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The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies offers students the opportunity to do an interdisciplinary undergraduate concentration, including a summer internship, and a Ph.D. program.
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Cohen-Lasry House
Located on the Clark campus, the Cohen-Lasry House is the home of the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. An elegant turn of the century villa, Cohen-Lasry House holds a large seminar room, and faculty and student offices. Renovated by the award-winning architects Julian Bonder and Dean Rykerson, Cohen-Lasry House was enlarged with the beautiful new Rose Library, an exhibition space, and a study garden.
View where the Cohen-Lasry House is located on the Clark University Map (#37)
Comments from the Architect
By Julian Bonder
The Holocaust changed the basis for the continuity of life within history. The so called 'Final Solution', exceptionally resistant to any redemptive perspective of humanity or life, threatens to remain an open wound, a breach in modern thinking. In its vastness and horror, it appears to be ungraspable, an irreversible rupture, an absent meaning, and it presents only questions. Therefore, the task of designing and building the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies raised issues which were not merely architectural, but indeed moral, ethical and philosophical.
This project involved working in a particular site that plays a pivotal role between Clark University's Main Campus and the Woodland Street Neighborhood
which is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The site included an existing Colonial Revival structure built in 1899 by the firm Frost, Briggs & Chamberlain.
The unprecedented program in Holocaust Studies required offices for faculty, graduate students, and staff; meeting and seminar rooms; exhibition area; a Holocaust library-reading room, and a small memorial garden. The project comprised an extensive renovation of the preexisting structure (including its dark basement in derelict condition), the addition of a new structure, which includes the Library, as well as systems and accessibility update.
How can an uncanny, unhousable, and enormously loaded subject be landed and anchored in an 'innocent' site in Worcester? How can a site which includes a preexisting colonial revival structure never intended to "house" a subject like the Holocaust, be transformed into a place dedicated to it, a "Holocaust Site"?
The scheme proposes the integration of the old and the new beyond appearances, establishing a connection between the historical and the aesthethical filtered through multiple levels of intense ethical-architectural dialogue. The different components of the Center —the preexisting structure, the Library addition and the Holocaust Memorial Garden— are to be seen as composing a new integral whole, while exposing a horizon of disconnections and absences. A new whole that hopes to suggest that the Question itself becomes the Architectural Theme.
This project does not seek to represent the Holocaust. Its ultimate task is to make room for echoes of an uncanny past to be heard in a humane environment created for reflection, study and dialogue. As a work on the Memory of the Holocaust through Architecture, this project is an attempt to generate and to foster dialogue, presenting a mode of being in space in sharp contrast with the story at its core. Asked to "house" the Memory of the Holocaust, this project thus entails housing memory which is neither "at home" with itself, nor housable at all. As such, its domesticity, scale and architectural qualities become alienated from themselves; never more a "house" for domestic inhabitation, yet a "house for an uninhabitable memory". The presence of an alien that is never an alien in close relation to the host house (now defamiliarized), and the presence of new ghosts within the old Host hope to suggest a strong, yet balanced estrangement effect, expressive of a disquieting historical uniqueness.
If anything, the friction, the dialogic exchange, the material contrast, and the radical transformation, seek to offer a spatial approximation, first, to the creative tension found in scholarly study and research; and second, to the complex relation between History and Memory, to the "twilight zone." Perhaps, it seeks to help illuminate difficult questions, while deferring, silencing any kind of attempt to represent -through intense spatial dramatization and gestures - the Holocaust experience. For no matter how dark, vast, or complex spaces may be, the Holocaust doesn't fit in any space.
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The Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies is located in the
Cohen-Lasry House. |
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