Opened in 2017, the National Holocaust Memorial in Ottawa is designed by Daniel Libeskind and includes photo-real images by Edward Burtynsky. Photo by Doublespace Photography.
?In a city of monuments that rise,? wrote Yale University student Maya Lin in 1981 of her Vietnam Memorial design, ?this will be a memorial that recedes.? Since her minimal composition was realized, architects have struggled to advance memorial design through similar abstraction. During this same recent period, following the example set by Guggenheim Bilbao, every aspiring world city seeks to lay claim to a work by a globally famous architect. The two trends occasionally coincide in a single work, as they do in Daniel Libeskind?s National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa. Libeskind?s project, located on unceded ground at the intersection of Wellington and Booth streets, is indeed monumental. Its concrete walls rise in powerful canted planes, enclosing a set of unroofed spaces with acute angles that, seen from above, resemble a Jewish star. In many ways, the monument reprises the design vocabulary of Libeskind?s Jewish Museum in Berlin, a significant work in which the geometries are linked to street addresses of key Jewish and non-Jewish Berliners. In the Ottawa monument, assigned messages have overwritten the actual site?s invisible and meaningful pasts?its almost ageless Indigenous history, and the more recently razed neighborhood known as LeBreton Flats.
Those who write about this monument tend to enum...