Illinois Holocaust Museum

The architectural credentials of Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center affirm its place as both monument and memorial. Renowned architect Stanley Tigerman created the 65,000-square-foot space, which incorporates historical and emotional symbolism inside and out, as a response to the apocalyptic inhumanity of the Holocaust. The journey from darkness to light is woven through the building, explicit in the exterior’s starkly divided dark and light wings and visualized as the visitor travels through the interior. The dark and light sides are connected by a “hinge” that symbolizes the rupture in humanity that occurred during the Holocaust and houses the museum’s anchor artifact, an early 20th-century German rail car of the type used to transport Jews to concentration camps.