Also known as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Holocaust Memorial was designed by architect Peter Eisenman and engineer Buro Happold. A New Yorker article from 2012 referred to it as “inadequate,” and I find myself agreeing with that assessment.

If you approach the site from the Brandenburg Gate, as I imagine many visitors do, it’s easy to not identify it as a memorial. We were fortunate to be with a local, but had we visited on our own, I’m not sure we would have recognized it as a tribute to six million lives lost. Perhaps it was this lack of understanding that led other visitors to sit, stand, and snack on many of the shorter rectangular concrete blocks in the outer edges of the memorial. Perhaps that was why some people ran through the rows of more than 2,700 grey slabs, laughing rather than reflecting.

Have you visited this memorial?  What are your thoughts?

The memorial is a grid with 2,711 rectangular, concrete slabs that range from eight inches to nearly 16 feet tall.

The cold, grey slabs are intentionally askew on a rolling terrain.