The Spoiler's Art: Embarrassed Space as Memorialization

Abstract

This essay looks at three architectural responses to the task of memorializing the mass murder of European Jewry. Both Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum and Peter Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe are tautly theorized and well-defended instances of contemporary architecture that are nevertheless subject to-and to a degree invite-embarrassment in the context of Berlin as a historically burdened location. In contrast, Ern标oldfinger's house at 2 Willow Road, Hampstead Heath, London, formulates a different response to the problem of properly acknowledging the historical past, in the form of a permanent threat to the interior's governing aesthetic.