Monuments: Expressing the Unspeakable

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The systematic murder of 6,000,000 of Europe's Jews by the Nazis during World War II was an act of such un speakable horror that any attempt to portray it has inevitably paled before the fact. Nonetheless, since war's end, some 50 U.S. local and national Jew ish organizations have been searching continually for sculptors or architects to design a suitable monument. Finally, three years ago, a formal Committee to Commemorate the Six Million Jewish Martyrs was set up. The art advisory committee, under the chairmanship of Washington Insuranceman-Collector David Lloyd Kreeger, had no difficulty in agreeing on Philadelphia Architect Louis I. Kahn. Last week a six-foot scale model of Kahn's proposed monument was put on display at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art.

Kahn's way of expressing the indescribable was not even to suggest it, but rather to provide a place for people to reflect. The monument consists of seven heavy, translucent glass piers, each 10 ft. square and 11 ft. high. They will be placed on a 66-ft.-square granite pedestal designed to be built in Manhattan's Battery Park. The New York Parks Department has approved the plan in principle. When installed, the monument will allow visitors to stroll among the piers; the central pier will be open on one side and serve as a small chapel with writing incised upon the walls. The lightsome, airy cubes are designed to reflect sunlight, people, trees and even boats passing by in New York harbor.

To some observers, the chilly, crystalline expanses seem to echo the eternal stillness and emptiness of death. To Architect Kahn, however, quite the contrary is true: "The glass makes the monument sensitive to everything around it and gives it a sense of life and hope rather than of death. One is conscious of light. Light is what we come from; we are born out of light. Light is the maker of all things, of all presences." Furthermore, he feels, the monument "is not accusing. One Pier—the chapel—speaks; the other six are silent."