Architecture as Evidence

Presented at the CCA, Architecture as Evidence explores the role of architectural expertise in a forensic legal analysis of evidence presented at a trial concerning Auschwitz.

Architecture as Evidence, exhibition presented at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, explores the role of architectural expertise in a forensic legal analysis of evidence presented at a trial concerning Auschwitz. As part of their extensive research into the subject, the exhibition’s four curators, Anne Bordeleau, Robert Jan van Pelt, Donald McKay and Sascha Hastings, have assembled material that together constitutes proof that Auschwitz was designed by Nazi architects as an efficient system of mass extermination.

The exhibition presents reproductions of this material: twenty plaster casts of letters, drawings, photographs, purchase orders, and invoices, as well as rebuilt chimneys and gas columns from Auschwitz crematoria. The walls are stark white, and the groups of objects on display are seen as part of a falsely immaculate universe. They are a powerful evocation of the past and of the Nazis’ horrific intentions.

As the curators explain, “As architects, we think, we draw, we build. We draft the lines that will become walls and roofs for the activities that our clients foresee. Under the Nazi regime in the 1940s, this meant that a group of architects drew extermination chambers to kill thousands of people in a single operation. These architects took on the responsibility of adapting parts of pre-existing buildings into gas chambers.”

In this study, the curators aim to document the systematic process of Auschwitz-Birkenau's architects. For instance, they designed rooms with gas-tight hatches, specified motors that could speed up the ventilation of a gas chamber to enable the next group of victims to enter faster, and reversed hinges on doors that would no longer open inward as dead bodies piled up against them.

16 June – 11 September
Architecture as Evidence
curated by: Anne Bordeleau, Robert Jan van Pelt, Donald McKay, and Sascha Hastings
CCA (Canadian Centre for Architecture)
Montréal

Architecture as Evidence

Presented at the CCA, Architecture as Evidence explores the role of architectural expertise in a forensic legal analysis of evidence presented at a trial concerning Auschwitz.

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