Designing Spaces of Remembrance

Designing memorial spaces asks something very different of you as a designer.

You are not simply creating an object or an architectural form. You are designing around memory, grief, human experience, and the responsibility of how history is carried forward into future generations.

The Holocaust Memorial Garden gate began as a series of sketches exploring symbolism, weight, threshold, and emotional response. From the outset, it became clear that the gate needed to hold both physical presence and psychological presence. It needed to feel protective, grounded, and permanent, while also inviting people gently into a contemplative space dedicated to remembrance.

What interested me most throughout the process was how design can quietly shape emotional experience. Long before a person reads a plaque or engages intellectually with a memorial, they first feel space emotionally. Material, proportion, texture, scale, silence, and movement all begin communicating immediately.