit to the museum is conceived as going from “light to dark to light again.” As such, patrons will be encouraged to begin on the fifth floor and work their way down. A large elevator will comfortably accommodate 15 to 20 people and let them out onto a top floor gallery awash in natural light. Visitors then make their way down into the exhibits, all of which are to be created by Luci Creative, a Chicago-based studio but with an office in Boston. In these interstitial galleries, darkness will prevail—Traficonte states that the exhibits will be highly interactive and may even include cobblestone streets, recalling Europe in the late 1930s.
Finally, however, when the museumgoer arrives at the ground floor, they will again be surrounded by light. “Although the exhibits will be dark in character, we want the building itself to be hopeful,” Traficonte said. The architect also added that no particular LEED certification has been targeted, but that sustainable design was in keeping with the foundation’s mission. “They want a building that is for the future, to educate generations,” he said. “And you can’t do that without being concerned about carbon emissions and depleting the ozone layer.”
One key ecologically responsible feature will be floor slabs created from dowel laminated timber (DLT). This system employs dowels to hold floorboards together, without the use of glue or other potentially toxic materials. In addition to being made of sustainably sourced wood, these floor slabs can be packed with acoustical material, yielding the quiet necessary to contemplate the exhibits.
Kipnis said it was too early to give a projected construction cost for the museum. But she did say enough had been raised to begin construction, and so “the next move is the city’s.” As required by law, the scheme has already been presented to the Boston Planning and Development Agency, which is reviewing it, and next it must go before the Boston Civic Design Commission, an elite group of local architects.
So far, luck has been on the side of the project. Kipnis said it was pure chance that they identified a rail car, which had been sitting idly in Arizona and is now going to Dallas to be renovated. The railcar was in Chandler, Arizona as part of a planned Holocaust museum that did not happen. It was examined by a curator of industrial artifacts who stated it was identical to railcars appearing in photographs of Jewish deportation during World War II.
One citizen, reacting to a story on the museum in The Boston Globe, said: “The museum idea might be great—but why put in a super modern building in a very sensitive part of Boston that has already lost so much of its built heritage? Is this a bad dream?”
But Kipnis is undaunted, and said acquiring the busy site along Tremont Street, with its proximity to the Boston Common and the State House, was serendipitous. “I didn’t dream we’d be able to buy a spot along the Freedom Trail,” Kipnis said. “We were just in the right place at the right time.”
James Moore McCown is a writer and author based in Boston.
