Daniel Libeskind's firm Studio Libeskind has completed Canada's first monument in Ottawa, comprised of six triangular concrete volumes configured to create the points of a star. Officially opened on September 27, the National Holocaust Monument - established through the National Holocaust Monument Act by the Government of Canada - displays itself as a permanent, national symbol that honours and commemorates the victims of the Holocaust and recognize Canadian survivors.

Sitting on a 0.79 acre (3,197-square-metre) site, the Monument is located at the intersection of Wellington and Booth Streets within the historic LeBreton Flats in Ottawa, symbolically placed across from the Canadian War Museum.

"The Monument will honor the millions of innocent men, women and children who were murdered under the Nazi regime and recognize those survivors who were able to eventually make Canada their home," said Studio Libeskind.

"The Monument is an experience that combines architecture, art, landscape and scholarship in ways that create an-ever changing engagement with one of the darkest chapters of human history while conveying a powerful message of humanity’s enduring strength and survival," added the studio.

The Monument is made of the cast-in-place, exposed concrete, which shows itself as an experiential environment to create the points of a star. The star remains the visual symbol of the Holocaust – a symbol that millions of Jews were forced to wear by the Nazi’s to identify them as Jews, exclude them from humanity and mark them for extermination. 

The triangular spaces are representative of the badges the Nazi’s and their collaborators used to label homosexuals, Roma-Sinti, Jehovah’s Witnesses and political and religious prisoners for murder.

The project involves other collaboratives from the field of architecture, art, photographer and landscape including consultation firm Lord Cultural Resources, landscape architect Claude Cormier, photographer Edward Burtynsky and Holocaust scholar Doris Bergen.

Edward Burtynsky’s large scale monochromatic photographic landscapes of Holocaust sites – death camps, killing fields and forests – are painted with exacting detail on the concrete walls of each of the triangular spaces. 

"These evocative murals aim to transport the visitor and create another dimensionality to the interiors spaces of canted walls and labyrinth-like corridors," added Studio Libeskind.

Rough landscape includes various coniferous trees, emerging from the rocky pebbled ground. This landscape is conceived to evolve over time representative of how Canadian survivors and their children have contributed to Canada.

Studio Libeskind won a competition to design Canada's first Holocaust Monument in 2014. Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind is well known with his projects including the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. 

Libeskind is currently working on a new Kurdistan Museum in Erbil, Iraq and Names Monument in Amsterdam’s Jewish Cultural District. 

All images © Doublespace

> via Studio Libeskind