A $34 million expansion of the Holocaust Museum Houston has more than doubled its size while also increasing its mission to be a national voice for human rights and social justice.
Gary Fountain photo courtesy of Holocaust Museum Houston
As intended, designed — and just completed, Holocaust Museum Houston’s $34 million expansion is a bigger, broader-reach facility that honors somber history, blends it with hope and inspires action.
The two-year project doubled HMH’s original size to 57,000 square feet – and extended its mission beyond that of regional resource in Holocaust education to that of “national voice for human rights and social justice.”
Museum materials rank the new facility’s physical size as the fourth largest Holocaust museum in the country (behind U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, and Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center in Skokie, Ill.) and as the first to be fully bilingual in English and Spanish. And it’s LEED certified.
HMH’s expansion – in space and in scope – marks the most ambitious undertaking in the museum’s 23-year history, said Dr. Kelly J. Zúñiga, museum CEO, in remarks during last weekend’s grand opening. “With the rise in anti-Semitism, hate crimes and threats to human rights within our own country, our role in education and outreach is more important than ever before.”
Meanwhile, the original facility needed a “refresh,” she said.
Museum attendance prior to the project averaged 130,000 a year, including more than 71,000 middle and high school students, according to project materials. Overall annual attendance is expected to grow by 35 percent, with a 50 percent increase in student field trip attendance. And a new ability to accommodate it, Zúñiga said.
From learning to action
Now rising three stories, the new facility is more open, multi-layered and brighter than the museum’s original structure. In scale and in nuance, the spaces are meant to evoke HMH’s message: From Darkness, Light, museum sources said.
“We want visiting to be a positive experience” and one that inspires taking action to make a difference, Zúñiga said.
The expanded spaces incorporate a welcome center, four permanent galleries, two galleries for changing exhibitions, classrooms, administrative offices, a research library, and café — the latter something not previously offered, she noted. Meanwhile, the once-crumbly parking lot was upgraded and expanded.
HMH’s campus occupies a city block due to subsequent land acquisitions since its 1996 launch. It now includes two performance venues: a 200-seat indoor theater and 175-seat outdoor amphitheater. Inside, an estimated 50 screens, mini-theater and interactive terminals augment the exhibitions.
Zúñiga said these performance venues are the museum’s opportunity to offer more programs and to collaborate with local arts groups and schools.
The museum’s new design kept and incorporated the original build-out’s most distinct features: a slope of concrete engraved with communities destroyed in the Holocaust and a somber, evocative cylinder. Both elements have been extended in height to increase their interior use as the welcome center and a second floor gallery.
At night, a “Beacon of Hope” shines from the top of the revised cylinder, which was fit with programmable LED lighting in a rainbow of colors. Blue, however, is typically the choice, she said.
Construction kicked off in October 2017 and razed the original building, a former medical professional building that had been on the property when purchased in 1991 and retrofitted for museum use.
In a complicated ballet of cranes and scaffolding, two of the museum’s largest artifacts, once displayed outside, were relocated and ensconced within the “Bearing Witness” gallery: a five-ton rescue boat like those Danish fishermen used at night to ferry fleeing Jews to neutral territory and a 10.5-ton World War II rail car, a type used to carry thousands of Jews and other victims to concentration camps.
The exhibition spaces include a new Human Rights Gallery with displays of UN-recognized genocides and tributes to international human rights leaders, including Malala Yousafzai and Martin Luther King. An interactive media display features a dozen young diarists – including Anne Frank – who perished in genocides around the world. The museum also debuts the nation’s largest gallery of artwork by Samuel Bak, a Holocaust child survivor.
Representing the 1.5 million children who perished during the Holocaust, a kaleidoscope of 1,500 acrylic butterflies extends two stories at Holocaust Museum Houston, which has completed its $34 million expansion project.
Gary Fountain photo courtesy of Holocaust Museum Houston
As a focal point of the entry, a two-story kaleidoscope of 1,500 acrylic, reflective butterflies hangs in the atrium. Each represents 1,000 of the 1.5 million children who perished in the Holocaust.
On the third floor, the museum’s relocated Boniuk Library, a resource for research, education and survivors’ oral testimonies, remains one of the largest sources of data in the U.S. on communities destroyed during the Holocaust.
HMH’s $34 million project was part of a $49.4 million expansion and endowment campaign, which has exceeded its goal by raising $54.8 million. The museum’s full name is Holocaust Museum Houston, Lester and Sue Smith Campus.
During the 22-month project, HMH moved to 16,000 square feet of industrial space nearby (and now closed). Attendance there ran at an estimated 65 percent of typical use, Zúñiga said.
The HMH project team included Mucasey & Associates Architects, with PGAL as architect of record, general contractor McCarthy Building Companies Inc. and exhibition design by museum designers Ralph Appelbaum Associates. TNT Crane & Rigging handled the boat and rail car relocation.
In the neighborhood
HMH is one of several museums making improvements within Houston’s Museum District, located south of downtown Houston and accessible by a light rail line. A block away, for example, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston has a $450 million redevelopment project underway on its 14-acre campus, adding new facilities, updating others and improving the public plazas and connections between the components.
The Museum District has also attracted considerable residential development of town homes, mid- and high-rise apartments, and condominium properties, with restaurants and other pedestrian-friendly destinations also on the rise to serve the higher-density, pedestrian-friendly pocket of the city.
Prior to the $34 million expansion project that doubled its size, completed in June 2019, Holocaust Museum Houston occupied a much smaller building. The new project retained and extended two original elements: a slope roof in concrete engraved with
Courtesy of Holocaust Museum Houston