Description

This unusual project, the first large building of Libeskind to be actually built, not only approaches the limits of architectural representation, but has also contributed significantly to the decisive change that this museum has undergone as far as its content is concerned. Originally planned as an extension for the Jewish section of the Berlin Museum, the semantically laden architecture soon became the crucial vehicle for the eventually successful claim of Berlin’s Jewish community to an autonomous museum, even if it was bound up with the history of the city.

Libeskind’s architecture, whose ground plan brings to mind a flash of lightning, is an extended volume multiply fragmented that is intended to describe metaphorically the dense interpenetration of Berlin’s history with the history of Berlin’s Jewish population. The dialog between two lines, each doubled and multiply overlapping, is the artistic means of rendering visible that which is invisible and translating it into spatial sequences and movements. While one line, interpretable as the backbone of the building, runs straight but is fragmented in many places, the other one zigzags across it again and again, symbolizing the changing course of German and Jewish history, inseparably intertwined with each other. At the interfaces voids are created to focus the fundamental idea of this theoretically brilliantly founded architecture, “to build the museum around an empty space,” in which the invisible manifests itself as a sign of absent Jewish presence in Berlin.

The lightning metaphor that can be read in the ground plan – already implemented by Libeskind in 1988 in the “Fireline” project – is capable of expressing as spatial formula not only catastrophe and forgetting, but also memory, a central category in Jewish religion that is always linked to hope. The fact that visitors only experience this fractal ground plan figure as a labyrinthine interlinking of routes and spaces dramatically staged in an interplay of light and darkness does nothing to detract from the validity of this emblematic conception, whose unique, almost cabbalistic iconography is based on an extraordinarily complex matrix of meanings. An oblong hexagram that can be seen as a compressed and distorted Star of David resulted out of the imaginary lines that connect the (literal) addresses of important Berlin intellectuals who are considered to be binding links between German and Jewish culture. A deliberately symbolic figure, the Star of David is called upon to explain the form of the ground plan, as is Walter Benjamin’s “Einbahnstraße” [One-Way Street], interpreted by the architect as an “urban apocalypse,” whose structure dictates the number of building sections. Libeskind’s architecture reflects Benjamin’s conception of history, which counters continuity with the dynamics of the dialectic, just as much as it does the boundary manifested in Arnold Schönberg’s unfinished opera “Moses and Aaron” between that which can be sung and that which can only be said. For the architect – who has repeatedly grappled theoretically with the relationship between imagination and architectural space – the spatial equivalent for this lies in the relation between the visible and the invisible.

No matter how one answers the question as to whether it was the architecture that actually brought forth the complex concept for the museum’s content or whether it was adapted from the specific formal language of the architect, in the circulation and staging of the spatial sequences, visitors have it impressed upon them that this architecture, whose exterior clad with zinc sheets is pierced by window slits and openings in the form of splinters in analogy to the outlines of the ground plan is not simply a theoretical building, but instead an expressive experiential space. Connected underground with the Berlin Museum, an old triple-winged Baroque building, Libeskind’s museum is accessible exclusively from the latter by means of a dimly lit ceremonial stairway, which is again to be understood metaphorically – it is to remind us of the degree to which Jewish and non-Jewish history are inseparably interwoven. Instead of a clear spatial orientation, one arrives at a point where three routes cut across each other at angles, of which one, called the Axis of Exile, leads out of the building and into the Garden of Exile and Emigration, a tilted surface populated bizarrely by 49 not quite vertical concrete stones. This is meant to offer the corporeal correspondence to the disquiet and disorientation of emigration. A second route, the Holocaust Axis, ends as a cul-de-sac in a high, acutely angled tower – dramatically lit from above – with bare walls of exposed concrete. Its emptiness as the embodiment of absence leaves one speechless. The longest of these subterranean roads eventually leads to the narrow main stairway (implying hope for a continuity reaching into the future), which, cut through by diagonal concrete struts and rhythmicized effectively by narrow bands of light, links the three main floors with each other. Here, a circuit dramatised by narrowing, darkening, broadening, and lightening – again, pregnant with meaning – leads through the exhibition rooms. These are all laid out the same way on each level, and their numerous, mostly small-scale exhibits from daily life generate a unique atmosphere oscillating between pathos and banality, the result of this architecture’s ambivalence between museum and memorial.

wettbewerbe aktuell 9/1989, pp. 535-548 and 9/1998, pp. 93-98 • archithese 5/1989, pp. 60-66 (Gerhard Ullmann; Daniel Libeskind) • Bauwelt 32/1989, pp. 1467-1473 • Architectural Design 3-4/1990, pp. 62-77 and 7-8/1990, pp. 26-29 • Alexander Tzonis/Liane Lefaivre, Architecture in Europe since 1968, London, 1992, pp. 290-293 • Kristin Feireiss (ed.), Daniel Libeskind. Erweiterung des Berlin Museums mit Abteilung Jüdisches Museum, Berlin, 1992 • ARCH+ 131 4/1996, pp. 56-61 • Deutsche Bauzeitung 11/1996, pp. 52-107 (Reinhart Wustlich; François Burkhardt; Luis Fernández-Galiano; Ernst Hubeli; Bjørn Larsen) • Techniques et Architecture 431/1997, pp. 34-39 (Jean-François Pouisse) • Architektur Jahrbuch 1998, Frankfurt, 1998, pp. 114-121 (Volker Fischer) • Victoria Newhouse, Towards a New Museum, New York, 1998, pp. 235-239 • Elke Dorner, Daniel Libeskind. Jüdisches Museum Berlin, Berlin, 1999 • Bernhard Schneider, Daniel Libeskind. Jewish Museum Berlin. Between the Lines, Munich/London/New York, 1999 • Deutsche Bauzeitschrift 6/1999, pp. 126-129 • Domus 820/1999, pp. 32-37 (Marco de Michelis) • Luca Basso Peressut, musei. architetture 1990-2000, Milan, 1999, pp. 256-265 • Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani/Angeli Sachs (eds.), Museums for a New Millennium, Munich/London/New York, 1999, pp. 100-107 (Angeli Sachs) • Jüdisches Museum Berlin. Architekt Daniel Libeskind, Amsterdam/Dresden, 2000 • Rolf Schneider, Jüdisches Museum Berlin (Die Neuen Architekturführer No. 2), Berlin, 2002

---

Originally published in: Paul von Naredi-Rainer, Museum Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2004.