UPD 13/5/2014: The winner of the competition was the Lord team with the project “Landscape of Loss, Memory and Salvation”, where Daniel Libeskind is responsible for the architectural component.
The monument will be located in the center of Ottawa, next to the War Museum. The memorial will also remind you of the impact of the Holocaust on Canadian history: after the end of World War II, about 40,000 Jewish survivors came to the country and made a significant contribution to the development of Canada. In addition, as the organizers of the project emphasize, Ottawa is the only capital of the country of the Allied bloc, where there is no Holocaust memorial yet.
In 2013, multidisciplinary teams led by a Canadian participant were invited to participate in the qualifying stage. Of these, 6 consortia were selected, which have now presented their interpretations of the memorial. The jury will choose the best project during 2014, and they plan to open the monument in 2015.
The Lord team, led by museology specialist Gail Lord, also includes Daniel Libeskind, artist Edward Burtynsky, landscape architect Claude Cormier and Holocaust researcher Doris Berger.
The Szylinger team, made up of curator and art historian Irene Szylinger, David Adjaye and Ron Arad, designed the structure with two parallel walls, separated by 120cm gaps, between which you can only walk alone.
The Klein consortium includes Leslie Klein of Quadrangle Architects (Leslie M. Klein), Jeffrey Kraft of the SWA Group (Jeffrey Craft), Alan Schwartz of Terraplan (Alan Schwartz), artists Yael Bartana, Susan Philipsz, Chen Tamir; and Holocaust researchers Debórah Dwork and Jeffrey Koerber. Their object combines video, sound and landscape. Its volume protrudes from the ground, simultaneously reminding of death and rebirth.
The Saucier team, a duo of Saucier + Perrotte partner Gilles Saucier and artist Marie-France Brière, also interprets their project as a geological form protruding from the surface of the earth, lifting up a piece of the Canadian landscape. The structure of granite, slate and oxidized steel symbolizes the inertia of the earth's motion and "evokes the memory of a place."
The Amanat team of architect and urbanist Hossein Amanat, artist Esther Shalev-Gerz, landscape architect Daniel Roehr, architects Robert Kleyn and David Lieberman proposed the monument in the form of a hemisphere: it denotes a world split in two, reminding of those who died and lost their homes, communities, families.
The Wodiczko + Bonder team, artist Krzysztof Wodiczko and architect Julian Bonder in their project proposed to uncover the rocky base of the site in order to anchor the memory of the Holocaust in the country's national “rock foundation”. And the soil brought from the old Jewish communities of Europe should remind of the settlers who lost their homeland.
