Swiss architect Peter Zumthor won the 1993 competition for “Topography of Terror.” His proposal was a slender “bar” that hovers directly over the basement archeological site. The building is constructed parallel to the dig site as opposed to the street, creating an angled effect.
The museum that currently sits on the site is the product of a second architectural competition hosted in 2005. Though construction began on Zumthor’s proposal in 1997 and the concrete foundation and vertical egress were built soon after, a series of construction and funding difficulties led to the project’s stagnation and eventual demolition in 2004.
Peter Zumthor’s project description suggests a desire to create a careful relationship between the visitor and the site that is otherwise left alone:
On an urban site not rebuilt, on this significant gap, a building will be put up that leaves the ground as it was found and can itself be understood as part of this history. The wild weeds, the mound of earth, the excavated parts of buildings, the excavated and refilled remains of buildings, the natural earth, the mound of earth and debris—all these are elements of the history of the site […] Posts—needles actually—stick into the gournd [sic]. The site flows through them […] The earth will not be sealed up by new coverings to create a new abstract museum level but remains “porous.” Visitors walk on gravel or natural earth just as they now do. A site of remembrance. Nothing is symbolized23.
The walls of the “museum” are comprised of a dense screen of posts through which light flows. Visitors move in and out of this filigree screen. Here, the porousness of the building allows visitors to step on the ground of the site itself, to experience the archaeological excavations (literally) of history. Zumthor centers the visitor’s experience in light of both the victims and the perpetrators: “What happened here [at the SS site], what has come down to us, should be experienced. It should be pointed to clearly, objectively, but not blotted out by commentary, architecture, or didactic mis-en-scène. The feeling for the reality of this site of perpetrators and victims must remain.”24 It is interesting that he notes the primacy of the experience over any commentary, that is, social construction, about the site itself. That experience is intended to be corporeal, in the form of physical sensations and impressions.
Attending to this architectural intent sheds light on how the form of the site shapes experience of it. Zumthor writes:
At the ‘ground floor’ level, the experience of place, perceived through the senses, the immediacy, personal experience are central. A spartan and reticent aesthetic creating factual interrelationships and strengthening the experience of the site.” The necessities of museum function—exhibits, archival spaces, cafes, places where verbal commentary about the site, SS, and the Holocaust is made—live on the second and third floor, as spaces of “reflection, science, [and] abstraction.”
The transparency of the building, “a transparent structure built of light and shadow,” allows visitors to peer in and out of the building, experiencing the site from every angle. The net of slender posts, like Libeskind’s zigzag and angular “cut” at the Jewish Museum Berlin, seeks to create different immersive experiences and thus, different orientations towards history. They offer different answers to the ethical question of how one should experience and engage with the historical weight of the murder of millions of Jews. But such answers are not definitive: at the architectural scale, viewers can read these spaces, walk through them in unexpected ways, producing their own answers to the question. Architecture focuses the viewer’s experience: from alternatives to the “tyranny” of the grid at the Jewish Museum to the immediacy of the archeological site at the Topography of Terror.
The current design for the Topography of Terror takes a more conventional approach. Unlike Zumthor’s demolished proposal, it is a square structure that sits in the center of the site parallel to the street. A slight plinth separates the building from the original site, but it is a comfortable, expansive space. It is also transparent, but there exists a clear delineation between the building’s interior and the archaeological site. During my time there, I spent more time looking inwards at than exhibits than outwards through the transparent walls to the area outside. In my opinion, this experience could be replicated in any exhibition spaces and classrooms. It did not engage with the site in a unique way, such as that envisioned by Zumthor. While there, I was situated in an “open wound25,” albeit bandaged over, sanitized for a particular consumption of Holocaust history. In the current building, I felt the need for the guides’ help to make sense of the site’s significance. Had the city completed Zumthor’s initial competition-winning entry, I wonder what my reflection on the site, on the role of the perpetrators, might have been. To better understand such an idea, I would like to return to the site with which I began this essay, Track 17.
Gleis 17 / Track 17
Track 17 is a simple intervention. It is a memorial to the deportation of Berlin Jews located at Grunewald train station, a still-in-service station that served as the departure point for many deportations. For the architects “the intervention at Track 17 is an attempt to associate the concrete location [with its historical significance] with the data and train schedules from 1941–1945—that is, to connect the mundane location of ‘Grunewald Station’ with the system of ‘deportation.’”26
Designed in 1996, the memorial consists of two platforms on each side of a train track. The platforms—each 132 meters long—are made up of large, perforated cast iron plates that are 1.42 wide by 3.12 meters long. A date,
a destination, and number are cast on the edge of each plate, marking the boundary of each platform where it falls to the level of the tracks27. There are 186 plates for each transport that took place. The architects describe the site in this way:
The Berlin-Grunewald train station is the scene of a crime, and yet it is still a completely ordinary place. Hardly anything there refers to the fact that the deportation of Berlin Jews began here in October 1941. Today, as then, Track 17 is embedded in a context of ordinary
22 Peter Zumthor, “Topography of Terror, International Exhibition and Documentation Center,” a+u: Architecture and Urbanism, nr 384 (2002): 86-93.
22 Ibid.
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