The enthusiastic support of donors helped a Waterloo team take their exhibition about the architectural evidence of Auschwitz to the Venice Biennale, the most prestigious architectural show in the world, where it is raising questions about the moral responsibility of architects.
The Evidence Room consists of life-sized replicas and casts of key pieces of architectural evidence (a gas column and gas-tight hatch, a gas chamber door, blueprints, architects’ letters, contractors’ bills, and photographs.
Waterloo Architecture professor Robert Jan van Pelt and his team of Anne Bordeleau, Donald McKay, Sascha Hastings and Waterloo architecture students, were starting to get worried.
Their exhibition exploring the architectural evidence of Auschwitz needed to be on a plane heading for Venice by late March 2016. It was already November, and the team didn’t have the money to construct the exhibition’s key objects—let alone to crate and ship it.
“We were facing the very real possibility that we might not be able to go,” says van Pelt. “We had very little time, and it was such a big project. We had to make everything from scratch.”
Robert Jan van Pelt and his team.
The exhibition was based on the report van Pelt authored as an expert witness at the 2000 libel case brought by British holocaust denier David Irving against American historian Deborah Lipstadt. In that trial, van Pelt’s forensic interpretation of the blueprints and architectural remains of Auschwitz helped prove irrefutably that the camp was a “purposefully designed factory of death.”
The idea of the exhibition was to present key aspects of van Pelt’s findings, including a three-dimensional reconstruction of an Auschwitz gas column.
Originally, van Pelt approached the Canada Council for funding, but the Council was already sponsoring a Canadian entry in the Biennale, and was unable to support another. The team’s only option was to accept the generous offer of student Michael Nugent to build the key exhibit and seek funding from private sources, something van Pelt had little experience with previously.
Fortunately, donors immediately saw the importance of van Pelt’s exhibition. Their response was overwhelming and the team quickly exceeded their fundraising goals. In total, $586,393 was raised from 30 donors to cover the construction, shipping, and maintenance of the exhibition. The Gerald Schwartz and Heather Reisman Foundation and the Azrieli Foundation made significant gifts to the project.
Carol Weinbaum, of The Jack Weinbaum Family Foundation, says she knew instantly that her foundation needed to support the exhibition.
“I had just come back from Buenos Aires where I visited several museum shows that used art and architecture to highlight issues of mass murder, remembrance, documentation and justice in the context of their history of the ‘disappeared,’” says Weinbaum.
“For Auschwitz and Holocaust denial to be part of this global conversation as a Canadian contribution on the international stage at the Venice Architectural Biennale was a uniquely powerful and timely opportunity to set the record straight with irrefutable evidence.”
Since opening in May, The Evidence Room has become one of the festival’s most widely discussed exhibitions. It has been covered by the international media, with articles in the New York Times, CBC, and the Globe and Mail.
Many of the donors travelled to Venice for the exhibition’s opening. For van Pelt, it was incredibly rewarding to put a face to the names of the individuals who had supported his project.
“We were able to stand there and look them in the face and say ‘what do you think’?” said van Pelt. “They were able to say ‘you've spent our money wisely and creatively.’ It was very different from working with, say, SSHRC funds, for which we were also very grateful. There was a personal dimension to the support, and that was very motivating for me and the team.”