Toronto Globe and Mail, Wednesday, February 7, 2001

How does an architect go about depicting one of the most inexplicable episodes in history? Peter Eisenman tells Simon Haupt that his plan is to commemorate the Holocaust by 'unrationalizing' it

By Simon Houpt NEW YORK -- Even before he sits down, Peter Eisenman wraps a caveat around the interview. All comments he makes -- though they are undoubtedly his, caught on tape during a friendly Friday afternoon chat at his Flatiron district office -- must be reviewed and approved by him prior to their publication.

A world-renowned architect and originator of architecture theory who is not normally known for his caution, Eisenman insists on this unusual condition because of the controversial nature of his subject: the long-delayed Holocaust memorial planned for the middle of Berlin. Not that he is wholly chary of discussing the project: This evening, he will talk about his experiences during a lecture at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. But after years of delays and near cancellations that he hopes will finally end with the breaking of ground in September, you can understand Eisenman wanting to minimize further risks.

After all, it is remarkable that the project has gotten this far. Conceived in the early 1990s, the memorial would seem to be like Howard Hughes's Spruce Goose aircraft, a bold intention overwhelmed by the weight of its very structure. How could a newly reunited German nation, troubled enough with healing the 45-year-old wounds of its own division, simultaneously memorialize the greatest sin in its history?

After a long series of false starts by project organizers, Eisenman somehow found the key. His design consists of 2,700 grey concrete stelae, or standing stones, spread over a 40 acre site near the Brandenburg Gate. Averaging 5.5 metres in height, the stelae bear no inscription, no words of explanation.

"It is a field of pillars that attempts to decontextualize the Holocaust, in the sense of trying to see it as a cut in the history of Germany," explains Eisenman, bespectacled and quietly authoritative. "Not to try and locate it, not to try and make it a thing of nostalgia, not to try and make it be able to be rationalized, but to be able to be unrationalized. . . . "I'm hoping that this monument will establish a different view of memory, a different view of monument, because it doesn't speak," he continues. "The city speaks: You look at that building, it speaks. Most graves have names on them, most memorials have names. This is an absolutely blank field."

Furthermore, it is a field that people must experience on their own, as there will be less than one metre of space between each of the stones. "The whole idea is, What does it feel like to be alone in space? What it is to be without any goal . . . no beginning, no end, no direction?"

Most Holocaust memorials -- Jerusalem's Yad Vashem and Washington's Holocaust Museum among them -- provide scores of facts, figures, photographs, artworks and personal stories. They are testaments to the individuals who perished. Visiting the sites are emotionally draining, frequently cathartic experiences. Eisenman went in the other direction. He wanted to "do something that was not either kitsch or nostalgia or representational. I hated Schindler's List," he says. "I hated any of these things that attempt to sort of make a theme park out of the Holocaust. . . .

"Had it been the weeping Burghers of Calais under a tree someplace, nobody would have said a thing," he suggests. "The fact of its scale, its dimension- in a sense its anonymity, its autonomy, its coolness, its silence, is what has caused the controversy."

There might also be something a little controversial about Eisenman himself. Born in 1932 to non-practising Jewish parents in an anti-Semitic, middle-class New Jersey town, he says he has always been faintly hostile toward rabbinical Judaism. His parents' home had a Christmas tree, as does his own during the holiday season. When he reached his teens, he didn't have a bar mitzvah; he was confirmed. Neither his present nor his ex-wife is Jewish. "I've never felt that I was a Jewish architect," he says. Yet, like many secular Jews, he admits to feeling different when he goes to Germany. "I go to Germany as an American and I come back as a Jew."

He has struggled with his identity as a Jew for 20 years in psychoanalysis: what it means to be an outsider and, paradoxically, a chosen person. Designing the monument is obviously helping him in that struggle. "There's no question that when it is built, this will be probably one of the most important works that I've ever done, and it's almost accidental, because I never wanted to be marked by this kind of work. I just happened upon it."