Holocaust Museum

My Visit to the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum
By: Lucas Shubert

Over Thanksgiving break, I took a road trip to the District of Columbia to visit family and see some of the points of interest there. One of the many places I experienced was the Holocaust Museum. And that’s what this article is about.

I need to begin with a bit of site analysis, or rather the area around its site. The parking and environmental conditions of the area surrounding the site are, of course, not caused by the Holocaust Museum. But they did affect the overall experience of my visit. Firstly, being in the vicinity of the National Mall, many modes of transit were available. There was a bus and train access as well as nearby parking. There was also a bicycle rental station a block away. The condition of the green space near the building was good but lacked direct walking routes.

The programmatic plan of the museum was a first floor lobby and assembly/memorial area with three floors of exhibit above. The basement was designated for children’s activities. There was a gift shop on the first floor as well. The upper three exhibit floors created a sort of stepped spiral, conceptually mimicking the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The overall essence of the experience can best be described in a word: awful. The architect, James Freed, succeeded at creating a series of built environments that suggest darkness and despair.

The first step of the Holocaust Museum experience worth note was waiting in line for and stepping through the metal detector. That was a process I am not used to when it comes to entering public buildings. The lobby was meant to give the feeling of 1940’s train station in Germany about to ship a load of people to a concentration camp. The entrance to the exhibit portion of the museum was unorthodox in that people queued for one of three elevators that carried a carefully controlled number of participants up to the top of the exhibit spiral on floor three.

The exhibit area was itself darkly colored, dimly lit and at times overly narrowed to create crowding and discomfort. Usually the more dismal the visual content became, the less comfortable the surrounding museum interior became. A seemingly unlimited amount of time could be spent studying the presented material within the museum. I spent about two hours moving my way down the three floors back to the lobby. The last stop moving through the building was the Hall of Remembering, which was a large, open assembly space that looked like it could double as a synagogue, where one could light a candle if he or she chose.