About the architect of the Holocaust Museum


Architect James Ingo Freed, of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, created an architectural relationship between the Museum building and the exhibitions within. To inform his design, he visited a number of Holocaust sites, including camps and ghettos, to examine structures and materials. The result is not a neutral shell. Instead, the architecture, by a collection of abstract forms — invented and drawn from memory — refers to the history the Museum addresses.Architectural allusions to the Holocaust are not specific. Visitors make their own interpretations. The subtle metaphors and symbolic reminiscences of history are vehicles for thought and introspection. In Freed's words, “There are no literal references to particular places or occurrences from the historic event. Instead, the architectural form is open-ended so the Museum becomes a resonator of memory.”
The curved portal at the 14th Street entrance to the Museum. Jeff Goldberg/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Freed wants the visitor to experience the Museum building "viscerally." Just as the Holocaust defies understanding, the building is not meant to be intellectually understood. Its architecture of sensibility is intended to engage the visitor and stir the emotions, allow for horror and sadness, ultimately to disturb. As Freed says, “It must take you in its grip.”

What Makes This Building Talk?In the words of architect James Ingo Freed, the Museum's architecture is intended to be a "resonator of memory." Join Museum educators as they demonstrate how aspects of the building's structure reflect the history housed within its walls.Please check at the Information Desk for dates and times.
Congress authorized the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1980 to be a permanent living memorial to all victims who perished in the Holocaust. The building has been designed as a living institution dedicated to research and teaching as well as to contemplation and commemoration.The Museum building houses permanent and temporary exhibition spaces, a research library and archives, two theaters, an interactive computer learning center, classrooms, a memorial space, and areas for impromptu discussion.
Architect James Ingo Freed, of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, created an architectural relationship between the Museum building and the exhibitions within. To inform his design, he visited a number of Holocaust sites, including camps and ghettos, to examine structures and materials. The result is not a neutral shell. Instead, the architecture, by a collection of abstract forms — invented and drawn from memory — refers to the history the Museum addresses.Architectural allusions to the Holocaust are not specific. Visitors make their own interpretations. The subtle metaphors and symbolic reminiscences of history are vehicles for thought and introspection. In Freed's words, “There are no literal references to particular places or occurrences from the historic event. Instead, the architectural form is open-ended so the Museum becomes a resonator of memory.”

At first glance, the building's exterior seems benign. On three sides — east, south, and west — the building is enveloped in limestone, the most common building material in official Washington. A large portal fronts the 14th Street entrance to the east, bowing gracefully outward to assume a formal presence in the urban landscape beyond. On the building's north side, pyramid-shaped roofs top four red-brick towers.To the west, along Raoul Wallenberg Place — named after the Swedish diplomat who rescued thousands of Hungarian Jews — the semidetached, six-sided Hall of Remembrance stands as a stately companion to the nearby Washington Monument and Jefferson Memorial. The Museum's limestone and brick exterior engages the neoclassical Bureau of Engraving and Printing to the south, and the Victorian red-brick Auditor's Building to the north.

The Museum's east side (14th Street) entrance. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
But all is not quite as it seems. Everywhere the building contains elements of concealment, deception, disengagement, and duality.The curved portico of the 14th Street entrance — with its squared arches, window grating, and cubed lights — is a mere facade, a fake screen that actually opens to the sky, deliberately hiding the disturbing architecture of skewed lines and hard surfaces of the real entrance that lies behind it. In Freed's words, "Visitors must pass through the limestone partition to enter a concrete world." This motif of contrasting appearance and reality is repeated throughout.