memorial minimalism

Case Study: Peter Eisenman's Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (2005)

I said all along that I wanted people to have a feeling of being in the present and an experience that they had never had before. And one that was different and slightly unsettling. The world is too full of information and here is a place without information. That is what I wanted...

...I was against the graffiti coating from the start. If a swastika is painted on it, it is a reflection of how people feel. And if it remains there, it is a reflection of how the German government feels about people painting swastikas on the monument.
- Peter Eisenman (interview transcript here)

Many great images of the project here.

Eisenman takes the position that minimalism is necessarily in contemporary memorial-making. For him, the introduction of content by the designer always leads to sensationalization.

The Holocaust memorial is a case study and a foil for the re-conceptualization of the landmark (of which memorial is exemplar). The effort is to understand the relationship of the landmark to content/narrative and to speculate on the potential of the landmark to be responsive, context specific, and ultimately, deployable or perhaps, ubiquitous.