From Bharat Sir’s file

JEWISH MUSEUM

Daniel Libeskind in design of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, wanted to communicate the
historical struggle of the Jewish people. Every detail from the exterior to the interior has a
purpose of connecting the building with Judaism.

For Daniel Libeskind, the extension to the Jewish Museum at Berlin was much more than a
competition/commission; it was about establishing and securing an identity within Berlin,
which was lost during WWII. Conceptually, Daniel Libeskind wanted to express feelings of
absence, emptiness, and invisibility – expressions of disappearance of the Jewish Culture it
draws two lines of organization and relationship: a straight line that breaks into numerous
fragments and a zigzag that can continue indefinitely. Both are shown as elements that
separate and separate each other, building the empty and discontinuous space that crosses the
museum.It was the act of using architecture as a means of narrative and emotion providing
visitors with an experience of the effects of the Holocaust on both the Jewish culture and the
city of Berlin.The project begins to take its form from an abstracted Jewish Star of David that
is stretched around the site and its context. The form is established through a process of
connecting lines between locations of historical events that provide structure for the building
resulting in a literal extrusion of those lines into a “zig-zag” building form.

The Jewish Museum can only be accessed by moving through the Berlin Museum's main entrance,
down a staircase, and into a vertical cylindrical structure called "voided void“, it has no exterior
entrance or egress. The base of this cylinder presents three underground paths cutting it through all
three levels of the building. First one leads out to the E.T.A. Hoffmann Garden of Exile and
Emigration; second one to a stairway to exhibition halls; and the third ends at the Holocaust Tower.
The garden is paved with cobblestones and is tilted at a 17-degree angle, sets the viewer and the 49
monolithic concrete planters, off balance.

In it’s Memory Void, cast-iron faces are scattered thickly, almost discarded on the floor of the
wedge-shaped space.

The materials create a sense of a foreboding and claustrophobia particularly in the cylindrical
Holocaust Tower.

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Even though Libeskind’s extenstion appears as its own separate building, there is no formal
exterior entrance to the building. In order to enter the new museum extension one must
enter from the original Baroque museum in an underground corridor. A visitor must endure
the anxiety of hiding and losing the sense of direction before coming to a cross roads of
three routes. The three routes present opportunities to witness the Jewish experience
through the continuity with German history, emigration from Germany, and the
Holocaust. Libeskind creates a promenade that follows the “zig-zag” formation of the
building for visitors to walk through and experience the spaces within.

From the exterior, the interior looks as if it will be similar to the exterior perimeter;
however, the interior spaces are extremely complex. Libeskind’s formulated promenade
leads people through galleries, empty spaces, and dead ends. A significant portion o f the
extension is void of windows and difference in materiality.

Libeskind’s extension leads out into the Garden of Exile where once again the visitors feel
lost among 49 tall concrete pillars that are covered with plants. The overbearing pillars
make one lost and confused, but once looking up to an open sky there is a moment of
exaltation. Libeskind’s Jewish Museum is an emotional journey through history. The
architecture and the experience are a true testament to Daniel Libeskind’s ability to
translate human experience into an architectural composition.

To give substance to this process, the design recognizes several structuring aspects. The first is
to determine that physical vestiges are not the only guideline to follow in the development of the
project. Libeskind constructs an "irrational matrix" through a system of intertwined triangles that
refer to a compressed and distorted star. Understanding that certain writers, composers, artists
and poets acted as a link between the Jewish tradition and German history, drew on the city plan
binding lines between the sites where different personalities lived, generating a "unique
constellation of urban and cultural history of universal history. "

The void that crosses in a straight line the entire length of the zigzag is crossed on the second and
third level by small bridges that connect different rooms. The route presents a series of spaces
that can not be accessed, spatial representation that accentuates signs and absences.
On the outside, the new museum equals the height of the existing building, maintaining the existing
trees on the site through skilful design strategies. The facade is covered with steel and its color
varies due to the effects of oxidation. Each opening made in the skin responds to the linear matrix
that links the addresses of Jewish personalities.

Libeskind composes a three-dimensional alphabet to remember the absent community, through a

sequence that traces the traits of tradition, the pain of exile and the terror of the holocaust. The
external slits that cross the volume challenge the collective memory, mediating a scenography that
denounces a terrifying moment in the history of humanity.