Canadian Holocaust Museum
location: Montreal, Canada
client: Montreal Holocaust Museum (MHM)
Selected team, international competition – in consortium with XTU Architects and Régis Côté et associés
The Challenge
The Montreal Holocaust Museum (MHM) has launched a competition for the design of a new landmark building on Saint-Laurent Boulevard. This project aims to provide the museum with a space better suited to its educational and commemorative mission, capable of welcoming new generations of visitors. Located in the heart of Montreal, the future building will seek to increase the museum’s visibility, broaden its audience, and further raise awareness of issues related to the Holocaust, human rights, and the fight against antisemitism, racism, and hatred.
The Response
The museum, named Migdal, features a symbolic architecture in corten steel, composed of reclaimed railway tracks, evoking collective memory, deportation, and industrialized violence. Standing like a beacon on the skyline of Boulevard Saint-Laurent, it becomes an urban landmark and the heart of the neighborhood thanks to a public passage connecting two streets.
The exhibition is organized around a central Garden of Memory. The visitor’s path, initially enclosed and austere, conveys confinement and dehumanization, then gradually opens up toward light and the city, culminating at the belvedere. The garden, with its Tree of Remembrance and its basin etched with symbolic lines, embodies regeneration and the passage from memory to life.