THE ARCHITECTURE OF DEATH : TO DESIGN THE U.S. HOLOCAUST MUSEUM, JAMES FREED HAD TO CHALLENGE THE VALUES THAT HAD GUIDED HIS WORK--AND CONFRONT OLD HORRORS.

IN THE LARGE, SHADOWY CENTRAL HALL OF WITNESS IN THE UNITED States Holocaust Memorial Museum, long, threatening straps of steel belt solid brick walls, just as they do the ovens displayed on the third floor. “The ovens were belted by steel to keep them from exploding under the tremendous pressures caused by the continuous combustion--there was so much fire in the overused ovens,” says James Ingo Freed, the architect of the museum, which President Clinton is scheduled to dedicate this Thursday on the National Mall in Washington.

Freed took this image of expediency in the service of the Holocaust, along with many other practical building details from the concentration camps, and worked them into the design of the memorial--a five-story, limestone-and-brick structure, neoclassical on the outside, but factory-like inside. What Hannah Arendt has called the banalization of evil was made possible by industrial engineering that made murder routine through assembly-line techniques. The long arm of factories along the Rhine and in the Ruhr Valley reached to the death factories in Eastern Europe.

The task of designing a museum that would evoke the void and final silence of the Holocaust at first stymied Freed. “I spent four weeks looking at blank paper,” remembers the prolific New York architect, a partner of I.M. Pei and the designer of the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York, the 58-story First Bank Place tower in Minneapolis and the new Los Angeles Convention Center, now being completed. He needed an approach radically different from his other buildings because, he says, “architecture is not the central issue. The real issue is how people can be made to understand the Holocaust and keep it from happening again.

“I was hopelessly stuck,” he says. “There is a certain thing about death that can’t be exploited.” To break his designer’s block, he decided to visit the heart of the darkness and journey to the camps themselves. “To get closer to the Holocaust, I had to see its remnants, because what I knew I understood intellectually, not emotionally,” Freed says.

Freed and Arthur Rosenblatt, who was then director of the Holocaust Museum, arrived in Auschwitz on All Saints’ Day in 1986, when thousands of candles had been lit by citizens to commemorate the victims. Freed was quickly overwhelmed. He found that he could exhume a bone simply by kicking the ground. There were sacks of ashes. Distant memories of his own childhood in Germany rushed back: Kristallnacht, when Nazis trashed synagogues and stores and schools owned by Jews, and he and his father spent the night riding a trolley in Essen, their heads buried in newspapers. Hitler’s parade through town. Fleeing Germany in 1939, carrying a passport stamped with a red “J”--for “Jew”--as he, a 9-year-old, led his 4-year-old sister on buses, boats and trains to relatives in Chicago.

“When I walked into this place,” Freed says of Auschwitz, “some archaic memories stirred, because emotionally this was a turning point for me.” He realized that but for a few months, he might have been one of the dead for whom the candles burned.

To protect himself from being overpowered and immobilized, Freed took refuge, during his several trips to Auschwitz and other camps, in his architectural instincts. He found that he avoided looking at the camps as complete ecosystems of murder, gravitating instead to their architecture: He started looking at parts of buildings and how they were put together, their tectonics.

“I began to see how everything was framed on the buildings, how things were strapped together, certain peculiarities,” he says. The windows of Josef Mengele’s labs in Auschwitz, for example, had blinds that allowed light in but restricted the view, perhaps to keep the doctor from seeing the “killing wall,” where people were lined up and shot in the court opposite, perhaps to keep prisoners from seeing his experiments.

“I couldn’t look at the Holocaust directly, but only out of the corner of my eye, and came away with the notion that the tectonics could influence the design. With the details--the straps, the bricks, the towers, the tectonic parts--I could confront the Holocaust obliquely. It gave me a distance. I could use tectonics repeatedly, like a Tibetan prayer wheel going round and round and round: Sooner or later it would call the gods to attention. Not by making things directly, but by sliding into the brutality.”

With his insight, the tall, thin architect with the full, graying beard was on his way to discovering a way to design the museum, and the path to the discovery would change his own self-understanding. “I had assimilated into American culture and buried knowledge about the Holocaust, like many people who left, but it surfaced with the project: I had to become Jewish to do it.”

And it changed the way he would approach the art that had always been a calling. Freed himself, who occupies clean-lined, off-white offices on Madison Avenue, has long practiced a modernism based in functionalism and minimalism, and as he designed the memorial, he reassessed his own architectural philosophy. Finding his design in the structures of the Holocaust itself led him out of the objective, modernist design based in Newton’s cold world of universal laws and ushered him into a realm where objects became animated by feelings and memory.

ANYONE FACING THE HOLOCAUST CONFRONTS MORTALITY, BUT FOR Freed, whose wife, Hermine, and 24-year-old daughter, Dara, are both artists, the issue seemed more immediate. “I’m not always in the best of health,” he says matter-of-factly. Though still vigorous, Freed suffers from a nervous disorder, and his voice trails off as his head turns involuntarily. Several minutes after he takes his ration of pills, he grips the rail of his chair as a storm seems to pass through him. “I’m 62 years old. If you’re not going to come back, you owe it to yourself to do something, even if it’s controversial. It was a once-in-a-lifetime project,” he says. “Those should be pushed as far as you can.”

He made repeated trips to Eastern Europe and Israel, and Wendy Evans Joseph, a senior associate for design on the project who accompanied him on some, recalls Freed’s intensity. “Something about his culture and past came back strongly, and it was very difficult for him,” she says. “At Yad Vashem, the memorial in Israel, he looked up the names of uncles to see if any had survived.”

As an architect understanding the Holocaust through its buildings, he reached the unsettling conclusion that his German colleagues had designed the Holocaust. Like the Nazi doctors, they had applied their expertise in that grisly endeavor with what he calls “incomprehensible inappropriateness.” Architects were witting accomplices, and design was a tool. “The elaborate shop drawings and the approval and stamping procedures showed that it was ordinary to build something you’d think was a dark and profound secret.

“The death factories were deliberately designed as a matter of problem-solving, like some movie on industrial efficiency gone mad,” he continues. On the outside, a camp like Birkenau was “composed and impressive, but when you come in the gate to the camp, you step into a rigorous killing structure. This is the place where (William Styron’s) Sophie had to make her choice between her two children. Those to be killed were taken to the ovens at the back. On an efficient day, 20 minutes after you got in there, you were smoke.”

In a book of concentration camp plans, he came across an early scheme for Dachau, with a proposal for wings flanking a central building, much like the layout for Michelangelo’s Campidoglio in Rome. “Some architect wanted to do something architectural,” he says. “There were polite letters begging the SS for work, and specs that matter-of-factly advertised the efficiency of ovens.”

The camps didn’t necessarily look ominous, just utilitarian. “The architects who stamped the drawings could have been designing summer camps,” remarks Rosenblatt. “The camps were prefabricated in Germany and sent out on railroad cars in components.” And Auschwitz, Joseph recalls, looked like a New England mill town. The attention to detail shocked and fascinated Freed: duckboards in the shower of a gas chamber; a gas chamber placed inside a Tirolean chalet with windows and lace curtains. “It was incomprehensible to me why the places where the most atrocious things happened were so often the most beautiful,” Freed says. “Certain elemental construction methods began to be very powerful--a Shaker simplicity to door latches, for instance.” Freed recognized an architectural aesthetic to Nazi death, and it was minimalist and functional.

Freed sketched constantly during these trips, and his drawings formed the basis for the final design of the museum. “You may be left with notions of silence and void, but you can’t just build an empty box,” says Freed. “The forms grew out of the subject, but they had to be understandable to people who know nothing about the Holocaust. We tried to construct symbolic forms that in some cases are deliberately banal, and in others, abstract.”

Back in New York, Freed intensified his research. “I was immersed in the subject,” he says. “I had stacks of books. I watched tapes for weeks. I obsessed about this building. Two months after being submerged in it, I could go on.”

FREED WAS NOT THE ORIGINAL ARCHITECT FOR THE HOLOCAUST Museum, which had a history of false starts and disagreements by the time he agreed to the commission. The project was begun in 1980, when President Jimmy Carter signed a bill that created a Holocaust Memorial Council that would plan, build and oversee a permanent memorial to Holocaust victims. Under the terms of the bill, the U.S. government would donate 1.9 acres on the Mall and the museum, part of the federal museum system, would receive an as-yet undetermined amount in yearly support. But the rest of the funding--more than $60 million--had to be raised privately and the design had to be in place within seven years.

Though there are other Holocaust memorials in the United States, including the recently opened Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, this would be the only national Holocaust museum. Unlike most others, this would extensively document the history of the Holocaust. Expectations were high. Elie Wiesel, the eloquent Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate who headed the Holocaust Council before resigning as chairman in 1986, wrote in his report that this building should disturb: It could not be a neat, clean Disneyland-like reconstruction that would devalue history.

But by 1986 the Holocaust Council and the federal Fine Arts Commission, which had the right to approve the design, had been through several architects and several designs and still had no plan, Rosenblatt says. In the view of the Fine Arts Commission, no plan presented was appropriate for the Mall, or for the task of representing the Holocaust. One proposal was neutral to the point of being nondescript and dehumanizing in its monumentality. One distinguished architect, Kevin Roche, withdrew after six weeks of disagreements.

With several false starts and failure imminent, Rosenblatt, who had steered the New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art through their restorations and expansions, approached I.M. Pei. A veteran of institutional politics, Rosenblatt felt that the distinguished architect, who had already built the west wing of the National Gallery on the Mall, had the credibility and prestige to navigate the shoals of Washington and Holocaust politics. But at a meeting with Rosenblatt, Pei demurred, and would not commit his firm. Rosenblatt was disappointed, but, he says, “You never give up.”

It was late in the afternoon, and Rosenblatt walked down the corridor thinking, “Maybe I could go through Jim Freed.” Freed, not as well known as his partner, had had a distinguished career, working in the office of Mies van der Rohe in New York, serving as dean at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s College of Architecture, building major award-winning, large-scale complexes. The architect happened to be in, Rosenblatt proposed a drink, and they adjourned to the Plaza Hotel. After three hours and several rounds of gin, Freed revealed he was a Holocaust refugee and agreed to design the museum. Freed became the primary architect but a predecessor, Boston-based Notter, Finegold and Alexander, remained associated with the project.

The design process took about a year and a half. The problem, to a large extent, was avoiding kitsch, being abstract enough so that symbols were not too literal. “Most art that I’ve seen dealing with the Holocaust has been dominated by the subject,” says Freed. “You’re always looking over your shoulder, aware of millions of bodies. The one thing I knew about the Holocaust was that it was not sentimental. It’s a brutal thing.”

He studied the design, especially the Hall of Witness, with bigger and bigger models, and often colleagues would find him alone, peering into the models. The team did about 18 different versions of the hall.

Still, his client, the Holocaust Council with its approximately 50 members, had conflicting desires. Some wanted a building that would force remembrance of those who didn’t survive, while others wanted a more positive, heroic memorial, with more marble and central spaces. “I can’t deal with this,” Freed wrote in an architectural magazine. “I have to make a building that allows for horror, sadness. I don’t know if you can make a building that does this, if you can make an architecture of sensibility. Because that is really what it is.” Added to the opinions of his clients were those of Washington design-review committee members, who always wanted, as Freed says, “to sand off any irregularities, to make things smooth, less raw.” Though Freed regrets losing some battles, such as an exterior cornice he wanted to weigh heavily on the facade, he persisted.

“Jim knew this could be a major building, and he poured his life into it,” says his associate, Wendy Evans Joseph. “He pursued even the smallest of details. I believe he thought this could be his one really great building, and he would not give up.”

THE BUILDINGS LINING THE NATIONAL MALL ARE BUILT IN A STARCHED, neoclassical style, and it is on this corridor of ordered rationality, among official buildings, that the Holocaust Museum is settled. The U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing, built in limestone, lies immediately south, and the brick headquarters of the U.S Forest Service lies north. To bridge them, Freed designed a building composed of both materials.

The museum, which architect Richard Meier has extolled as a “perfect integration of art, purpose and history,” is predominantly limestone, classical in style and dignified in character, with a curved front on 14th Street. The site stretches to 15th Street, opposite the Tidal Basin, where the monumental, semi-detached hexagonal pavilion called the Hall of Remembrance stands. The building, which has six floors open to the public and 265,000 square feet, belongs stylistically to official Washington--just as it could belong to the stately classicism of Albert Speer’s Berlin.

The exterior presents a highly civilized face. But a visitor who steps into the oval entry court off 14th Street finds disturbing aspects in this classically composed world. First, it offers no shelter, as it has no roof, and the window grids are thick and closely spaced, suggesting imprisonment. Brick coursing and concrete interrupt the limestone; a sandblasted steel entry shed, asymmetrically placed, breaks the purity of the geometry and rational order. “It’s a pure facade, a pure fake, because it is open to the sky, and you’re duped by it,” explains Freed. “It’s not what you thought: The limestone gives way to concrete and brick. It’s the beginning of a change of events as you enter the building. It’s intended to separate you from Washington in a fundamental way, as you enter an experience that is not ordinary.”

Visitors in this entry court face a choice, one that is resonant with the history of the camps. Visiting groups, often the elderly or the young, go right, through a door leading to the concourse, echoing the way the elderly and the young were swiftly eliminated at the camps. Others go left. This separation of visitors from each other is the first of several places where the building divides rather than collects people, as though following their own fates.

Those who go right descend into seminar rooms. Those who go left proceed to a steel loading dock jutting into the Hall of Witness, where they are abruptly exposed, as though under surveillance in the multistory courtyard that rings them. There they receive a passport with the name of a person alive during the Holocaust. Along one side of the hall, an imposing wall forms what seems to be a series of brick watchtowers. Overhead, the glass roof warps, twisted by the irregular geometry of the trusses, and four looming pedestrian bridges cross above the glass line between the towers. Figures walking on the glass block floors of the bridges are shadowy; they hint at inaccessible, anonymous presences in control. There are few windows in this self-enclosed world. Only glimpses of the sky, through the trusses and overpasses, offer hope.

“All the survivors I spoke to said that everything was taken away from them--their families, their identity, their dignity--and the only thing they held on to was a shaft of light,” says Freed. “So I played the sun.” Next to a black granite wall with an inscription from Isaiah--”You are my witnesses”--is a stairway with a forced perspective that subtly recalls the rails that vanish under the entry tower to Dachau’s crematories. The Hall of Witness is not perfectly proportioned according to the golden section that informs so many other buildings on the Mall, but is narrow for its height, and slightly confining. The details give it a claustrophobic density.

Visitors who enter the elevators leading to the permanent exhibition by one door find unexpectedly that it is a second door that opens on to the fourth floor, the beginning of the exhibition. Designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates of New York City, the exhibition documents three phases of the Holocaust on three floors--the Nazi Assault, covering the years 1933 to 1939; the Final Solution, 1940 to 1944, and the Last Chapter, from 1945 to the present. Visitors spiral through the exhibition on a path similar to that in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, looping around the central hall along bridges. “Always the visitors are bearing witness,” says Freed. “They’re always going back to this main space, glimpsing its twisted glass from different angles.”

In the exhibitions, with thousands of original objects donated by survivors or obtained from European governments and organizations, there is a cattle car from Eastern Europe, a Danish rescue boat that ferried Jews and political escapees to Sweden and a wooden barracks from Auschwitz-Birkenau. In one three-story space crossed by a bridge, there is a “family photo album” of a shtetl wiped out in a genocidal sweep--the pictures show sweethearts together, children and their bicycles, wedding pictures, athletes, grannies, women in summer hats. Throughout the museum there is an effort to restore dignity and identity to the victims. Besides the photographs, 5,000 first names of victims are etched on the walls of glass bridges, along with the names of 6,000 communities that were destroyed.

This controlled path, with respites in stairways that feature artworks by Sol LeWitt and Ellsworth Kelly, leads out of the world of the Holocaust into a tall, voluminous, six-sided building lit by an overhead oculus. Its semi-detached walls appear to be tablets. After the exhibits, this empty Hall of Remembrance is a deliverance and a point of release for contemplation. It is there, in a reflective, spiritual space, without exhibits, that visitors remember. An amphitheater of seats surrounds a space that seems to be the void left by the tragedy. “It is the kind of space in which you observe shadows within shadows,” says Freed. An eternal flame burns, and visitors can light candles along the outer walls. “People are able to participate, to do something here.” Some people weep.

“I think of the building as a resonator, a box into which you shout and the echoes reinforce your own particular shout. I wanted to leave the building open as a resonator of emotions,” says Freed. “But if you don’t understand it with your body, it’s a failure. It is not meant to be an architectural promenade, or a walk through memory, or an exposition of emotion, but all of this. ‘Odd,’ or ‘quiet’ is not enough. It must be intestinal, visceral; it must take you in its grip.” If art of this century has been accused of being overly “retinal,” Freed has created a symbolically suggestive environment that invites many interpretations. But it is an environment that also engages the body, and so brings the building beyond the kind of modernism--with its emphasis on the neutral object--that Freed and his firm long practiced.

The Holocaust Memorial ventures fully into complexities that modernist architecture eschews. In many ways, the design is an implicit criticism of modernism, of the industrial culture and technology that drove modernism and helped make the Holocaust possible. Modernist architects always believed in the myth that the rationalist culture of the West would lead to continuous social progress, but Freed’s use of the industrial motif to portray the Holocaust camps questions that optimism. For 11 million victims, the steel straps, matter-of-fact brick and iron gates delivered another reality. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is not so much a self-assured building, like others on the Mall, full of principles and answers, but a building spun out of questions and shadow.