Shoah Memorials: Designing by Traces

The need to interpret the problematic legacy of the Shoah through the creation of memorials has led to a need for architecture to redefine instruments and methods with which to represent this unrepresentable event. This disciplinary reflection has challenged the design tools codified by the Modern Movement: the Shoah not only contradicts modernity’s idea of progress but also represents an internal component of it linked to the role of twentieth-century technology.

The Shoah memorials have thus given shape to a new theme for architecture, which has necessitated a paradigm shift primarily in terms of the relationship between monument and burial. This direction of research developed according to different solutions, in Western and Eastern Europe, in terms of methodology, language, and ends. It is a genealogy of projects that can be groupable into a few categories of intervention, disputed between the rhetoric of representation and the search for “significant forms”: war monuments, memorial museums, and Shoah memorials.

The most advanced line of research open to future development is represented by site-specific architectures. They have made the transition from commemorative statics derived from the museographical tradition to a narrative based on the experience of places, without therefore reducing the Shoah to an event to be “communicated” rhetorically and “explained” through scenographic representations. It is research by design that focuses on the centrality of the architectural form in relation to the sites and preexistences that, together with the non-figural materials of the Testimonies, constitute the patterns of designing Shoah Memorial by traces.