Foster + Partners and Michal Rovner
With Simon Schama, Avner Shalev, Future\Pace, Local Projects, Samantha Heywood, David Bonnett Associates, Tillotson Design Associates and Whybrow
With minimum disturbance to the park, a ramp descends into the earth. Evocative of train tracks that terminated in the camps or the brown brick lined corridors leading down to the gas chambers. This is the way to the Time Left Memorial.
Projected images of an endless procession of human figures resonate with exodus or a human text that seems to go on forever like the unspoken testimonies.
The surface of the Memorial is set in the landscape, a gently arched rusted steel plate on the cross axis of Victoria Tower, Buxton Memorial and St John’s Smith Square.
The ramp entrance is marked by a sculpture of Broken Books evoking the burning of millions of books started by the Nazis in 1933 with the words of Heinrich Heine “wherever they burn books they will in the end burn human beings”.
Marking the biggest break in the book of human history is also a reminder and a warning.
Norman Foster | Michal Rovner
