1997 Peter Zumthor: Topographie des Terrors

The Topography of Terrors project was to be part of the Topography of Terrors foundation in Berlin, an institution that aims to research, and communicate, the atrocity of Nazi crimes and to work against the forgetting of history. The site where Topography of Terror is based, in the centre of the city, once housed the major institutions from which the Third Reich wrought terror over Europe and from where genocide was organised. Between the years 1933 and 1945, the site on Niederkirchnerstraße (formerly Prinz-Albrecht-Straße) in Berlin was occupied by the main institutions of the Nazi regime. Located here were the headquarters of the Gestapo, the SS leadership, the Party Security Service (SD) and, after 1939, the Reich Central Security Office. Here were the desks of Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, from which Nazi ethnic cleansing, transportations and murders were planned.

Unlike Zumthor’s previous buildings, his design for this project responded to the location in a different way by curating oppositions. It was positioned in the site according to the shape of the excavations and the gap between two rubble heaps. It was imagined as a reduction to ‘pure structure’ which did not speak any other ‘language than but of its own material, composition and function’.