The gentleness of Kerstin Thompson Architects’ Melbourne Holocaust Museum helps visitors confront the horrors of history
Not long ago, in February, a group of masked neo‑Nazi men occupied the steps of Parliament House in Melbourne. Standing in a line, they made the ‘Sieg Heil’ salute, threatening protesters advocating for transgender rights. This shocking spectacle is a reminder that extremist groups promoting racist ideology and hate are unashamed to be in public in Australia today. Jayne Josem, CEO of the Melbourne Holocaust Museum, sees these events as a direct challenge to her organisation’s mission and purpose, encouraging visitors ‘to reflect on behaviours they might have and to ask what their responsibility is in the world today’.
The new Melbourne Holocaust Museum incorporates its predecessor into its fabric
Credit: Philip Game / Alamy
Melbourne has one of the highest numbers of Jewish Holocaust survivors outside of Israel, with more than eight thousand people seeking refuge here in the wake of the Second World War. As one survivor recounted, Australia was ‘as far away from Europe and the memories of the death camps as possible’. A group of these survivors came together in 1984 to found the Jewish Holocaust Centre as a place to educate, tell their stories and commemorate the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. They purchased a 1920s building that housed a dance school in the Melbourne suburb of Elsternwick, a centre of the Jewish émigré community. They recorded testimony, collected material, conducted research, and ‘tacked on an exhibition’, without knowing whether people would come. They now have more than 1,400 survivor testimonies, 12,000 historical artefacts, and have educated more than 700,000 school students in four decades. I came here on a school trip in the 1990s; I had not given much thought to the Holocaust at that age, but to meet with survivors and to hear their stories directly was confronting and affecting. I distinctly remember the main focus of the exhibition, a scale model of the camps, all mud and barbed wire. It is not easily forgotten.
The new Melbourne Holocaust Museum incorporates its predecessor into its fabric. The ground floor includes a courtyard with commemoratory sculptures
Credit: Leo Showell
The new building is conceived to help the organisation reach a new audience and take their message of combatting antisemitism, racism and prejudice to a wider public. ‘We’re now opening up as a serious public museum,’ says Josem. Kerstin Thompson Architects’ (KTA) response was to create a dignifying and generous space in which to learn and contemplate these stories – to invite people inside. The atmosphere is calming, defined by natural materials and light: a space to be confronted by awful truths, while also allowing space for your own emotional response.
The Holocaust museum is a particular challenge for architects. How can one represent the unrepresentable? Everything you draw must seem trivial next to the thing you are commissioned to memorialise, and yet you have to draw something. James Freed, a refugee from the Holocaust who fled from Germany to the US as a child, visited the death camps in researching his design for the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, which opened in 1993. ‘You may be left with notions of silence and void, but you can’t just build an empty box,’ he said. His design deliberately echoes the materiality of the camps: straps of steel are wrapped over brick walls with explicit reference to the steel belts used to prevent the ovens from exploding at Auschwitz – they were under so much pressure from continuous use. A powerful idea, potentially, and yet it inevitably appears aestheticised and removed. Can material ever bridge this gap in understanding?
The ground floor also includes a library
Credit: Leo Showell
Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin (2001) similarly seeks to use architecture to evoke the experience of the Holocaust, albeit in a less literal way to Freed. The building is hard‑edged, jarring and overwhelming, deliberately destabilising the visitor with dead‑ends, cuts and voids. ‘It’s important not to repress the trauma,’ said Libeskind, ‘to express it and sometimes the building is not something comforting.’
While KTA acknowledge both of these precedents as important to their thinking, their approach is deliberately different. ‘A lot of museums dedicated to the Holocaust from the past two decades attempt “to represent the unrepresentable”. But that’s not something architecture can do,’ Kerstin Thompson argues. ‘Our point was to make a building that feels humane and gentle, with moments of beauty, to help people confront the difficult content.’ The architecture does not tell you how to feel.
A spine of stairways twists through the building’s heart
Credit: Derek Swalwell
On approach, the building is muted and restrained. It presents a flat wall to the street, composed of cream‑coloured and glass bricks in various hit‑and‑miss patterns, evoking textile weaving. The facade satisfies the requirement to be blast‑proof, while also letting points of sunlight through. This new brick facade is flush with the existing 1920s building, which is subsumed into the composition, its pitch roof and tower forming a sharp outline against the taut brick screen. This flatness breaks with usual heritage practice to provide a setback, to clearly distinguish between old and new. But this programme does not call for deference to the past; the building clearly asserts its place on the street and its right to speak.
‘A space in which to be confronted by awful truths, while also allowing space for your own emotional response’
The entry is narrow and compressed, funnelling visitors past a security point, an experience relieved by a view to an outdoor courtyard at the other end of the building. Notably, there is no café and no shop – functions expected of all museums today. This is not a place to meet your friends for a casual visit; it requires intention to enter, to come with purpose. At the centre of the building is the circulation spine, repeated on each floor, providing clear orientation. The exhibition galleries, education spaces, auditoria, library, research spaces and offices all lead off this central spine. With daylight and views out at both ends on all floors, it is a space to reconnect with your surroundings and re‑orient yourself. ‘Survivors often speak of the sight of the sky as a source of hope,’ Thompson explains. This device is key to the success of the building, making sense of a deep and complex plan, and providing reprieve from the confronting stories told in the museum displays and survivors’ testimonies.
Serene gallery spaces sit on the upper floors, their calmness in contrast with some of the most famous Holocaust museums, such as Libeskind’s in Berlin
Credit: Derek Swalwell
The building is large, stepping and shifting to press at the edges of the buildable envelope – not a millimetre is spared. And yet it feels generous, with wide hallways and outdoor terraces on multiple levels. As I am visiting, two school buses of students are emptied into the building. I’m bracing for havoc, but serenity prevails. Walls are clad in Australian timber, doors are solid wood, handrails and other touch‑points are all timber – there are no sharp edges. Birch trees are planted in a garden on the first floor, signifying cyclical renewal, as well as referencing the birch forest from which the Birkenau concentration camp takes its name.
Installations, such as this model of Treblinka created by Holocaust survivor Chaim Sztajer, attempt to evoke something of the horror of the genocide
Credit: Leo Showell
The risk is that the building feels too ‘nice’ for a museum about the Holocaust, that it ends up anaesthetising any strong feelings. It is a fine line to tread. ‘This is one of those projects I wrestled with a lot,’ admits Thompson. ‘Not to fuck it up. Not to insult. Not to diminish. There’s so much pressure on it as a significant cultural programme. I worried that there is something perverse about a Holocaust museum that feels warm.’
KTA point to the aborted scheme by Peter Zumthor for the Topography of Terror museum in Berlin from 1993, a museum which finally opened in 2010 and houses original Nazi documents and objects. While the reasons for the original project’s termination were many, one objection was that the design was too rarefied. A minimalist object, framed by fins, omitting filtered light – it could have inadvertently glorified the Nazi past, creating a pilgrimage site instead of a memorial.
The Melbourne Holocaust Museum opens at a time when fascism is bubbling to the surface: in February, neo-Nazis clashed with trans rights activists in the city. The building’s use of glass bricks references Germany’s Kristallnacht (‘night of broken glass’) pogrom of 1938, while also making its presence visible on Selwyn Street and in the Elsternwick neighbourhood
Credit: Derek Swalwell
While the Melbourne Holocaust Museum does not contain Nazi ephemera, Thompson was conscious of crossing this line. Throughout the process she spoke with the artist Kathy Temin, whose family are survivors. An aesthetic sense‑check gave Thompson the confidence to pursue this calm approach, concluding that ‘the humanity is really important’. Rather than being drawn to an architectural spectacle, as in Libeskind’s Berlin museum, visitors will hopefully come for the right reasons: to learn and to understand.
Mirrors lining door reveals reflect light through the gallery, proving disorienting from some angles
Credit: Kerstin Thompson Architects
Various mirrors throughout the interior unsettle this comforting atmosphere. Positioned at odd angles, embedded in doorways, and directed to the sky, they reflect the outside in improbable ways, and give brief glimpses of people passing. Josem relates the mirrors to a shift in the museum’s voice. ‘When the survivors first opened it, it was: “this is what happened to us”. Now it’s about you, the visitor, thinking about yourself in today’s world.’ Seeing yourself literally reflected is a subtle reminder of your civic responsibilities; that you are part of this story too.
Solid bricks alternate with clear ones, allowing natural light to permeate the interior
Credit: Kerstin Thompson Architects
A building, or an institution, can never be enough to fight fascism. It requires all of us to stand up, to shape public debate, and to speak up for those who are being targeted. As the ugly face of intolerance and racism seeks to claim legitimacy in Melbourne, it remains as urgent as ever to hear testimony from Holocaust survivors, to witness evidence of what happened, and to educate the next generation. This exceptional new building rises to the challenge. In asserting its place on the street, and opening its doors to a wider audience, it can present its message to more people. In making a space that is calm and dignified, KTA recognise the limits of architecture to evoke trauma, and instead assert that the Holocaust should remain outside of representation.
