Recognizing the Passage of Time to Auschwitz-Birkenau: An Admonishing Memorial

Abstract

The grounds and buildings of highly loaded historic sites are continually changing due to environmental and human interaction, ecological erosion, disposition, erasure and the various levels of human intervention. These factors dissolve both physical structures and the meaning embedded in them, to varying degrees. In loaded historic sites, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, revitalizing the ruins to their original state trivializes the Holocaust. On the other hand, creating an architecture that does not directly engage with existing conditions shows the inability to translate history into an architectural narrative and achieve an awareness of the events that took place there. The challenge then, is to ? nd a place for architecture to operate within, and to activate the ruins of these fragile sites.