Human-rights center proposed for Phila.

A low-slung, transparent human-rights education center designed by Moshe Safdie has been proposed for a prominent location on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, proponents announced yesterday.

A conceptual design for the trapezoidal glass structure, behind Nathan Rappaport's Holocaust memorial, was unveiled at a City Hall news conference hosted by Mayor Nutter and attended by Safdie and several Holocaust survivors.

Nutter paid homage to those survivors and noted that yesterday, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, was the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet Red Army. The litany of genocides over the decades, Nutter said, makes a human-rights education center almost essential.

The Philadelphia Holocaust Remembrance Foundation, backer of the project, has a $1, 80-year lease to the site, a 10,000-square-foot triangular peninsula at the Parkway and Arch and 16th Streets. The lease already has been approved by City Council and was negotiated by the old Fairmount Park Commission.

The city's new Parks and Recreation Commission, formed after dissolution of the Fairmount Park Commission, has no authority to rule on Parkway structures and no involvement in the current planning for the rights center. The city Art Commission, now the only body charged with publicly examining Parkway projects, has not yet taken up Safdie's design.

Jeffrey Schwartz, president of the Holocaust Remembrance Foundation, said no dollar figure had been attached to construction and no timetable had been established: "One thing we will not do is rush this project. . . . It's going to be driven by the community."

Joseph Smukler, chair of the foundation's board, said the city lease granted his organization a five-year "window of opportunity to raise the money."

Formed in 2005, the foundation first proposed renovating the site as a park and plaza with new street furniture, plantings, and a stylized version of Jerusalem's Western Wall, among other things. That plan was reviewed and approved by both the park commission and the Art Commission a few years ago.

In subsequent conversations with survivors, members of the Jewish community, and others, foundation officials learned that a park was not enough. "As receptive as they were to the concept of a park, the message we heard loud and clear was that a park would be nice, an education center would be used," said Schwartz.

Smukler said the impetus for the project stretches back to the 1964 installation of the Rappaport memorial, The Monument to the Six Million Jewish Martyrs, believed to be the first such Holocaust monument in North America. The proposed center, said Smukler, who was present 1964, "is the culmination of the promise made at that time, by people who were there, to develop and enhance that site."

Safdie's design envisions a low, lucent structure with a highly reflective hexagon within. During the day, he said, the center would almost shimmer into invisibility; at night, its interior glow would serve as a beacon.

Programming areas would be below street level, with most of the area under the site given over to a theater and small galleries. City officials said tests have determined that the site appears free of any underground obstructions.

Staff from Fairmount Park, now merged with the city Recreation Department, will review designs as they develop, but there will be no public review until the project is placed on the Art Commission schedule.

This is one of Boston-based Safdie's smallest projects, he said, and his second on the Parkway. His first, a $175 million addition to the Central Library of the Free Library, has been slowed by the economic downturn.

He said the center, "a place of memory, a place of reflection looking into the future, appealed to me." Though "tiny," he called it "very significant."