The Montreal Holocaust Museum, set to open in 2027 on the mainstay Saint-Laurent Boulevard, will replace the memorial centre located in the city’s West End. At 55,000 square feet, the new museum will feature survivor stories, rotating exhibits, community outreach and education programs.Supplied/Montreal Holocaust Museum, KPMB Architects and Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker Benech Architecture
The modular three-storey Montreal Holocaust Museum, located in the city’s downtown, will be a first-of-its-kind institution in Canada when it opens next summer.
Through survivor stories and rotating exhibits, the 55,000-square-foot facility aims to remind visitors of the atrocities committed during the Holocaust and other historic genocides, such as the 1994 Rwanda genocide and the mass murder of Indigenous people across North America.
But while the new museum’s exhibits address painful pasts, they also offer glimmers of hope for a future free from hatred and discrimination through community outreach, continuing dialogue and education programs.
“This new museum addresses one of our darkest histories even as it speaks to resilience and hope,” says Shirley Blumberg, founding partner at KPMB Architects, the design firm collaborating alongside Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker Benech Architecture on the Montreal Holocaust Museum.
Its opening in 2027 comes amid an increase in the volume of hate crimes against Canada’s Jewish population and as the federal Integrated Threat Assessment Centre warns that the community faces a “realistic possibility” of a violent extremist attack. According to Statistics Canada, police-reported hate crimes against the Jewish community rose by 82 per cent in 2023. Of all religious groups, Jews are still the victims of the greatest amount of incidents, more recent numbers from the RCMP show.
The need to expand
After the Second World War, more than 30,000 Holocaust survivors arrived in Canada, with 10,000 settling in Montreal. By the 1970s, the city was home to the largest group of survivors in Canada and the third-largest worldwide.
In 1979, local survivors and other Jewish community members founded the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre, Canada’s first and only recognized Holocaust museum. Located inside Montreal’s Jewish community services building in the city’s West End, it was intended to memorialize survivors and educate the public.
The new Montreal Holocaust Museum, located downtown at 3535 Saint-Laurent Blvd., will replace the 1979 centre while also helping to bridge the city’s past and present.
“We had a checklist, and this location hit every single criteria,” says Helen Malkin, consultant and director of planning and development for the forthcoming Montreal Holocaust Museum. “It’s downtown, it’s close to the museum corridor along Sherbrooke Street, and it’s close to both McGill University and the University of Quebec at Montreal.”
Construction on the new site began in fall 2023 after the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre made the case for expansion owing to a lack of space and its consequent inability to meet visitor demand. The centre soon hired a consulting firm to conduct a feasibility study that found a stand-alone museum was needed.
An international competition resulted in Toronto firm KPMB Architects and Montreal’s Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker Architecture, which has since added “Benech” to its name, being selected to co-design the new $130-million facility.
Letting in light and nature was integral to the museum’s design. The garden court features birch trees, which are symbolic since they grew around Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. The trees are meant to symbolize life, survival and resilience.Supplied/Montreal Holocaust Museum, KPMB Architects and Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker Benech Architecture
Design approach
The architects’ starting point was an observation by philosopher and culture critic Theodor Adorno, who described “writing poetry after Auschwitz” as “barbaric” in 1949. While architecture could not make up for such an atrocity, it could help shed light on one of the darkest moments in human history.
To understand the survivor experience, the architects consulted a pair of academics on Montreal’s history, the local Holocaust survivor community and past international Holocaust-related exhibits.
“A key goal for the new museum was to create a building that blends into the urban fabric of Montreal,” says Renée Daoust, founding partner at Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker Benech Architecture.
The architects designed the museum’s ground floor to be a welcoming space. Visible from the street, it features a public agora and café that connects to the city’s heritage and cultural diversity.
Besides a café, the ground floor features classrooms, a multipurpose space and a 150-seat auditorium to host events such as author talks and panel discussions.
Capturing Montreal’s essence
To reflect a “Montrealness,” the architects used local materials, constructing the museum’s façade with limestone sourced from a quarry north of the city and the building’s interior with Quebec oak.
“We wanted it to be as Québécois and as Montreal as possible in every way because it expresses the new land that the survivors came to,” Ms. Blumberg says. “Every design decision we made had a meaning and a story behind it.”
Letting nature in and landscaping the property with symbols was also integral to the design.
For example, the garden court features birch trees, which grew abundantly around Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi concentration camp where more than 1.1 million people lost their lives. In a place filled with death, the birch trees are meant to symbolize life, resilience and survival.
The central courtyard also offers visitors a place to pause and reflect from the heaviness of the exhibitions and contains a memory wall with the names of all the cities where Jews were killed.
After viewing the exhibits, visitors will arrive at the museum’s rooftop terrace, where the Candelabra stainless steel sculpture sits. Created by local artist Nicolas Baier, it represents a new constellation network based on astronomical data from the Montreal sky, one of the only elements not affected for Nazi concentration camp prisoners.Supplied/Montreal Holocaust Museum, KPMB Architects and Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker Benech Architecture
Lighting the way
There was little natural light in the Nazi concentration camps, which were built to evoke feelings of deprivation. This darkness is why the architects want visitors to feel a connection to life, often represented as natural light, while walking through the museum, Ms. Blumberg says.
The site is made up of five individual lots marked with spaces that allow sunlight to filter into the building and become part of the visitor experience.
“The idea was to tie into the circadian rhythms of the day,” Ms. Blumberg adds. “Visitors see a shaft of light moving across the agora, and it reminds them that they’re alive.”
As visitors meander between galleries, light peaks through to evoke cleansing feelings of relief, she says.
“The visitors are always put in a situation of understanding awful things that happened in history, but then balancing that with the affirmation of life and human resilience.”
After museumgoers finish touring the permanent exhibits on the second floor, they’ll arrive on the third floor, where there will be rotating temporary exhibits that showcase other human injustices and genocides. Finally, the tour will culminate on the rooftop terrace, where visitors can see a panoramic view of downtown Montreal and the city’s Mount Royal.
Atop the terrace sits a polished stainless steel sculpture, dubbed Candelabra, by Montreal-based artist Nicolas Baier, who created a new constellation network based on astronomical data from Montreal’s sky.
“The artist wanted this installation to symbolize the sky because that is one of the only things that was not affected for the people in the concentration camps,” Ms. Daoust says.