United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Analysis

Light also creates the emotions in James Ingo Freed’s United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. It may not play as important of a role as in the Jewish Museum but still has some purpose of light and dark qualities to it. “The visitor’s passage through the building is a spatial and emotional journey through open light spaces into damp cramped dark spaces, over ramps and bridges, and through doorways that evoke the ‘selection’ of victims in the camp.” Freed’s idea is to create an emotional rollercoaster throughout the building similar to what a Jew would have gone through from before the war where they were normal, to the change of classification to vermin, and finally to freedom to reflect on the loss and how to cope with …show more content…
Libeskind states, “I call it [‘Between the Lines’] because it is a project about two lines of thinking, organization, and relationship.” He continues to say, “One is a straight line, but broken into many fragments; the other is a tortuous line, but continuing indefinitely. These two lines develop architecturally and programmatically through a limited but definite dialogue. They also fall apart, because disengaged, and are seen as separated. In this way, they expose a void that runs through this museum and through architecture, a discontinuous void.” These voids are throughout the building only to be seen from small windows or as a whole up in the air. These voids create emotions of something missing in one’s life. Libeskind describes it, “as an emblem where the not visible have made itself apparent as a void, an invisible…. The idea is very simple: to build the museum around a void that runs through it, a void that is to be experienced by the public.” The memories that are brought back from these interruptions may not be from the Holocaust but of someone close to the visitor that is reaching out and bringing back what they felt the day they lost the person or people. One of the voids is open to walk on the faces of all the Jews that did not survive the Concentration Camps. The opening in this one void creates meaning to all the other voids connecting it to death like they had already, however now it is directed to a specific kind of death the death of innocent people murdered for believing in something that others thought was