The Spiritual Architecture of Daniel Libeskind
Building on the Shipwreck of History
Anyone who thinks architecture is boring, unsexy and pretentious should look again. A new kind of architecture has emerged, writ large by the likes of Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaus, Bernard Tschumi and, at 55, new-kid-on-the-block Daniel Libeskind, that has exploded the modernist box, and the tyranny of the right angle, to create previously unseen shapes from unconventional materials. Think of the Guggenheim Bilbao. The curvaceous, billowing titanium surface is so seductive it has an unprecedented popularity. 1.3 million visitors flocked to the museum in its first year, and most were there to see the building rather than the art inside. Just about every small city wants a landmark building and $200 million is a small price to pay to become a cultural destination.
At the moment, Daniel Libeskind’s fragmented and shard- like deconstuctivist style is in great demand and anything the celebrity architect does is news. Libeskind is perhaps the world’s most radical working architect. He still has a reputation as a formidable intellectual, but he also has a gift for being able to make his complex ideas, and revolutionary architecture, appealing and accessible. Until recently, he was content to head the prestigious architecture department at Cranbrook Academy in Michigan, USA, preferring a career in the academe, rather than suffer the impracticalities and compromise inherent in building. He was hugely admired as a theorist and considered king of paper architecture. It didn’t matter to Libeskind that he had no buildings because for him architecture is a state of mind.
His design for the Jewish Museum in Berlin changed all and, since its unveiling in 1999, Libeskind has enjoyed an unexpected rise to architectural celebrity. With his first building, he proved himself capable of an architecture that is visceral, emotional and intellectual. The Jewish Museum is now being referred to as Libeskindbau, and there is talk of the ‘Bilbao effect’ taking place in London where he is designing the extension to the Victoria & Albert Museum and in Manchester where his Imperial War Museum North (IWMN) is under construction. Libeskind is now extremely busy an has many impressive commissions on the drawing board: the Bremen Philharmonic Hall in Germany; Jewish Museum San Francisco, U.S.A; the JVC University, Guadalajara, Mexico; Maurice Wohl Convention Centre, Bar Ilan University, Tel Aviv; Atelier Weil, a private atelier/gallery in Mallorca, Spain; Corporate Headquarters for Wohnbau Nordwest in Dresden, Germany; and the Extension to the Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado, to name a few.] While his practice includes everything from shopping malls to opera sets, he is carving a niche for building innovative cultural institutions.
It used to be enough for a museum to be stylish [or affecting or visceral], but in the 21st C. it has to be emblematic. Libeskind challenges the very nature of the museum. His designs are not about hanging famous paintings on diagonal walls, but aim to give a new physiognomy to the building in a way that forges a new relationship between the form and content. In the case of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the building is the exhibition. The museum officially opens to the public on September 11, 2001 [with a permanent historic exhibition, as well as “The Gallery of the Missing” by artist Via Lewandowsky (who was artist-in-residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts)], but since its completion in 1999 the museum has attracted huge crowds even when it was empty. This ‘emptiness’ speaks about the absence of Jewish culture in Berlin since the Nazi era, those who died in the Holocaust, and the subsequent generations of ‘unborn’, whose voices will never be heard.
Moving through them is a bit like being in a fun house that challenges your perceptions, or a psycho-analytic adventure that takes you on an inner journey to a spiritual place that elicits a profound emotional response. Libeksind describes his design process: “I’m interested in the dreamlike and almost invisible progress of the relationship of architecture to the human soul. My first approach to the design of a building is a search for the inaudible voices or prophecy incarnated in each segment of time and place. The form of the building emerges out of a myriad of spiritual adventures, becomes quantifiable, and materialises as it rejoins the issues of everyday life.”
At the very least, he hopes he is building cultural icons that will stand the test of time and the Jewish Museum is remarkable. The project has been on the drawing boards for nearly a quarter of a century and took a decade to build. The impressive sleek building clad in a gray zinc facade is punctuated with broken crosses and irregular shards of windows that seem to explode like a shattered Star of David. These mysterious incisions are topographical lines, an invisible matrix that point to addresses of Berlin Jews who once lived near the site. The zinc exterior will oxidise over time to become part of the visual and cultural fabric of Berlin, a resurrection of Jewish culture in the city we associate with its destruction.
Entering the museum, you are drawn in by the architecture. The elongated, sharply folded building appears impenetrable and in fact the “invisible” entrance is next door in the Collegienhaus, the former Prussian baroque courthouse, which is now the Berlin Museum. [The architectural styles of the two buildings are so different that no one would suspect that they are connected underground.]
A black slate staircase plunges into the basement, criss-crosses underground and enters the new building that rises up like a three-dimensional lightning bolt of concrete, steel and zinc from a jagged floor plan. Three underground ‘streets’ each lead to a singular destination, the Garden of Exile, the Holocaust Tower, and the Stair of Continuity which is a seemingly endless stairway that gives access to all five levels of the museum.
The ‘Garden of Exile’ is an outdoor forest of concrete slabs rising at unsettling angles that represents the exile and emigration of Jews from Germany. [Forty-eight columns are filled with the earth from Berlin signifying the birth of the state of Israel in 1948; and one filled with earth from Jerusalem represents the city of Berlin.] The sloping ground/surface is disorienting and makes you feel a bit nauseous, like being on a boat—a physical sensation of how unsettling it is to be culturally adrift, in exile. [It is also an appropriate metaphor for what Libeskind refers to as the “shipwreck of history”. His own family arrived by boat to New York and the reference to the skyscrapers of the New World seems implicit.] The museum speaks to us kinesthetically and a sense of rootlessness is felt in our bodies; as if we all travelers whose route is fragmented, whose experience is shattered.
Another ‘road’ leads to a dead end. A heavy metal door closes behind and the 27-metre-high, unheated, raw concrete shaft of the ‘Holocaust Tower’ feels very remote. A delicate shard of light penetrates the darkness. It is the kind of light, Libeskind says, “that Jews recalled from the crowded cattle trucks that drove them to the concentration camps.”
At the physical and metaphorical heart of the museum is the ‘Void’—a realm that attempts to give voice to something unspeakable. Walking along the jagged corridors, you pass through a space that feels strangely cold and isolated. Slicing through the museum is a disconnected straight line—an eloquent backbone—that organises the museum, yet it is not part of the museum. It embodies a sense of loss, an absence, for that which has vanished but which must still be made present.
It is this kind of emotionally resonant space, laced with historical references, that makes Libeskind a brilliant narrative architect. It was his intention that the museum engage the visitor in such a way that when moving through the space they would find it not just a container for objects, but is something that coerces them viscerally and intellectually.
Philosopher Theodor Adorno said there could be no art after the Holocaust. Like him, Libeskind sees the Holocaust as more than just another catastrophic event in time; it was a total reorientation of physical and moral space that shattered the contemporary psyche. If there is a thread that runs through his work, it is best expressed by his phrase “The Trace of the Unborn,” which refers to the Holocaust and to that which remains forever absent—those who can never again be and a future that remains unborn. At the same time history is not over.
If Libeskind seems like an architect of angst, specifically of Jewish tragedy, it is because he suffered the loss of most of his family during the Holocaust. Consequently, his designs for Jewish-related projects are not something he has to research or invent. His sensitivity to these issues, understanding of history and deep humanity, are so profound that he even persuaded German officials to allow him to transform Sachsenhausen, the former administrative headquarters for the Nazi death camps, (and an embarrassment for more than 50 years) into an urban park. His design for the park integrates the remains of the Nazi buildings which, like ghosts, give evidence of the machinery of brutality.
The Imperial War Museum-North (IWM-N) is part of a redevelopment scheme to update Manchester’s bleak Coronation Street image and transform the city that spawned the Manchester United Football Club, rave culture and Brit Pop into a cultural destination. When completed in 2002, the $150 million IWM-N will stand on Salford Quays, in Trafford, across the Manchester Ship Canal from Michael Wilford’s spectacular Lowry Centre.
The IWM-N looks like an exploded globe, in which three interlocking shards, or ‘traces of history’ as Libeskind thinks of them, rise from the scattered remnants of a giant sphere to reassemble as an emblem of conflict. The impressive shape is already visible on the horizon, and the skeletons of exposed steelwork make it possible to see the complex geometric forms. Libeskind’s design deals with the ravages of war on contemporary culture. “I wanted to create a building that people would find interesting to visit yet reflects the serious nature of a war museum,” he explains. “I have imagined the world broken into fragments and taken the pieces to form a building: three shards that together represent conflict on land, in the air, and on water.”
The dramatic entrance to the museum is through the ‘Air Shard,’ a 55 m high lattice of steelwork, clad in aluminum, in which planes and bombs will be suspended. The arrival zone will be open to the elements and the adventurous can take a lift—disconcertingly angled at 4º—up to the 30m high ‘Water Shard,’ which forms a viewing platform that sweeps out over the Manchester Ship Canal. The ‘Earth Shard’ is an irregularly shaped, 50m long structure that visitors will enter from what will feel like the top of the world.
A narrow staircase rises from the ground floor lobby and leads them out on to ‘the North Pole’, as it is called, the point from which the floor curves away. The domed floor curves to a 2m drop at the sides and the smooth gradation challenges the viewer’s perception by producing strange optical effects on the verticality of the objects around it. The further away from the Pole you move, the steeper the floor will slope, and from the far side you will only be able to see people’s heads moving about on the other side. If that isn’t sufficiently disorienting, a series of audio/visual projections on the walls of the exhibition space called ‘Image Totale’ will immerse visitors in a simulation of a war zone.
For Libeskind one of the most intriguing things about the 21st century is that the period will not be about finding but about losing ourselves deeper in the history that created the future. We may not be in a position to judge their historical significance of Libeskind’s buildings, or whether what the architect says about them true. What matters is the way these buildings function as places and how we interact with them. Walking through the Jewish Museum in Berlin -- a significant example of his work and his intent --is like being in a cathedral, a sacred Mayan site, or an ancient stone circle. The building makes us reflect for a moment and feel a sense of something larger and outside ourselves. It renders us silent out of respect, and then from that unfathomable space, inaudible voices can be heard. Libeskind’s architecture speaks resonantly to the soul.
“Building on the Shipwreck of History: The Architecture of Daniel Libeskind.”
BorderCrossings, Vol. 20. No. 4. Issue No. 80. 2001. © 2001