ARCHITECTURE MONOGRAPHS

Berlin's Jewish Museum
A Personal Tour With Daniel Libeskind

Daniel Libeskind is one of the most brilliant and influential architects of our time. Although often considered an iconoclast, his spiral design was recently chosen for the extension to the prestigious Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He is the founder of Architecture Intermundium, which "functions as a laboratory for those interested in the life of Architecture independent of office routine and institutionalized curricula."

The son of Holocaust survivors, Libeskind was born in Lodz, Poland in 1946. His first training was on the accordion, an instrument that he mastered at an early age and is considered a virtuoso. As a young man he performed at Carnegie Hall with Iszak Perlman and Vladimir Ashkenazy. Later he went on to study architecture under Peter Eisenman at Cooper Union and to complete graduate studies at Essex University in England. For his first 17 years as an architect he did not see any of his designs realized. During this time he drew, theorized and developed his own conceptual approach to the field while teaching at Cranbrook Academy and lecturing to audiences around the world. His approach to architecture is highly intellectualized and philosophical. He considers architecture to be much more than the structuring of material surfaces: "I'm not interested in making objects. I want to communicate the vastness and also the legacy of things that are not completely visible. Contrary to public opinion the flesh of architecture is not cladding, insulation and structure, but the substance of the individual in society and history; a figuration of the inorganic, the body and the soul."1

The Jewish Museum which is an extension to the Berlin Museum, was his first commission and is the subject of the film, Berlin's Jewish Museum: A Personal Tour with Daniel Libeskind. In this film Libeskind and architecture critic Alan Riding discuss the theories behind the architect's vision as they tour the Museum itself.

The Jewish Museum in Berlin is officially known as the "Extension of the Berlin Museum with the Jewish Museum Department", but Libeskind refers to it as "Between the Lines." Libeskind explains "…it is a project about two lines of thinking, organization and relationship. One is a straight line, but broken into many fragments, the other is a tortuous line, but continuing indefinitely. These two lines develop architecturally and programmatically through a limited but definite dialogue." 2

The museum is built around the concept of the void. The broken Star of David, or lightening bolt shape of the building is interrupted by structures that Libeskind calls "voids". These voids represent the loss of the Jewish presence and culture in Berlin as a result of the Holocaust. In the film Libeskind elaborates, "The void is one of the organizing features of the building…it is the cut through German history, Jewish history. It is the extermination of Jews and the deportation of Jews not only from this city but from Germany and from Europe. So that is the central but not very apparent line which organizes all of the seven spaces which stand around it in the zigzagging form of the building." The void represents the erasure of Jewish history.

A grand Baroque structure, the old Supreme Court building, serves as the entrance to the Museum. A void has been cut into the old building through all of its floors, and it is through this physical embodiment of nothingness that visitors can access the new extension with its exhibits of Jewish culture and heritage. This is just one example of the simple way that Libeskind represents via the architectural form the inextricable link between Berlin's past, represented in this case by the Baroque building, and the history of the Jews in Berlin.

The architectural plan of the Jewish Museum is conceived around a four-fold theme. First, as a way of linking the Jewish tradition with the history of Berlin, Libeskind plotted the addresses of famous Jewish artists, composers and poets of the city such as Henrich von Kleist, Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Celan and Walter Benjamin. This "irrational matrix" resembles a broken star and is the basis of the "zig-zag" shape. The second dimension reflects the loss of music; specifically Schoenberg's unfinished opera Moses and Aaron, which was composed in the neighborhood of the Museum. Libeskind mirrors the end of sound in the proportions and structure of the void. The third aspect involves missing Jewish Berliners. Prior to starting the project Libeskind found a book called Gedenkbuch that lists the names, birth dates, dates of deportation, and places of murder of those deported from Berlin. He looked for the names of all of the Berliners and where they had died. Finally, in the fourth dimension of the project Libeskind used a guidebook to Berlin, "Einbahnstrasse" that describes the one way streets, and the 60 stops along the map of Berlin. He drew the distorted Star of David along these stops to organize the buildings upon the matrix of Berlin.

1. Newhouse, Victoria. "Designs that Reach Out and Grab", New York Times, June 4, 2000.

2. Libeskind, from a lecture at Hannover University, December 5, 1989 as quoted in Daniel Libeskind Jewish Museum, Ernst & Sohn, 1992.