Montreal Holocaust Museum featured by The Globe and Mail

April 1, 2026

“This new museum addresses one of our darkest histories even as it speaks to resilience and hope,” says KPMB founding partner Shirley Blumberg of the Montreal Holocaust Museum.

Earlier this week, The Globe and Mail published a detailed overview of the new museum in downtown Montreal. The 55,000-square-foot building, which is currently under construction and scheduled to open to the public in 2027, will feature survivor stories, rotating exhibits, and community outreach and education programs related to the Holocaust and other global genocides.

In 2021, the museum staged an international design competition for a new home. It called for a building that would serve as a place of memory, education, and community-building and be rooted in Montreal’s distinct culture and history.

Selected from among 32 proposals, the winning design by KPMB with Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker Benech will house permanent and temporary exhibition spaces, a public agora, classrooms, a 150-seat auditorium, a café, and a rooftop terrace across three levels.

The museum is composed of five volumes, each tracing historic lot lines and echoing the visual scale and rhythm of Boulevard Saint-Laurent’s established streetscape. The masses are clad in Quebec limestone and divided by vertical light shafts.

To inform the design, the architectural team consulted Holocaust survivors and scholars Dr. Robert Jan van Pelt and Dr. Sherry Simon, whose expertise shaped the building’s conceptual underpinnings. This includes the foregrounding of nature, exemplified by a forecourt of birch trees — symbols of resilience and survival — and the building’s recurring exploration of natural light.

“The idea was to tie into the circadian rhythms of the day. Visitors see a shaft of light moving across the agora, and it reminds them that they’re alive,” says Blumberg.

Read the full article at The Globe and Mail.