MEIS – NATIONAL JUDAISM AND SHOAH MUSEUM IN FERRARA

Five buildings remind the five books of the Torah, and float over a garden, a new public space connecting the Museum with the city of Ferrara

The project for the new National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah in Ferrara represents the opportunity to create a new fragment of the city starting from a prestigious cultural program and the reconstruction of an existing building. The former Piangipane prison was built in 1912, in the area comprised between the Castello Estense and the docks, not far from the ancient Jewish Ghetto. The prison is an emblematic place of the fascist Anti-Semitic policy during WW2. The MEIS is built in this complex and rich environment. The walls of the prison are interrupted, broken, and become the fundamental element that creates a new relation with the city of Ferrara. The enclosure turns into opening, the distance into proximity. The MEIS is a museum of the city, a museum for the city. Part of the building is opened to the public, and the garden creates a continuity with the gardens of Ferrara: the addizione erculea in Corso Ercole I d’Este, the Giardino dei Finzi Contini. The central budling of the former prison hosts the temporary exhibitions. Next to it, five new buildings, five elements in a sequence, recall the Pentateuch, the five books of the Torah. Prominent passages from the Torah define the façades of the Museum. They regulate the natural light in the building, as they are builit as a brise-soleils on the glazed façades, or excavated in the solid ones. The areas dedicated to the permanent exhibition are conceived as neutral spaces so as not to interfere with the collection. Movable divisions are placed in multiple configurations and generate various possibilities of use. All areas will be lit with indirect and diffuse zenithal lighting. The MEIS, connected and opened to the city, is a collection of objects and a place, a medium to communicate values, ideas, memories which make it an incubator of the new common culture.