Tonnesen says he has "never, ever" represented himself as an architect. He mistakenly gave Sosin testimonials from friends and clients that referred to himself as such, he admits. "But I would never represent myself as an architect," he says. "I'm not one."
The house never did get built.
Peter Scanlon
Bill Tonnesen
Peter Scanlon
Artist Mary Shindell calls Tonnesen's work "shamelessly derivative."
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"You get sucked in by [Tonnesen's] enthusiasm and excitement," Joplin says. "This is a guy who can do things. But the cost is people getting tossed off of a project, and a house not being built, and wreaking havoc on people's lives because they're in the way!"
Many of the Holocaust survivors adore Tonnesen, even if they do chuckle over the intensity of his obsession. He comes to their monthly dinners, and, as Handler notes, "he talks to every one of them. He makes them feel very important." He's even memorizing the Hebrew prayers.
And the survivors love the memorial design.
"If Bill has anything to do with it, it's going to be spectacular," says Dolly Redner, who survived several work camps and Auschwitz-Birkenau as a teenager. "He is spectacular."
Redner understands that some people may question the cost when there are so many other worthy causes. Even her own husband, Aaron, says he doesn't see the point of memorials. But she wants to see that something still stands when she is no longer around to tell her story. "So many people died," she says, "and they must be remembered."
And she believes Tonnesen when he says the money will come. "The criticism comes because he thinks in millions," she says. "But if you have pegs, and each one costs 25 cents, what child will not give 25 cents to see this happen?"
So far, Tonnesen hasn't been paid a penny for his work on the designs. "We've paid him for some out-of-pocket costs, but I even had to pull teeth to get him to accept that," Kader says.
If the project gets built, Kader says, Tonnesen will get his professional fee -- but he bridles when asked how much that is: "That is simply none of the New Times' business." (On other projects, Tonnesen has used "cost-plus" contracts, which give him 16 percent of the total. Under such a formula, if the memorial cost $3 million to build, he'd get a $480,000 payday.)
Tonnesen clearly has Kader's full support. But Kader seems to understand that the cost, and the difficulty of construction, may badly slow the project or even doom it. "The first question most survivors ask is, 'Will it be done while I'm still alive?' And all I can tell them is, we'll try to do it as quickly as we can," he says.
"That's the nastiest part, in a way," he adds. "There's a side of me that says, 'Let's scale back, let's do an iconic visual that people can walk to and walk away.' But we want people to have an experience as opposed to see something. Whether that's realized or not, we'll find out."
For Tonnesen, there is no doubt. He shrugs away questions of cost; the survivors say he's promised that his friends will donate various materials. Even his family Christmas card thanks a local business for donating trees for the project. He's already sent at least one letter asking his professional and art contacts to donate money to the group.
He isn't making art anymore. "How can you compare visual art with genocide?" he asks.
Tonnesen does say he will "art-direct" another show of Burning Man photos, and Chiaroscuro director Lykins acknowledges it's a possibility. Other than that, Tonnesen says, his only other art project is Holocaust-related. He's been directing Romero in a series of stark black-and-white photographs of a dozen members of the survivors' association.
The photos show them, simply, as survivors. Tonnesen insisted: No makeup, no jewelry. He proudly proclaims the photographs "Avedon-esque."
Bill Tonnesen is a man who once vowed not to make great art but to become famous through art. So it's natural to wonder, is this Holocaust obsession no more than Tonnesen's latest stab at immortality?
Tonnesen is famously combative. But during the sole in-person interview he consented to, a two-hour conversation in his studio in February, he let the question drop without a sharp retort. "I would say my focus is on the memorial right now," he said simply.
Pilar Tonnesen says that her husband's Holocaust obsession is filling a void. "He needs something like that, where he pours all the energy he has into it," she says. "If not this, he'd be looking for something else."
Tonnesen doesn't see it quite that way. To him, today, the memorial is not one in a series of obsessions, from contemporary art to a 21st-century Falling Water. As he sees it now, it's the ultimate obsession.
He explains that he's at a "mature point" in his professional life, that all his experiences -- contemporary art, construction, landscape architecture -- have built to this moment.
"This is important," he says, jabbing one long finger. "Relatively speaking, these other things were not important at all.
"I feel like this is my chance to do something important before I die. What we're doing here has never been done before in the world, and I will not stop until I'm done."
