In April 2024, the Warren J. Kennedy Association, owner of the future museum, launched a design competition.
The jury, which met on June 18, selected three teams from 49 applications. They were invited to submit an architectural project in the form of a sketch, and a scenographic project illustrated by a one-minute film showing the scenographic ambience of the future museum.
TRACKS Architects was chosen by the jury, which met on November 7. An architectural and landscaping sketch, modified following some of the jury’s recommendations, was presented at the end of January 2025.
After five years of brainstorming, feasibility studies, programming studies, meetings with public contributors and a few patrons, the machine was set in motion! The preliminary work of digitizing and inventorying existing archives, and the search for new ones in archive centers in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Poland and France, continues to feed the work of the scenographers.
The story within the story…
As the collections are enriched by donations from prisoners’ families, unexpected discoveries on sales sites, and camp memorabilia unearthed by residents of neighboring villages, the story comes to life, embodied in the poignant accounts of 12-year-old Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) children captured at the end of the conflict, in the prisoners’ writings, and also in their cartoons, paintings and caricatures of their comrades and captors, and drawings of their living conditions.
Warren J. Kennedy Foundation
Warren J. Kennedy Foundation
And our project management team draws on all these archives, thinking about the message to be conveyed, to future German, American and French visitors, to German and French schoolchildren and beyond…
The subject is fascinating and always topical: how to emerge from a conflict that has ravaged the world? How do you rebuild your life, how do you build Europe?
