Architect Hagy Belzberg recently showed me around his latest creation, the new Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. He had kindly agreed to give me a personal tour since I was preparing to write up a review.
While I had fully intended to focus on the architecture, the site, the ideas behind the design, I was caught off-guard by something unexpected: people.
Prior to my visit I had been looking at some new photographs of the building taken by Iwan Baan. Architecture photographed for reviews is usually uncluttered by the messiness of life. The buildings are often empty vessels waiting to be activated. People appear as mere apparitions, like objects, often blurred. Thus, there is little evidence of other responses or adaptations to the architecture. If we overlook the gaze of the photographer, there is then only one gaze present: that of the singular “I”. And this “I” had expected an encounter with a building.
