Museum Transformations. Группа авторов

Safdie and the architecture of emotion

The creator of the Children’s Holocaust Memorial whom Badal met in Jerusalem was the famous Israeli-Canadian architect, Moshe Safdie. Hailed as a prodigy at the age of 26 for his revolutionary Montreal housing complex Habitat 67, in the years since, Safdie’s stature has only grown and he has designed dozens of museums, libraries, opera houses, national monuments, and seats of government across three continents. His major public commissions in Canada make him something of a national architect for his adoptive country, but he may equally be regarded as the national architect of Israel, the country of his birth. There, Safdie was entrusted with the design for the Ben Gurion International Airport and the Yitzhak Rabin Center in Tel Aviv, as well as an entire planned city called Modi’in. He was asked to draw up a controversial, and now discarded, “Safdie plan” for the future expansion of Jerusalem; when the former no man’s land between the Israeli and Jordanian sectors of the Holy City became available, it was Safdie who designed the luxury residential complex that was built upon it. However, Safdie’s definitive work in Israel, and perhaps in his career, was the clutch of projects he undertook for the Yad Vashem Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, Israel’s official Holocaust Memorial complex in Jerusalem.

      Yad Vashem, which was founded almost immediately after the founding of Israel, occupies an entire hillside in Jerusalem. The complex includes a synagogue, a hall of remembrance, archives, museums, and memorial groves. The multiplicity of buildings accommodate diverse memories, honoring the heroes of the Warsaw uprising as much as the victims of Bergen-Belsen; Jewish combatants as much as the “Righteous among Gentiles” who aided Jews during the years of the Reich. Today, however, the many memorials of Yad Vashem are dominated by a bravura museum building by Moshe Safdie that ranks among the most spectacular late-twentieth-century museum buildings alongside Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum Berlin.

      Safdie’s Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum, which opened in 2005, tunnels into the earth to excavate a series of galleries that are linked by a 650 foot long central corridor or “spine.” Only this spine thrusts out of the ground, appearing like a “knife edge across the landscape” (Safdie 2006, 94). Inside the building, this spine is experienced as a sky-lit passage of soaring height which visitors cross and recross in their progress through the dark and subterranean galleries of the museum. The last of these galleries is the dramatic Hall of Names – a circular gallery whose walls are lined with cabinets that hold Yad Vashem’s archive of information dedicated to the six million victims of the Holocaust. In this gallery the ceiling shoots up to the sky in a 30 foot high cone lined with photographs of the dead; below, a reciprocal cone, deep and inky-black, burrows into the bedrock, in honor of the victims whose names will never be known. Then visitors re-enter the central spine and take in its final flourish as it broadens into a terrace that is dramatically cantilevered over a magnificent view of the hills of Jerusalem. After the long, deep, and dark path through the galleries that recount the grim history of the Holocaust, the emergence into this preternatural degree of brightness and elevation is like an out-of-body experience. Spread at the visitors’ feet, the land of Israel is offered not as a place but as a vision, one that fulfills the epigraph from the Book of Ezekiel engraved onto the museum’s entryway: “I will put my breath into you and you shall live again, and I will set you upon your own soil” (Ezekiel 37:14).

      It is hard to miss the symbolism of the museum’s pathway that takes us through the horrors of the Holocaust, and delivers us unto Jerusalem. That a Holocaust museum should conclude by presenting Israel as a necessary refuge for the Jewish community is not unusual (indeed it is routine); what is extraordinary here is Safdie’s capacity to restate this trope so eloquently through purely architectural elements of space, height, darkness, light, and siting. The Holocaust History Museum underlines Safdie’s great ability to turn architecture into narrative.

This is a quality that is present in all of Safdie’s Yad Vashem work. Earlier, when the Polish government had given Israel one of the box cars that had transported prisoners to Auschwitz, Safdie embedded it in an installation – the Memorial to the Deportees (1995) – that suspended the box car on a broken track that hovered over the edge of a cliff. And even earlier, in 1985, Safdie had completed the Children’s Holocaust Memorial, his first Yad Vashem project and possibly the most intensely affecting of this triad of his emotive architectural forms.

      In 1976 the Yad Vashem authorities had first approached Safdie to design a museum that would narrate the fate of the children who had perished in the Holocaust. Safdie had a counterproposal: visitors who had already been through the main history museum, he felt, would not want to read more documentary facts. Instead, he proposed a space that would create an emotional experience. He would burrow into the ground to make a darkened chamber which would be lined with dark mirrors. Five memorial candles would burn in honor of the dead children, but reflections in the mirrors would make an infinity of flames. In the darkness, photographs of a few of the child victims would stand for the 1.5 million murdered; and a recorded voice would name each child, as well as the place and the age at which he or she had died. Today, this kind of assemblage is immediately identifiable as an installation, with strong resemblances to Christian Boltanski’s work, but when it was proposed it was too far ahead of its time. The authorities feared the dark mirrors and pinpricks of light would look like a discotheque, and the project was shelved for 10 years until a donor couple who had lost a child at Auschwitz underwrote its construction.

      Once it was built, the Children’s Holocaust Memorial became one of the most highly visited displays in Yad Vashem. Its appeal to visitors’ emotions has been appreciated by many, but it has also been criticized by some. The Hebrew University professor of philosophy Avishai Margalit’s criticism is trenchant. His essay “The Kitsch of Israel” is a broad-ranging discussion of emotional manipulation in popular cultural representations of Israeli statehood. For Margalit, this phenomenon reaches its apogee in the Children’s Holocaust Memorial. Describing the darkened chamber and the flickering flames, he says:

      The real significance of this room is not its commemoration of the single most horrible event in the history of mankind – the systematic murder of two million children, Jewish and Gypsies, for being what they were and not for anything they had done. The children’s room, rather, is meant to deliver a message to the visiting foreign statesman, who is rushed to Yad Vashem even before he has had time to leave off his luggage at his hotel, that all of us here in Israel are these children and that Hitler–Arafat is after us … Against the weapon of the Holocaust, the Palestinians are amateurs. (Margalit 1988, 23)

For Margalit the Children’s Holocaust Memorial is kitsch because it encourages “a vicarious sentiment: it comes not out of the person’s direct involvement with the object of feeling but rather out of a derivative excitement” (1988, 20), born of the desire to be included in someone else’s emotion. But what Margalit criticizes others may admire. Surely it was precisely this quality of Safdie’s architecture – its ability to deliver a heightened experience of an aestheticized emotion, by sweeping the viewer into a sentimental identification with the represented subject – that made Badal weep, and then ask for one “just like this” for his own community.

      But what made Badal want a monument “just like this” for the Sikhs? What made him want to mark the tercentenary of the Khalsa in an elegiac rather than celebratory tone? And what was this suffering of the Sikhs that Badal was equating with the suffering of the Jews? To understand this, we need to turn now to a brief overview of the turbulent history of the Sikhs.

      “The Sikhs too have suffered”

      As a faith, Sikhism derives from a lineage of 10 gurus who lived and preached in south Asia between 1469 and 1708. Its founder, Guru Nanak, was a visionary who stressed the common humanity of man and built bridges between the Hindu populace and their Muslim rulers. The four gurus who succeeded him led relatively peaceable lives and preached a syncretic faith to a diverse congregation. But the fifth guru, Guru Arjan, offered shelter to the reigning Mughal emperor’s rebel son and was executed as a result. This event set the Sikhs on a course of conflict with imperial authorities. Guru Arjan’s son took up arms against the Mughals and was imprisoned by them; the ninth