Details:
The Holocaust Memorial, or the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, is located on the Cora-Berliner Straße in Berlin.
Information:
The memorial was designed by the American architect Peter Eisenman and the British engineering firm BuroHappold. The memorial was first proposed in 1988 but only approved in 1999 and built in 2003-4. It consists of two thousand, seven hundred and eleven concrete stelae of equal dimension (238 x 95 cm) which rise from the ground to different heights (as high as 470 cm). This memorial honours the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust during World War Two. The memorial forms a symbolic cemetery without epitaphs. The layout of the memorial was meant to disorientate the viewer as they passed through the grid of undulating concrete blocks and uneven ground. This is an excellent example of the modern memorial type, which went beyond the statuesque and monumental and moved into the realm of architecture and interactive open-planned space.
Did you known?
Located underneath the memorial is an information centre which provides background information on the persecution of the Jewish people during World War Two. The centre was recently closed but is due to reopen on January 18th 2017.