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has happened is the result of a typical po-
litical attitude.
Berlin is something else altogether, but
it also faces risks. There was a politician
recently who ran a campaign that promised
to demolish the memorial, because there are
Germans who hate the project because it is
valuable real estate. At the same time, we got
respective e-mails, from a Chinese student
and a young architect from Bahrein, who
had just been to the memorial and thought
it was the most incredible thing they had
ever seen or experienced. This is what is very
interesting of your work, you don’t build for
experience, you build for the concept and
hope your works will make people think
about it. At the memorial both things come
together in a very interesting way.
PE: One of the things that I like about
that project which is not phenomenological
– because this building is clearly a phenom-
enological work, even though I don’t really
do projects like that, but it was a different
kind of client, this was for dead people –
is that I have always been interested in
the possibility of feeling lost in the space.
And it happens all the time in the memo-
rial. If a mother is with a young child, and
the child runs away and she starts looking
for the child there is a moment when the
child is totally lost, because even if there is
screaming, if both people are moving you
can never get together. For example, I can
never remember, everytime I go, where my
favorite spot is, because you do sometimes
feel lost in space. Phenomenologically you
can’t get lost, but psychologically you can.
And this is the whole concept of the idea:
that woman in New Jersey who was sepa-
rated from her mother at one of the Ausch-
witz camps, and she survived but never saw
her mother again.
“We have always been football
fans, but it is difficult to do
architecture with a stadium“
