Dead End In Berlin
Libeskind’s Jewish museum
If one considers the glass dome over the Rigsdag building to be Berlin’s most exciting architectural experience, then the Jewish museum must represent the most claustrophobic and traumatic. While there can be no doubt that these two buildings are among the most outstanding and transcendent realizations here at the turn of the century, the Rigsdag points toward democracy and transparency, whereas the Jewish Museum points so strongly back to Hitler’s Entlösung, that for the client, it is almost seems like German self‑flagellation.
The Jewish Museum opened in January 1999, and until the spring of 2001 stood empty except for the office and administrative functions on the top floor of the buildings four stories. The main entrance to the aggressive, hexagonal building is underground, via the adjoining Collegienhaus (now the city museum). From Lindenstrasse, there is also a door at street level, which has the character of a staff entrance.
Seen from an architecture historical point of view, the most interesting feature here is the architect for the museum, Daniel Libeskind, and the results of his many years of work with the avant-garde and architectural deconstruction. As opposed to the other leaders of deconstructivism, the Polish born Libeskind has managed to create an extremely original and consistently “new” architectural idiom, where the walls do not necessarily have to be vertical, nor building technical rationality a virtue. Since the early 1980's, in an intriguing way, Libeskind has raised fundamental doubts about the conventional practice of architecture. However, as opposed to Frank Gehry’s visual-sculptural play with forms and materials, Libeskind has preferred a more analytical-aesthetical approach to architecture.
Libeskind won the international design competition in 1989 for the Jewish Museum among 165 proposals, with a bold concept that had a lightning bolt formed building mass in glaring contrast to the neighboring, Philipp Gerlach’s sedate main building (1735) with its mansard roof. The snaking building shape presumably symbolizes a shattered “deconstructed” Star of David - and with its many directions, indicates the addresses of the city’s historically famous Germans and Jews, like von Kleist, Heine, Mies van der Rohe, Walter Benjamin and Arnold Schönberg. The original proposal had sloping facades, but considering the fact that neither the plans, window band nor ceiling finishes had perpendicular of parallel directions, the project budget forced the architect to raise the facades to a vertical position.
Seen from the exterior, the height of the museum is surprisingly consistent, but aside from this, all “simplicity” ceases to exist: The facade openings as well as the spatial organization are characterized by intricate intersections and entanglements. And throughout the building’s zigzagging main direction, six “vacuums” arise according to a strict linear system, that is, an analysis of the plan would reveal that these empty incisions are controlled by a mutual, yet extremely disjointed sequence. The empty spaces can be interpreted as references to Arnold Schönberg’s unfinished opera “Moses and Aron”- or as mementos of the lives of the Berlin Jews that were so brutally interrupted during the 1940's by the Third Reich. Toward east, the complex runs into the stylized Exile and Emigration garden with 7 x 7 hollow concrete pipes, of which those on the perimeter (48 ) contain soil from Berlin, while those in the middle have soil from Jerusalem.
The number (19)48 refers to the year that Israel was established, and the center column - to Berlin itself. The sloping concrete pipes rest perpendicular to the sloping base. This is because Libeskind believes that architecture should be experienced with the feet as well as the head. The sloping floor in the garden causes the visitor to loose orientation - like those in exile. On the other hand, the willow bushes growing up from the concrete pipes represent a slim hope for future relations between the Jews and the Germans.
With its introverted and specific “history,” the Jewish Museum renounces any notions about how buildings should be built or how they should appear. And the first impression of the result is seductive and hard to comprehend. But perhaps the baby has been cast away with the bath water, if the buildings only functional value is its associations to the Jew’s claustrophobic experience of being caught in a trap.
Seen from the exterior, the museum’s narrow band of windows seems extremely fascinating. It’s almost as though a gigantic scalpel was employed to destabilize the zinc facades to such a degree that the building’s framework and its cladding just manage to hang together with a clearly exposed vulnerability. The modest length of the window band ensures that the corpus of the building continues to be experienced as the primary form. However the consequences for the interior behind all this, is that all the spaces, to an alarming degree, will be experienced as hermetically sealed.
The museum’s zinc cladding consists basically of vertical panels with oblique cut ends, so the direction of the panel intersections rises evenly across the entire facade thus eliminating any traces of conventional horizontality. When one considers how technically demanding it must have been to mount 12,500 square meters of ridged paneling, perforated by 1,200 meters of flashing around irregular, oblique window openings, 10,500 ventilation openings, 500 down spout openings, 600 roof flashing elements and 500 meters of base molding, one can understand why the building cost as much as it did!
After having seen this vast collection of complicated details carried out with a high level of German craftsmanship, despite the architect’s provocative theoretical design, one can only be impressed by the client’s forbearance. But regardless of how tempting it can be to experience deconstruction realized at uncompromising full speed and thus contest the general banality of contemporary building, one can’t help but consider to what degree the museum will be able to continue this architectural manifestation? It is one thing to demonstrate how complicated and “irrational” it can be to realize a project by one of the world’s most enthusiastic and talented architects. But it is something quite different to register possible potentials in a greater perspective for the development of building technoloy in the near future (and in my opinion this does not include isolated, tactless imitations like that of the Melbourne-office, Ashton Raggatt McDougall’s Gallery of Aboriginal Australia). My guess is that in the future we will experience a number of international, well-situated clients who will be interested in acquiring a Libeskind-building, primarily motivated by the PR-value of obtaining a recognized oddity.
Rather than being the epitome of architecture, the Jewish Museum appears more like a hollow sculpture or a "monument,” which can only be experienced from inside in a few exceptional areas. If the fenestration had been at a human scale, it would have been a building on architecture’s premises. Instead, the architect chose to orchestrate an introverted spacial experience, where with a feeling of anemic oppression, it seems only to commemorate the victims of Nazism.
Each year, throughout the world, there are constant cases of massacres in the area of human rights. If these injustices are to be permanently contained in our common memory, I would personally prefer Pingusson’s unusual and humble monument (from 1962) for deported French resistance members on the point of Paris’ Ile de la Cité instead of Libeskind’s mammoth performance.
Flemming Skude
FACTS:The Jewish Museum has a gross area of 12,500 square meters, and opened in the spring of 2001.
