The Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, originally established in 1984, re-opened in September 2019 in a brand-new 55,000-square-foot facility, a building five times larger than its previous location. The museum shines a spotlight not only on the atrocities of the Holocaust, but on human rights struggles in the United States and genocides around the world. Dallas firm Omniplan designed the museum’s new facility, which also served as the subject of the grand prize winner of AIA’s 2020 Film Challenge. We talked to Emily Teng Yan, AIA, a project architect on the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, about what the project meant to her.
I didn’t know what I was getting into when I first started architecture. I was good at math, science, and art, so it seemed like the perfect marriage between [all three]. I really loved the idea of architecture influencing not only the everyday, but the sacred. I definitely gravitate toward buildings that are for everyone to experience.
The [museum] project came to our firm in 2013. I was heavily involved at the beginning, especially with the [design] competition, which was open to a certain number of firms. I helped with our approach to the design of the museum, and then when we actually won the project, I worked with a designer to visualize the exhibits. That helped develop the formation of the shape of the building; it was programmatically driven. During fundraising, I helped with Sketch-Up models that helped explain the story of the building. The museum had a mission to find a local firm from the region, [but] some firms had partnered with other firms in New York and other areas. When we competed, it was just us, not partnering with a starchitect firm.
I worked on the competition when I was first at Omniplan, in 2013, and the museum was completed in 2019. It shows that building is a long process, and there has to be a lot of support, there has to be a vision, there have to be people to want to see [the project] come to fruition. You have to be patient, but I think it’s just so gratifying because I know what it means to the community. I feel like the building represents more now, with how polarized politics are. In 2013, I just don’t think the world was as charged. It’s interesting looking back at the younger me, and at what the building means now.
I love the museum’s mission of not only telling the story of the Holocaust but extending the idea of human rights to all people: civil rights in the United States, and human rights globally and internationally. My family is from Dallas, and my grandfather came to Dallas after World War II. My parents talked about how schools were segregated, and since they were Chinese-American, they weren’t considered “colored,” so they didn’t go to the Black school, but they went to “white” schools and weren’t quite accepted there. I think this building is telling the history in my own backyard. It’s meaningful for my family because of my family’s history in Dallas. As a minority woman, I appreciate that the museum’s mission is one of education and tolerance. — As told to Katherine Flynn
