Students To Design Genocide Museum

Though the U.S. government has yet to recognize the post-World War I mass killings in Armenia as a genocide, some students and faculty at the Graduate School of Design have—and have taken action.

Two weeks ago, Design School professors Allen Sayegh and Martin Bechthold took 12 of their graduate students to Armenia.

The trip—which concluded last week—was part of a new studio class, which focuses on designing a genocide museum in the capital of Armenia, Yerevan.

In its conceptual phase, the project is meant to reside near the current genocide memorial in Yerevan, and will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the mass killings that occurred in Armenia at the hands of the Ottoman Empire in 1915.

Though the museum is only a design project—meant to encourage students to utilize immersive multimedia techniques to deal with a complex political issue—it has garnered attention in Armenia, the group said.

While in Armenia, Sayegh, Bechthold, and their students met with an array of people, including Armenian students, professors, descendents of survivors, and government officials, to try to grasp the complexity of the event’s legacy.

“It’s a controversial topic, especially right now, how politics is involved in human rights issues, and about how you take all these forces to come up a with a museum when you don’t have any artifacts,” Sayegh said.

Both professors said they felt it was important for their students to physically be in Armenia and experience the ways in which the mass killings have affected the country.

“For the students, it opened up...a complexity which they probably were not able to grasp before the trip,” Bechthold said. “The denial is like a thorn in the flesh that is just not going away.”

Bechthold and Sayegh’s students agreed with these sentiments.

“[Armenians] are trying to emerge out of the genocide and Soviet rule,” said Tricia L. Ebner, who is a student in the class. “The key to attacking this is by inserting elements [in the conceptual museum’s design] which can be identified as moving forward.”

The project comes in the wake of new political developments in the U.S. While the House of Representatives signaled its readiness last week to vote on recognition of the 1915 mass killings in Armenia as a genocide, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the White House would try to block such a vote—despite Obama’s campaign promise to recognize the killings as a genocide.

Turkey is currently an American ally, noted by assistance in Iraq and Afghanistan and involvement in the trade of oil and natural gas.