steven holl’s contemplative ‘tower of light’ wins terezín ghetto museum competition

a new memorial of hope and light for Terezín

Steven Holl Architects, in partnership with Marcela Steinbachová and SKUPINA Studio, has won an international competition to renovate and extend Terezín Ghetto Museum in the Czech Republic. The team’s first prize scheme, which beat 22 other projects, proposes a new memorial of hope and light named the ‘Tower of Light’.

Terezín is a small town in the northwest of the Czech Republic that was first founded in 1780 as a military fortress. During World War II, it served as a Jewish Ghetto, where an estimated 33,000 people died. Terezín Ghetto Museum opened in 1991 to honor these individuals whose lives were brutally taken from them.

rendering by Obrazek.org (Michal Nohejl)

The Tower of Light recalls a drawing named ‘Moon Landscape’ that was made by Petr Ginz, one of the victims of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Born in Prague on February 1, 1928, Ginz was deported to the Terezín concentration camp where he made this imaginative drawing of a view of the earth from the moon. In 1944, Ginz was deported to Auschwitz and gassed to death at the age of 16.

Designed as a hopeful new presence in the center of Terezín, the Tower of Light features a translucent street elevation and a sculptural roof that reaches for the sky. Steven Holl brings his signature use of light to the project with a rooftop skylight made partly from prismatic glass to refract daylight into a rainbow of colors. At night, the Tower will become a beacon for the town, glowing through the darkness.

rendering by Obrazek.org (Michal Nohejl)