The Road. Museum on the site of german nazi extermination and labor camp in Treblinka

Silesian University of Technology, (Politechnika Śląska), Faculty of Architecture, Gliwice

Project idea

The work touches an aspect of the commemoration of sites related to the Holocaust, referring to the concept of anti-monument and Oskar Hansen's theory of Open Form. The work is an attempt to find a way of preserving a memorial site by linking architecture to the landscape and creating relationships that are carriers of events and changing activities.

When the world seems to easily forget wartime suffering, it becomes a challenge to restore a sense of obligation to remember. Monuments do the work of remembering for their audiences and, in effect, cause it rejection, believed James Young, creator of the concept of the anti-monument. Thus, if we consider monuments as didactic objects, full of pathos and moralizing, the task of the creator restoring active memory is not to offer simple answers, and leave all the work of understanding its content to the viewer. In Treblinka, the site of the death of 800,000 people, a competition for the design of a museum was announced in 2021, which was the direct inspiration for this project.

Project description

The site of the former Treblinka camps appears to be "at the end of the world." The camps are hidden in a dense forest, far from any human settlements. It is rare to see another human being there and even rarer to see an organized tour. Finding the silence of Treblinka to be the strongest carrier of the horror of the events of 80 years ago, the author tries to preserve it at all costs. The proposed design solution is the Road - a 2,860-meter-long line running from the edge of the forest to the Execution Site. The Road, while maintaining its uninterrupted straightness, runs through or right next to the most significant locations in the study area: Extermination Camp, Labor Camp, Execution Site and the former Gravel Pit, crossing the Black Road twice. In this way, the goal of finding a common denominator and linking all areas spatially and functionally together is achieved. The proportions of the Road mean that it is not visible in its entirety from any location - the exception is the bird's-eye perspective, in which the design takes the form of a clear sign in the field, a line crossing the remains of the camps. The overall rule is to keep the design non-interference with the remains of the camps and the existing monument. Following the postulates of Oskar Hansen's Open Form theory, The Road acts as a frame for the landscape and events in its space. Using minimalist forms, it moves away from its dominant position, giving the main role to nature and man. The road acts as a guide, highlighting the most significant parts of the Treblinka camps area, while at the same time allowing one to go off it and, through the numerous forest paths, discover the large area in an individual and specific way for each visitor. The nearly three-kilometer-long Road is divided into five chapters, corresponding in their content to the areas they cross. The chapters are named: Abyss, Pandemonium, Oblivion, Trace and Silence. The volume part of the Road containing the museum is the Chapter one.

Technical information

The museum's walls, foundations and roof are not barriers per se, but have functions assigned to them: the horizontal divisions are full floors - service, storage and technical spaces below, and educational and office spaces above. The east wall, in its thickness, hides vertical communication and installation shafts. Between them is a void - the actual content of the Museum.

The auditorium and exhibition hall of the museum are multifunctional and fully transformable spaces. Thanks to the use of movable platforms with a width of 1 or 4 meters and a length corresponding to the span of the hall, it allows to obtain any configuration of the interior layout and easily modify it, depending on current needs.

The structure of the museum building is based on a regular grid with a module width of 4 meters and a span of 7.5 meters, dilated every 40 meters (10 modules). The building is founded on a 70 cm thick reinforced concrete foundation slab. The ceilings are designed as 25 cm thick reinforced concrete with beams arranged on a structural grid. The exterior walls were designed as three-layer, reinforced black colored concrete in formwork made of local soil with a 20 cm thick layer of thermal insulation.

The design intervention in the further section of The Road is limited to the removal of trees and marking the route with two walls of black colored concrete with a width in line with the walls of the building (55 cm) and a height of 40 cm above ground level. The pavement in the strip between them is replaced with basalt gravel, which shows variable properties depending on the humidity of the environment. In a dry environment, it turns a light gray color and, when exposed to rainwater, it changes to a deep black.