The building: Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum
Location: Mount of Remembrance, Jerusalem
Building Year: 2005
Architecture: Design principal:Moshe Safdie,
Principal project architect and manager: Irit Kohavi
Structural Engineers: S. Ben Abraham, Y. Gordon
Landscape architecture:S. Aronson
The Museum building is part of an architectural complex designed by Moshe Safdie Architects for the Yad Vashem Mount of Remembrance. This plan integrates a movement between inside and outside that is composed of a series of passages among landscape, nature and architecture.
The Hall of Remembrance, the central memorial at Yad Vashem, was preserved as the tallest building on the site.
The Museum itself is subterranean, while the entrance and exit and its two ends are cantilevers that emerge from the earth. The exposed concrete building is a prismlike
triangle that is 200 meters long and 13 meters high, with a varying width. A narrow shaft of light penetrates through the glass skylight running along the structure’s apex.
The Museum is reached by a bridge, from which visitors turn towards the interior of the gable wall, where there is a video art work representing Jewish life before the war.
From there, visitors depart on a historical journey through the Holocaust as they walk through exhibition galleries located on both sides of the prism.
The prism floor descends into the depths of the earth, in accordance with the temporal axis that unfolds in the exhibition space. The point where the historical crisis of ‘The Final Solution’ is presented is also the beginning
of an incline that directs the viewer’s eyes towards the sky and light outside.
The prism floor extends into a ramp that
leads to an open terrace, which is flanked by two concrete wings that unfold from within the prism and frame the landscape of the Jerusalem Hills.
