In 2001 the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois thought it had found a home for its new museum and educational center, in a residential neighborhood in Skokie. But early last year Skokie Village Board officials rejected the plan after a series of volatile hearings where future neighbors voiced objections, including their fears of vandalism.
He’s held his tongue and kept a low profile as he tinkers with his design and tries to help raise the $25 million it’ll take to build the museum and endow it. “In the context that it is the purview of the aged to hold grudges–which I’ve been practicing for many ages,” he says, “how are you going to hold a grudge against your neighbors?”
Here’s a line he uses often: “You know, I’m Jewish, and the Jewish god established a quota for Jewish architects. They can only work on so many suburban homes for Jewish American Princesses and I reached my quota five years ago.” He’s happy to share his wife’s blunt assessment of him–“You’re now at the stage where you design bridges to burn.” He says it’s time to give back, time to focus on the ethical and moral obligations of architecture. Tigerman won’t call the Holocaust Foundation project a museum. “It’s a memorial, which is different than a museum, and it’s an education center.” As with so much of Tigerman’s work–schools and libraries that wrap their pastel arms around children at risk, animal shelters that look like dogs’ faces, houses shaped like penises–metaphor plays a starring role.
There will be no turning around and going back. “Every museum you go into, you go out by going out the same door, so if you had an epiphany it’s denuded,” Tigerman says. “To come out the same door you came in problematizes any authority that the building might otherwise have. It takes away the experience. The Jews, when they went on fucking cattle cars or when they were gassed…didn’t have the convenience of coming out the same way.”
In its ten years, 96 people have completed the one-year postgraduate program. About a third of the students come from traditional architecture backgrounds and another third from the design world; the remainder defy easy categorization. Tigerman recalls two women in their mid-50s–one a senior official in the Chicago archdiocese, the other a former Florida lobbyist who came up from Tallahassee by bus. “People come here because it’s hands-on, in the trenches,” he says. His goal is “to skew the trajectory” of these people. “Archeworks is not about making big plans like Dan Burnham. Archeworks’ motto is, ‘Make no big plans but let every little one be the best that it can be.’”
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Archeworks students divide their time between classwork and hands-on projects. They gather for three hours a week. In the fall they generate a paper a week for Tigerman’s seminar on morality and ethics. In the spring they do the same for Maddox’s class, “Future Studies.”
