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An artist’s impression of the planned Holocaust memorial by the Houses of Parliament. Asa Bruno steered the project through the planning process and permission was finally granted last month.
An artist’s impression of the planned Holocaust memorial by the Houses of Parliament. Asa Bruno steered the project through the planning process and permission was finally granted last month. Photograph: Courtesy of Ron Arad Architects
An artist’s impression of the planned Holocaust memorial by the Houses of Parliament. Asa Bruno steered the project through the planning process and permission was finally granted last month. Photograph: Courtesy of Ron Arad Architects

Asa Bruno obituary

This article is more than 2 years old
Talented architect whose practice won the competition to design the new Holocaust memorial destined for central London

At the end of last month, planning permission was finally granted for the building of Britain’s most significant memorial to the Holocaust, just a few days after the death, at the age of 49 from cancer, of Asa Bruno, a director of the practice that designed its distinctive fin-based structure.

In the four years since Ron Arad Architects won the competition to design the £100m project on London’s Victoria Gardens, in partnership with David Adjaye Associates and the landscape architects Gustafson Porter + Bowman, nobody did more than Bruno to make the project possible.

It was Bruno who steered the project through a long, drawn-out consultation process, an increasingly negative campaign against it and, finally, cross-examination in a gruelling public inquiry. He dealt elegantly and eloquently with everything from inaccurate claims that the memorial neglected Roma and gay victims of the Nazis, to suggestions that a park in the shadow of the Houses of Parliament was the wrong site.

Against a background of so many misfiring and banal memorials, the project, which blends architecture, sculpture and landscape, is an assertion of the residual potential of a monument to make a powerful and authentic emotional statement. Bruno quietly rebuked those who believed, for whatever reason, that Britain had no need of such a reminder of the unspeakable evils of which the world is capable.

Born in Jerusalem, Asa was the son of Ofra (nee Hirschenberg), an art therapist, and Michael Bruno, an economist who became the governor of the Bank of Israel, and later chief economist at the World Bank.

His brother, Ido, is the director of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. If Asa had stayed, he would have been at the heart of the country’s establishment.

Asa Bruno, right, with Ron Arad. Photograph: Courtesy of Ron Arad Architect

But he was determined to be an architect, and in 1993, after high school, he left to study at the Architectural Association in London, where he believed he could be at the centre of the international architectural debate.

Graduating in 1998, he initially joined Jonathan Caplan Architecture. In 2000, Arad told a friend: “I am looking for an architect who is very tall, has a loud voice, plays the piano and ping pong, knows all about computers but can also draw with a pencil, and is good with people.” Bruno fitted the part exactly.

The first major project that Bruno worked on with Arad was the Design Museum in Holon, a small city in the shadow of Tel Aviv, with an ambitious mayor determined to use architecture to make a mark. Fabricated from coils of Corten steel, which wrap a highly organised sequence of galleries inside a dynamic sculptural composition, it opened in 2010, and convincingly proved that Arad’s approach was applicable to architecture as well as art and design.

“He had his own way of appropriating a project, but he looked after me,” Arad said. “Normally building is a journey of compromises. But thanks to Asa, there was no difference between the sketches and Holon as a finished building.”

Bruno was a charismatic figure, the horse whisperer who steered Arad, an artist who, though he trained as an architect, has an international reputation as an uncompromising and highly original designer, through the frustrations and difficulties of architectural practice, to give him the chance to build architecture on a substantial scale.

“He was the responsible grown-up in the office,” said Arad. “We had a special way of working together, we would sit and talk, and he would understand everything. I am a reluctant member of the architectural world. He was in the RIBA. I never wear a tie, he never minded the dress code. I told him his biggest problem is that he is good at everything.”

Bruno became a director of the practice in 2007, and worked with Arad on a wide range of projects around the world, from the refurbishment of the Watergate building in Washington to an award-winning and unconventional pair of skyscrapers, the taller of which is now rising in Tel Aviv and will be 80 floors high, by way of projects for Maserati in Modena, Yohji Yamamoto in Tokyo, the Médiacité retail centre in Liège, Belgium, and a cancer care wing at a hospital in Israel.

The Médiacité retail centre in Liège, Belgium, on which Asa Bruno worked with Ron Arad. Photograph: Courtesy of Ron Arad Architect

There was also a tantalising string of might-have-been projects – a restaurant balanced on a mountaintop fulcrum in Gstaad, Switzerland, for Bernie Ecclestone, a remarkable villa in Marrakech using local skills and materials to create a radical approach to climate and space, and an alchemical transformation of what was once the boiler house of Battersea power station into Upper World, a luxury hotel and private dining room reached by a lift inside the chimney stacks.

Bruno led the architecture studio in Camden, north London, transforming Arad’s boldly drawn sketches that initially seemed beyond the bounds of the achievable into physical reality. He was a passionate believer in architecture as a creative cultural form, but knew that to build, tact, diplomacy and clarity were essential.

He described the process of developing the proposal for the memorial “as a sensitive balancing act between creating an emotive experience, befitting the weight of the subject matter, and a careful physical integration into Victoria Tower gardens. The memorial aims to strike the right balance between significance and peaceful coexistence within its rich context and the crucial juxtaposition of the Houses of Parliament as its backdrop.”

Announcing the government’s decision to start work on building before the end of the year, Lord (Eric) Pickles, co-chair of the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation, paid tribute to Bruno’s contribution, saying: “Asa had so much to give, his patience and calmness at the planning inquiry did us all a great service.”

Bruno is survived by his wife, Tamara Bloch, a fashion designer whom he married in 2001, their two sons, Benjamin and Emmanuel, his siblings, Yael and Ido, and his mother, Ofra.

Asa Bruno, architect, born 12 December 1971; died 20 July 2021

This article was amended on 9 August 2021 to correct the city of Asa Bruno’s birth and the date of his death.

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