Alejandro Aravena, the artistic director of this year’s biennale, calls Mr. van Pelt’s expert testimony a powerful example of “reversed architectural logic.” “The Evidence Room,” he added, “achieves the delicate balance between being subtle and respectful and communicating the horror. Walking in, you feel something on your skin.”
The most striking elements of the room, which will remain on view here until Nov. 27, are three full-size reproductions, or “monuments,” as the team calls them: the gas column, a fragment of wall from a crematory and a gas chamber door. They are unlabeled, but their details, once explained, are almost unbearably chilling.
The room, based on Mr. van Pelt’s nearly 600-page book “The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence From the Irving Trial” (2002), is one of the more unusual installations in a biennale dedicated to the ethical dimension of architecture, and one of the few featuring the work of a nondesigner. To give his research concrete form, Mr. van Pelt turned to Donald McKay, an architect and fellow professor at the architecture school of the University of Waterloo in Ontario. (The team also included Anne Bordeleau and Sascha Hastings.)
“I wanted it to have a kind of ideal quality, like we were inside the architect’s mind,” Mr. van Pelt said.
Entering the room, which uses four shades of white, feels like walking into a combination of an architectural model and a fossil-specimen hall. The walls are lined with plaster reliefs based on photographs, drawings, blueprints and other documents introduced during the trial to counter Mr. Irving’s claim that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.
One photograph shows a group portrait of the Auschwitz Central Construction Management team, including the head of the design department, Walter Dejaco. An inscription near the entrance describes the death camps as “the greatest crime committed by architects,” but there is minimal explanatory text in the room itself.