Peter Eisenman Interview: Field of Otherness

“Architecture, I believe, is necessary to mark collective memory.” One of the leading contemporary American architects, Peter Eisenman, here shares the thoughts that went into building the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, and how he sought to transform a feeling of “being lost in space in time” into the memorial. Eisenman shares how he didn’t want to use Jewish symbolism in the memorial, but rather have “a field of otherness, where people understand that to have been a Jew in Germany was ‘other’. And what was it like to be ‘other’ in space in time? And that’s how we came up with the field.” It had nothing to do with the Holocaust symbolically, he explains, but was inspired by his conversation with a woman, who had survived Auschwitz. Upon being separated from her mother, she had had a terrifying encounter with Josef Mengele, which made her feel alone and lost in space: “I wanted that feeling of being lost in space to inhabit the memorial.” Getting to what he describes as “the popular level” was also important