One of my early challanges was to “design” an information centre for the memorial of the concentration camp of Buchenwald.
The concept is a spatial and content-related introduction to the complex history and future of the Buchenwald Memorial.
when walking through the documentation and information center, the visitor approaches the complex through a wide forum, a plaza for events.
The documentation area is designed in the form of an underground block as a buried museum building. can only be read by overhead lighting using accessible, radiating glass domes in the lawn.
chronologically you walk through the almost 35-year history of the complex past. the cinema, library and concert hall are organized at their end points.
Present and future are designed above the lawn, above ground. This continues conceptually in the vertical, materialization of the design.
if the documentary content is spatially organized exclusively underground, the meeting places, library, concert hall, cinema, hotel, study retreats and teaching rooms clearly extend out of the hillside area.
the reflection and meeting place becomes a platform of transparent space, made entirely of glass, translucent and visible from afar.
light and illumination as a metaphorical means of design.
The design for an information center at the Buchenwald Memorial does not appear as an autonomous freestanding object, but rather as a landscape-embedded spatial figure that renders the historic site legible through placement, trace, and sequence. Its defining element is a linear axis of circulation that functions as a spatial backbone: it organizes the approach, calibrates perception, and leads the visitor through several building parts in a processional sequence of spaces. Here, the path is not merely circulation, but an architectural motif in its own right—a spatial continuum in which movement, memory, and knowledge are inseparably interwoven.
The premise of the project is the conviction that the history of Buchenwald can only be conveyed adequately through a pluralistic, multi-perspectival, and spatially differentiated engagement. The center is therefore conceived not simply as an exhibition building, but as a hybrid typology combining place of documentation, research institution, meeting space, and landscape of learning. Its ambition is not only to archive historical violence, but to render it spatially present, sharpen awareness, and establish a platform that equally enables mourning, reflection, reconciliation, exchange, and research. Architecture is understood here not as a representative object, but as a medium of orientation and meaning that structures memory, makes historical layers legible, and spatially anchors collective responsibility.
The complexity of the task lies in the site’s multiple historical strata. Buchenwald functioned as a concentration camp from 1937 to 1945; from 1945 to 1950 it housed the Soviet Special Camp No. 2. The later memorial constitutes a further historical layer of the site. Added to this is the area above the actual camp grounds, where several SS barracks buildings were located. Together with the Carachoweg, the historic route linking the commandant’s compound to the camp gate, this area forms the project’s chronological, topographical, and historical point of origin. From here the design develops its spatial logic: not as an imposition upon the site, but as a precise inscription into an already existing historical matrix.
The spatial program responds to this layering through a deliberate interweaving of documentation, public discourse, scholarly work, and temporary inhabitation. The program includes exhibition areas, spaces for concerts, film, and video, a forum, library and study rooms, retreat and work rooms, overnight accommodation with youth hostel functions, administrative facilities, and restaurant services. The project thus assumes an intermediate typological condition between museum, research center, educational institution, and civic place of encounter.
Its fundamental spatial figure follows a topographical grammar. The point of departure is a forum conceived as an open plaza for outdoor events. It functions as a threshold space between landscape, memorial site, and institution—open, non-directional, and collectively occupiable. From there, the visitor is guided into a subterranean linear exhibition sequence following the morphology of the terrain. This spatial figure, cut into the ground, forms the documentary backbone of the ensemble. The exhibition is not conceived as an additive chain of neutral rooms, but as a spatial choreography inscribed into the slope, in which compression and expansion, guidance and interruption, constriction and outlook shape the dramaturgy of experience.
At the ends of this linear exhibition zone, further building volumes attach themselves to the sequence. On the one hand, partially embedded yet simultaneously emerging volumes house concert, film, and video functions. On the other, at the opposite end, the library extends in a similarly linear manner following the topography, both anchored in the earth and visible and accessible above ground. Along this topographical course follow the areas for accommodation, dining, and administration, which seem to grow out of the landscape and orient themselves toward the location of the existing museum building.
The building masses read as reduced, tectonically abstracted volumes. Their language is restrained, almost ascetic, and avoids any expressive monumentality. Particularly striking is the contrast between light-colored, at times translucent bodies and a field of punctual insertions, markings, and linear cuts, which may be read as a palimpsestic inscription of former orders. What emerges, therefore, is not a closed building in the classical sense, but an ensemble of built volume, terrain drawing, and field of memory. The architecture does not assert itself as a singular object, but as a precisely placed sequence of spatial interventions within a terrain charged with historical meaning.
The conceptual core lies in the spatial and symbolic allocation of the program. All documentary, historical, and archival contents are assigned to the earth. They appear as subtractive spaces inscribed into the slope, as sediments of history, as archives deposited within the topography. By contrast, all present-oriented, communicative, and future-directed uses—forum, encounter, event, habitation, and exchange—are formulated as visible above-ground volumes. From this opposition emerges a deliberate architectural dualism: the historical narrative of violence remains embedded, documented, and open to research; the contemporary engagement with history, international understanding, learning, and active civic life becomes visible, transparent, and publicly effective.
The emergent volumes are conceived in a highly transparent materiality. By day they permit reciprocal visual relationships between interior, landscape, and memorial site; by night they appear as lantern-like bodies. Their glow is not an effect but a statement: active engagement with history remains present in public space, visible from afar and resistant to erasure. In this way, the architecture formulates a built declaration against forgetting. Opposed to the document embedded in the ground, it sets an above-ground counterfigure—light-filled, open, and communicative.
Particular significance is attached to the walkable skylights that bring natural light into the subterranean exhibition spaces. These are simultaneously functional and semantic elements: by day, light catchers and orienting markers; by night, admonitory incisions in the terrain, appearing like grave-like signs in the grass. The design operates here through a precise dialectic of absence and presence, of void and inscription, of terrain and tectonics. Architecture does not become illustrative or formally didactic, but works through cut, trace, stratification, exposure, and spatial condensation.
In this sense, the project may be described as a form of terrarchitecture: an architecture defined less by objecthood than by the transformation of terrain into a legible field of memory. Topography is no longer merely the support of construction; it becomes a medium of meaning in its own right. The design mediates between the site’s distinct layers of use and remembrance—documentary and largely subterranean, yet contemporary and socially active in its emergent volumes. It translates the weight of history not into pathos, but into spatial restraint, precision of placement, and topographical discipline.
At the same time, the site remains experienceable in its openness as landscape. The visitor is meant to be able to use the center not only as an institution, but also as a walkable meadow and field of experience: lingering, walking, listening, speaking, and reading. The project thus proposes an architecture of humble accessibility. It does not erect a closed apparatus of remembrance, but rather an open platform for commemoration, learning, and teaching—one that enables research, allows individual appropriation, and fosters collective understanding. The site is not to be consumed, but traversed, comprehended, and bodily experienced.
According to the project documentation, the design was selected in 1996 by a committee of the memorial administration. It was, however, never realized. To this day, no central information center combining all the functions envisaged in this project has been built. Precisely therein lies the project’s enduring relevance in retrospect: it articulates not merely a spatial program, but a position—the idea that architecture at a site such as Buchenwald can be neither mere enclosure nor mere symbol, but must become a spatial practice of remembrance, placing documentation, research, public life, and the present into a precise relationship.
Ultimately, the project understands itself as an architectural contribution to the task not only of preserving history, but of keeping it durably present in public consciousness. It formulates the promise of creating a place in which memory, knowledge, and responsibility are brought together: an architecture that documents the past, activates the present, and thereby helps prevent the repetition of violence.
project: 9607
size: 1.400 m2 (building), 1.700 m2 (landscape)
plot: 6.580 m2
client: department of administration memorial concentration camp buchenwald
place: buchenwald, weimar, germany
type: new museum, information center memorial
team (bulding): jle
team (landscape): jle
responsable architect: jle