Holocaust Museum Houston first opened in March 1996 to keep the stories of the Holocaust alive and in two decades grew to become an important stop in Houston’s highly lauded Museum District. A two-year $34 million expansion unveiled in 2019 more than doubled the facility’s square footage, took the original building from one story to three, and added outdoor gathering and event spaces to create a footprint that encompasses an entire city block. Today, the new Holocaust Museum Houston is the nation’s fourth-largest Holocaust museum and first to be fully bilingual in English and Spanish, allowing the museum to welcome more than 175,000 visitors annually and to significantly broaden its community outreach and impact.

M2L was the landscape architect on the large renovation, working with architect PGAL. Outdoor additions included a 175-seat amphitheater, a garden patio and a commemorative wall with updated landscaping and lighting across the campus. LEED-Certified renovations included credits from a water-efficient landscape irrigation system. M2L’s designs paid homage to one of the museum’s most prominent displays. Known as the “Butterfly Project,” the dramatic exhibition is a two-story kaleidoscope of 1,500 acrylic butterflies hanging in the museum’s entry, each representing 1,000 of the 1.5 million children who perished in the Holocaust. M2L designers tied the poignant butterfly theme into the landscape designs by incorporating the caterpillar’s curled shape into landscape forms and materials throughout the project.