Designing an “Architecture of Information” -

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Ralph Appelbaum
ABSTRACT For the permanent exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum the
design approach was minimal and transparent, and the designers were in dialogue only
with the story - not with the history of design or the conventions governing most
museum presentations. We reached for a sense of immersion by trying to erase the
seams between exhibits and architecture. Display strategies included the removal of
conventional barriers of certain glass-encased vitrines: some objects can be touched,
and reactions sought are as visceral as they are intellectual. We tried above all to see
that people leave the museum not profoundly dejected but with some other feeling
evoking the resilience of life and hope. The design intended to make the environment
so united with its subject that memory of the museum experience and the sharing of
memory through discussion will carry on in the lives of the visitors.

CONTEXT AND CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE PERMANENT EXHIBITION

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Edmund Burke, late 1700s

All of us who collaborated on the permanent exhibition at the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum have been gratified by the public response to the complex blend of
instinct, scholarship, design, and engineering that brought about the communicative envi-
ronment. The combined history-museum and theatrical background of director Jeshajahu
Weinberg and the documentary-film background of exhibits chief Martin Smith were among
the profound influences on the character of the visitor experience.
Many articles have reviewed the museum’s architecture on the one hand, or content
and narrative structure on the other; so I would like to take a median course and invite
readers inside the environmental-design process whose goal was to marry this extraordinary
building with its uniquely demanding historical contents.
Revisiting the museum today, I see the architecture and the exhibition as mutually
supportive. The building is free to pursue its abstract metaphors by virtue of the exhibits’
particularity; and the exhibit environments, dense with literal metaphor, are made more
accessible by the general emotions that the architecture evokes. On this brief tour, we will
look at how certain exhibition design choices created specific confluences of information
and emotion, thereby assuring an “immersion environment” and a memorable museum visit.
As we examine various design strategies, it may be helpful to bear in mind the notion
of this exhibition as “three-dimensional historiography.” For us as designers, this meant
keeping our eyes strictly on the artifactual and documentary evidence we had to present,
drawing our metaphors from this alone and filtering out any supporting imagery or design

Ralph Appelbaum is the founder and president of Ralph Appelbaum Associates, 133 Spring Street, New York,NY
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88 R A L P H A P P E L B A U M DESIGNING AN “ARCHITECTURE OF INFORMATION”

gestures that could possibly be perceived as emotionalistic. Practically, this meant develop-
ing a design vocabulary that was very minimal, very transparent: we sought design strategies
that were in dialogue only with the story -not with the history of design, as often happens,
nor with the conventions governing most museum presentation. It is actually this puristic
approach that explains the copious use of media throughout the exhibition. The vast
majority of the film footage shown was shot by the Nazis themselves. And the interactive
media elements - where visitors view film in response to subject-based themes - show
newsreels and other contemporaneous footage that the American public of the 1930s and
1940s saw. This was done to enforce and reinforce - environmentally as well as intellec-
tually - that this was a modem crime committed with modem tools and impossible to
distance from our own lives by virtue of the wide temporal and cultural leaps that characterize
most historical exhibitions.
From the outset, we were concerned with strategies to make the content bearable in the
first place. To us, this meant no dilution of history - absolutely none -but rather, as a
science student makes a shadow box to observe an eclipse of the sun, we needed to find a
few conceptual frameworks to enable people to look into the face of evil without such a
scorching of consciousness at the outset that they would become unable to absorb a survey
of the evidence. This is why, after visitors ascend to the beginning of the exhibition in what
may be the world’s most foreboding elevators, the first photomurals they see when the doors
open are of American soldiers liberating the camps in 1945. This prologue area also includes
a photo of Eisenhower at the scene - tilted upward toward viewers and strongly lit, so as
not to be missed - and color footage of the camps taken by the Army film unit of director
George Stevens. These views of and by Americans are there to create a primary identification
for American visitors to the museum; we want them to enter armed with their American
values, specifically the values and outlook of their soldier fathers or grandfathers who entered
Europe in 1945 to discover the same evidence that the museum presents.
Opposite this prologue wall, en route to the exhibition proper, visitors encounter the
first evidence in the form of uniforms of concentration-camp victims. These appear not
behind glass, but -using a display strategy that will recur throughout -they are suspended
in a wire cage. This was done not only for its literal metaphor of imprisonment, but mainly
as part of a broader strategy for removing the conventional barriers that people tend to expect
in museums. We believe that the more visceral the encounter with the evidence -by which
I do not mean emotionally hyped, but the opposite, being purely and literally presented -
the more likely visitors are to remember and to pass on the experience they have here, telling
a grandchild or telling fnends far away this story that must never be forgotten.
Since the matter of artifacts and their display will recur as we look through the museum,
I’ll take a moment to discuss their general role, for they have an evocative as well as an
evidentiary use. The exhibition is often noted for being story driven rather than artifact
driven; and this is certainly true insofar as the structuring and sequencing of the visitor
experience is concerned. But by the same token, many of the most poignant connections
- and most stirring conjunctions of emotion and moral sensibility- are triggered by these
objects, which can be awesome in their simplicity.
For me, the small things people had with them when they arrived at the death camps
are always particularly potent: a tea strainer, say, that someone had brought for his “new life
in the East,” which was a sign of hope in the face of steadily increasing dehumanization, and
C U R A T O R 3 8 / 2 *1995 89

which really stood for the last vestige of his personhood before he was totally and ultimately
processed. For this is the story we have to tell: how this modem, societally embracing,
inexorable processing system stripped away the humanity of its victims methodically, layer
by layer - until some must have doubted it themselves, readied as they had been for the
ultimate processing. One began by giving up the right to have a voice in politics, then a
profession, then a school, then a telephone, then a doctor’s care, then a family pet, and then,
after several more steps usually involving one’s home town, one’s name, one’s cleanliness -
the tea strainer. This unassuming object is given a powerful voice by its context -by the
“architecture of information” that we build around it. Is it still a utensil, merely? Or a
haunting pivot pointing to all that was given up before it, and all that was about to be given
up? For what was relinquished next was not only life, but the right even to have one’s body
returned to nature. In context, the little strainer points to an unholy world where death was
just another step -by no means the last -in its owner’s reprocessing into materiel and his
bizarre repatriation to Germany as chair stuffing or industrial felt.
In the case of the uniforms and certain other key artifacts -notably large ones like the
railcar, the barracks, and the prisoners’ bunks, which are there to be touched if visitors need
to -we had the support of the museum’s conservators in the unorthodox decision to forego
the use of protective glass or other solid barriers. It was a necessary decision to heighten the
emotional interactivity of the displays for visitors born long after these events. Enforcing the
emotional connection is really the only way of keeping the memory alive; if the exposure of
artifacts means securing an unforgettable connection for a young visitor, causing him to talk
with his family and friends about what he has seen -and touched -it is a risk worth taking.
Necessarily, this exposed mode of display had to be reserved for certain objects and special
narrative junctures; glass is indeed employed in many exhibits. But we used the glass to
enhance the sense of fragility of the whole world, supporting the glass sheets minimally and
seemingly precariously, causing them to lean at times toward the visitor. This tipping of glass
greatly reduced reflection as well, thereby eliminating a typical barrier between the viewer
and the viewed.
This inward-tilting and strangely angled world is the one visitors enter as they begin the
exhibition. The top floor covers the rise of Nazism, the Jewish and global responses to it,
the terror of Kristallnacht, the invasion of Poland and, generally, a sense of the scope of what
was to come. The initial corridor covering the methodologies of the Nazi state is intended
to produce a feeling of constriction; it culminates near an artifact called the Hollerith
machine, a punch-card device used to identify the racially undesirable from census data, a
very modem tool from which one could not exactly escape, since it was a computer.
Although the spaces open up again after this encounter, the inclined surfaces and off-angles
we used as we installed a profusion of documentary evidence throughout this floor continue
to immerse visitors in the un-right “un-world”of the Fascist dictatorship and its propaganda.
These design choices consciously countered the rectilinear propriety, the physical “right-
ness,” of the architectural space - for any good architecture is an essentially optimistic
construct, however dark its metaphors; we felt compelled by the story to employ a purity of
focus in constructing this historiography of evil.
A moment of contrast is found in an installation on the Evian conference of 1936 -
that ineffectual meeting of diplomats on the question of German refugees, which set the world’s
do-nothing precedent as much as any single response. Here, a 180-degreephotomural wraps
Danish fihing boat that fenied Jews and resistance
fighters to Sweden. (Photocourtesy USHMM.)

Ark fromthe synagogwe of Nentershausen, a d

town in Germany. The ark, a sacred place where the
Torah is safeguarded, was defaced by the Naris during
Krisdnacht (the Night of Broken Glass), November 9,
1938. (Photo by C. h4iceli.j
92 R A L P H A P P E L B A U M DESIGNING AN “ARCHITECTURE O F INFORMATION”

around the visitor and captures the indescribable serenity of the lake at this French resort,
the view the diplomats had from their secure conference table. Before the visitor lies the
hotel registration book with the attendees’ names, revoking the anonymity of these particular
bystanders.
In telling the story of Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), it is not only the terror of
this public assault on the German Jews that must come across, but its singularity. There was
but one such messy outpouring of popular hate; Nazi leaders had no taste for riots, as they
are inefficient, unseemly, and unmodern; they destroy things that might be converted into
money or materiel. Here one sees the Torahs that were slashed and thrown in the street,
but later, one will learn about other Torahs that became lining for Nazi boots. Here, too, is
a remarkable artifact - a defaced ark from a synagogue, the gouge marks in its Hebrew
inscription (“Know before whom you stand”) gaining vividness from the surrounding
information so that the gouges are the very embodiment of the perpetrator’s hate: they come
as close to being the preserved energy of the perpetrator as anything in the museum. Yet it
is the design context - the placement of the ark in a carefully structured “informational
architecture,” as I have come to think of it -that differentiates these gouges from a child’s
innocent scribble and frees the “voice” of the object to bear witness.
The punctuation mark between floors is the Tower of Faces - the skylit, three-story
display of hundreds of portraits of the people of Ejszyszki, a village in what is now Lithuania
whose 900 years of Jewish life were eliminated in two days’ work by a mobile killing squad.
Visitors traverse it twice at descending levels as they tour the exhibition. It is one of the
places where awareness of other visitors returns powerfully again, after various environ-
mental and informational experiences might have absorbed one in a more private mode.
Without intrusion but with necessary affirmation, eyes can meet here in a combined
acknowledgment of loss and survival that is difficult to describe, but somehow re-girds the
consciousness for the next level of the exhibition. After the first such crossing of this tower,
one descends to the “second act” of the exhibition, namely, the universe of the ghettos and
camps known as “the h a 1 solution.”
Whereas the top floor is, essentially, a very proper history museum in terms of its
materials, finishes, and sense of architectural completeness, the environment of the middle
floor begins to degrade. We found ourselves not adding materials to the base building to get
the interior we needed, but stripping them away, reversing the human impulse to finish over
a raw structure. Finished architecture wouldn’t have been the right metaphor for the world
of the ghettos and camps, which was a world of the makeshift, of the meanly utilitarian, of
the will not to waste a board or a bullet more than necessary to get the transporting and
killing done. Here the concrete floor is left raw, the ceiling tiles are missing, and the building’s
structural character is evident. As this floor houses some of the museum’s most important
large-scale artifacts and castings of European remnants - actually in rather delicate
juxtaposition, given the floor space they had to fit into - the bleakness of their historical
context just had to ring true, or their compression here would work against their individual
evocative powers. Strategies that proved particularly helpful included the sound and feel of
wooden footbridges, which we built to recall the bridges that ghetto residents had to use to
cross “non-Jewish”streets; the sense ofbeing herded that one gets from the corral-like spaces
approaching the railcar; and the darkness of the car and barracks interiors.
CURATOR 38/2 01995 93

Some visitors have commented on the sense of immersion in the story that is achieved
on this floor, and I feel it comes from working with the architect, James Ingo Freed, so that
the seams between exhibits and architecture are erased as much as possible. One of the most
significant things about the design - symbolically from our point of view, and subliminally
for visitors -is the way the architecture of this floor was modified not merely to accommo-
date the barracks and the railcar from Poland, but also to embed these elements within itself.
The train, and the longer historic rails on which it sits, had to be airlifted through the roof
by means of complicated architectural surgery. The museum’s structural columns were split
here so as not to interrupt the barracks interior, and the concrete floor was channeled to
receive its outline, so that its doors can never again be closed. Visitors needn’t notice these
details to benefit emotionally from their resonance.
We are often asked why the Holocaust’s stories of survival, rescue, and righteousness
are saved for the last of the three exhibit floors and not interspersed to mirror the reality of
their sporadic occurrence over the whole of the Nazi period. Imagine wandering through a
long, ugly room and coming upon a magnificent vase of roses at the end. Now imagine
wandering it again when the bouquet has been dismantled and one rose placed every now
and then in the decor. Somehow the experience is “neither nor.”
We chose to separate the opposed forces that comprise the museum’s total story.
Simply, we did not believe it effective, or accurate really, to create a historiography of evil
with goodness interlarded; it might have blurred the communication of the inhuman horror
of the Nazi state, which was real and, for most people who were affected, unmitigated by
rescue. The truth about rescuers is that, while there were many - too many to honor
properly, indeed a Schindler in some form on every block -there were far too few to prevent
doom from being the norm for captives of the Nazi net. The historical truth we labored
under and strove to represent was the net’s near-total success. Therefore, like the rescuers,
the personal stories of survivors are also kept for the end because we felt that detours into
their highly emotional worlds would be deflections from a broader and starker historical
reality that governed the fates of so many more.
Conversely, we wanted enormous clarity, like a sunbeam, on the stories of resisters and
rescuers, from lone individuals to whole communities (and in the case of Denmark,
practically a whole country). Visitors notice at once the bright white panels signaling stories
of moral courage. While honoring people of conscience in their own right, it was very
important to honor them collectively - for this is what calls up for the visitor the hideous
gray shadow of all who did not say no to the crime of genocide, who acquiesced and kept
silent, preferring the convenience of business as usual. The fingers of complicity in the
Holocaust are very long, much longer than the distance between the crematorium and the
nearest village. The specter of the silent ones casts a shadow reaching even to our own
country; but for all their number, they are mostly anonymous in a historical sense; their
terrible moral lesson is hard to evoke except through a brilliant counterpoint of light playing
upon their opposites, the righteous who dared to protest, resist, save others, or just hang
onto their faith in humanity enough to survive and rebuild.
Thus the last floor of the exhibition tackles a great deal, including the stories of
individuals, the fates of communities, the emigrations to Israel, and finally a more communal
visitor experience near the end. Upstairs, visitors had seen a casting of a path at Treblinka
the Nazis had made from crushed Jewish tombstones; here they see a much larger casting of
94 R A L P H A P P E L B A U M D E S I G N I N G A N “ A R C H I T E C T U R E OF I N F O R M A T I O N ”

a memorial wall in Poland made of crushed gravestones resurrected, now vertical, light
washed, and clean again. This wall - together with open white wirework forms displaying
photographs of survivors’ reunions after liberation - forms the backdrop for a media
amphitheater focusing on autobiographical tales of survival. The sequence of the stories
that are told follows the sequence of the exhibit topics from start to finish of the exhibition,
so the film becomes another means of reiterating themes and building resonance. The
survivors’ stories are deeply affecting; here the theater benches curve, like theater-in-the-
round, acknowledging our need to sense one another in the presence of these amazing
individuals.
Many visitors - even those of us who worked on the design - struggle for words to
describe the feelings one leaves the exhibition with. For all the tough information, for all
the severity of this look into a moral black hole, we tried above all to engage the visitor
positively; to place these events on a clearer plane of moral drama than that of Nazis and
their victims; and to see that people leave the museum not, in fact, profoundly depressed
about humankind but with some other feeling leading to a reaffirmation of humane values.
The design strategies I have described, and many others embedded throughout the exhibi-
tion, are intended most of all to spark conversations within families and among friends that
might not take place without this immersion. What we have tried to achieve is an
environment so seamless, so united with its subject, that memory of the museum experience
and the sharing of memory through discussion would carry on in the lives of its visitors.