Elizabeth Diller is drawing personal lessons from her design for the Jewish Museum's Edmund de Waal exhibition

The personal has never been a hallmark of Diller’s work in architecture and design. But working with de Waal’s emotionally charged travelogue, she said, had a transformational effect. “Seeing the world of his family through Edmund’s eyes,” she said, “I saw my family history also.” “Edmund dug into his past,” Diller added. “I didn’t. I couldn’t bear it.” Designing an exhibition based on de Waal’s book has changed that.Six rooms designed by Elizabeth Diller give viewers a glimpse into de Waal’s inner world informed by his relatives, the Ephrussis, who, like the architect’s own Polish family, was forced into exile during the Holocaust. Diller said she wanted the exhibition spaces to reflect the displacement felt by the storied art-collecting family and chronicled by de Waal in his fiction. The author referred to Diller as “the great dramaturge of space.”  Diller had previously designed a 2016 exhibition at the museum which focused on the lifework of French architect Pierre Chareau. The exhibition "The Hare with Amber Eyes" goes on view starting November 19th. More information can be found here.