Architecture Commons^™

"Introduction" To Presenting Difficult Pasts Through Architecture: Converting National Socialist Sites To Documentation Centers, Rumiko Handa

Architecture Program: Faculty Scholarly and Creative Activity

This study deals with the question of how architectural design, when applied to his­torical places, can assist in bringing an extremely difficult – notable and troubling – past to the present in meaningful ways. In particular, it examines postwar architectural designs that converted National Socialist perpetrators’ places into documentation centers on National Socialism whose explicit purpose is, above all, to present and discuss the community’s involvement in the National Socialist ideology and actions.

Although the cases I have selected for close study vary stylistically and in many other ways, these centers have a number of common attributes that make the …