As the days grow incrementally longer, Australian Design Review (ADR) turns its attention to lighting. We spoke to leading architects and designers and invited them to share their expert insights on topics such as harnessing natural light, crafting thoughtfully orchestrated lighting design schemes to evoke a particular mood or atmosphere, and their favourite lighting products. 

In this piece, Stephen Jolson, principal of Jolson Architecture and Interiors, delves into the poetic resonance and atmosphere that can be created through an orchestrated dance between the presence and absence of light. In all architectural and design contexts, designing with the interplay of light and shadow is one of many tools architects can draw on to shape and transform spaces. However, as Jolson so beautifully writes, when the space in question carries an enormous legacy, as the Memorial Room at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum does, light and dark become fundamental to the design narrative and visitor experience.

A small space charged with an enormous legacy, the Memorial Room at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum provides a space for visitors to pay respect to the victims of the Holocaust and their families who settled in Melbourne after the war, and to propagate collective memory within the city’s multicultural community fabric.

As a third-generation Holocaust survivor and an architect, living and working in Melbourne, designing the Memorial Room was far more than solely an architectural project — it was a deeply personal expression.

The Memorial Room is centred around the journey from darkness into light and poetically tells a story about the Star of David as a symbol of religion and identity through a carefully considered dialogue with light, generated from the flame and the sky.

Upon entering the space, the room dims towards darkness forcing visitors to stop and reflect. As they move through the space, introductions of natural and artificial light are carefully placed and lead towards a culminating experience looking up towards a reconstructed Star of David in the atrium — a symbol of hope and resilience.

Natural light plays a crucial role in this journey. We made the decision to block off the existing windows to ostracise the room from the outside world and diffuse the perspective from the inside out. A vertical skylight and an atrium in the corner are the only introductions of natural light. This restriction assists in focusing your attention, amplifying the contrast between lightness and darkness.

The morning sun is strong, piercing through the space with a distinct brightness. As the day progresses, sunlight refracts through the atrium, illuminating the floor and material palette in different ways.

The vertical skylight enables visitors to peer through the frame of the old bay window. Deliberately placed in front of the diffused natural light is the altar, upon which lays the memorial book, a place for visitors to write a message of remembrance.

The interplay of light and material is essential to the experience of the Memorial Room. The walls are adorned with more than 10,000 aluminium stars, each individually pinned to create a kinetic effect. As visitors move, there’s a shimmering effect from both the refraction of light and the movement of the stars. We like to think of it as the ghosts of our ancestors, a visual representation of the spirits of those lost and those who survived.

These stars carry deep meaning. Gold stars memorialise survivors who settled in Melbourne, bronze stars represent family members murdered during the war, and silver stars stand for unnamed victims. By using different materials and colours, illuminated by the room’s carefully curated lighting, we aimed to create a dynamic visual narrative of loss, resilience, solidarity and community.

Central to the room’s design is an eternally burning flame, which is used to breathe colour and hope back into the room. This golden light is the primary source of colour in a space otherwise dominated by steel and black granite. We use the flame to illuminate the rituals that the Holocaust denied, referencing Jewish traditions that rely on candlelight and serving as a universal symbol of remembrance and hope. 

The room is full of reflective surfaces of highly polished steel and blackened steel silhouette figures, allowing visitors to see their own reflections among the representations of Holocaust victims and survivors. The idea is that everyone can see themselves in these reflections and realise that we’re all just people.

The silhouettes are defined by emotional and physical body language, communicating the universal burden of their experiences without words, and reflecting visitors’ own faces in their mirror-like surface.

At the heart of the silhouette is a cavity carved into the Star of David allowing the emptiness to resonate. Seven digital candles illuminate the emptiness of each interrupted journey.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the Memorial Room is its 13-metre-high atrium, which follows the lines of a dissected Star of David, drawing the eye up the void where the fractured star reforms, reflecting light from the mirror-like surface of the adjacent walls. 

Similarly, the dissected Star of David has been referenced in the polished stone surface of the floor beneath the atrium. This creates a deep wound as you peer into the apparent depths below. Natural light becomes the conduit of reflection as you feel suspended within the void. This negative space, carved from the building mass above, not only brings natural light into the space but also serves as a powerful symbol of hope. It represents looking towards the heavens for truth, while also acknowledging the pain of the past, and celebrating light as we emerge from the darkness.

My approach to this project was informed by years of research and personal connection to the Holocaust narrative. As a student, I created a database of Holocaust survivors in Melbourne, interviewing thousands of people and recording their stories. This first-hand research, combined with my family history, allowed me to deeply connect the story of the refugee embedded in Melbourne’s rich diversity — a city which is home to the largest population of Holocaust survivors per capita outside of Israel.

In a world where the voices of Holocaust survivors are becoming increasingly rare, spaces like the Memorial Room take on added importance. They serve not just as memorials to the past, but as symbols of hope and education for future generations.

Designing this Memorial Room will resonate with me for a lifetime. 

I hope it will ensure the stories of survivors of persecution will continue to illuminate the darkness for years to come.

Photography credit: Timothy Kaye

Take a look back at Cox and Scott Carver’s design for the Australian War Memorial