Memoriale della Shoah. Milan. Morpurgo de Curtis Past in Place. A memorial in Milan’s central station retraces the journey many took to Nazi extermination camps

The Memoriale della Shoah, a new Holocaust memorial, opened this summer under the Stazione Centrale (Central TrainStation) in Milan. It requires our attention: not just inherently, because the subject is so important, but architecturally, because of the skill of the architects in finding compelling ways to bring this terrible period alive. The design is by Morpurgo de Curtis, a partnership founded in 2006 in Milan with a varied portfolio of housing, exhibition, and interior design. Guido Morpurgo previously worked for Vittorio Gregotti, Annalisa de Curtis for Umberto Riva. The architects have made two major decisions for this underground space. First, they have stripped everything down to bare gray concrete. What remains is the texture of the formwork; damage, rough joints, and partially protruding rebars have been retained. Then, rather than giving us a direct path to the train tracks and its huge rail elevator, the architects have unsettled the route into the Memoriale with switchback steel ramps hidden behind the wall of Indifferenza. At the top of the ramps, one might imagine a sculpture but, instead, there is a large cone and a pair of telescopic lenses looking toward the tracks, from which we can view film footage showing the opening of the station in1931, bringing the past into focus. From there, a long hall stretches out between concrete piers and raised, pod-like steel rooms accessed by steel ramps. There, groups can sit on bare benches and watch film clip. Deeper into the Memoriale, and parallel to the hall, are the train tracks, with boxcars like those used for the deportees. At a lower level still is a lecture hall, classrooms, and offices—new spaces that recall the great Milanese Modernist design tradition. The Memoriale is not a place that summarizes an institutionalized collective memory. The critical achievement of the architects is to bring visitors to contemplate their own indifference. Morpurgo de Curtis proposes to translate Bertolt Brecht’s “alienation effect,” the “verfremdungseffekt,” into architecture. Through jolting reminders of the artificiality of the space, visitors are not allowed to submerge themselves in a narrative. (The Memoriale is not, the architects insist, a museum; the explanatory historical panels currently along the walls, important as their story is, are undersized and look trivial. One day, perhaps, they can be placed downstairs in an exhibition area.) The “distancing” is also literal: the new two-story library echoes Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Beinecke Library at Yale in New Haven as if to say, “Here stands the past, a delicate Modernist box, in a dystopian concrete underground.” Italy’s best-known concentration camp survivor was Primo Levi, author of If This Is a Man (1947), a work of deep moral skepticism. The Milan Memoriale shares with Levi’s work a hard message: we cannot avoid the past and its implications for the present. The architects are to be complimented for communicating this message with grace and restraint; they have turned the site over to us as individuals.