I think this building is telling the history in my own backyard. 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. My family is from Dallas, and my grandfather came to Dallas after World War II. 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.
It’s interesting looking back at the younger me, and at what the building means now. In 2013, I just don’t think the world was as charged. I feel like the building represents more now, with how polarized politics are. You have to be patient, but I think it’s just so gratifying because I know what it means to the community. 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 come to fruition. I worked on the competition when I was first at Omniplan, in 2013, and the museum was completed in 2019. When we competed, it was just us, not partnering with a starchitect firm. The museum had a mission to find a local firm from the region, some firms had partnered with other firms in New York and other areas. During fundraising, I helped with Sketch-Up models that helped explain the story of the building. That helped develop the formation of the shape of the building it was programmatically driven. 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. I was heavily involved at the beginning, especially with the competition, which was open to a certain number of firms. I definitely gravitate toward buildings that are for everyone to experience. I really loved the idea of architecture influencing not only the everyday, but the sacred. I was good at math, science, and art, so it seemed like the perfect marriage between. I didn’t know what I was getting into when I first started architecture. 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. 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. 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. 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.