JEWISH MUSUEM

SHLOKA RANGANATH
1BQ19AT090
 DANIEL LIBESKIND
• Daniel Libeskind (born May 12, 1946) is a Polish-American architect, artist,
professor and set designer of Polish Jewish descent. Libeskind founded Studio
Daniel Libeskind in 1989 with his wife, Nina, and is its principal design architect
• Libeskind's work has been exhibited in major museums and galleries around the
world, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Bauhaus Archives, the Art
Institute of Chicago, and the Centre Pompidou.
• On February 27, 2003, Libeskind won the competition to be the master plan
architect for the reconstruction of the World Trade Center site in Lower
Manhattan
• Libeskind began his career as an architectural theorist and professor, holding
positions at various institutions around the world.
• His practical architectural career began in Milan in the late 1980s, where he
submitted to architectural competitions and also founded and directed
Architecture Intermedium, Institute for Architecture & Urbanism.
 CLASSIC FEATURES
• His designs combine today's modern architecture with his
Polish background.
• Libeskind always considers how he can add his own twist
into a typical structure to make it unique.
• His architecture is the perfect combination between
organic and sophisticated.
• Daniel Libeskind is renowned for his ability to evoke
cultural memory in buildings
• Drastic angles, strong geometries and seamless transitions
between spaces are observed in his buildings
JEWISH MUSUEM
 INTRODUCTION
• The Jewish Museum Berlin (Jüdisches Museum Berlin) is one of the largest Jewish
Museums in Europe.
• In three buildings, two of which are new additions specifically built for the museum
by architect Daniel Libeskind, two millennia of German-Jewish history are on display
in the permanent exhibition as well as in various changing exhibitions.
• German-Jewish history is documented in the collections, the library and the archive,
in the computer terminals at the museum's Rafael Roth Learning Center, and is
reflected in the museum's program of events.
• The museum was opened in 2001 and is one of Berlin's most frequented museums
(almost 720,000 visitors in 2012).
• Opposite the building ensemble, the Academy of the Jewish Museum Berlin was built
- also after a design by Libeskind - in 2011/2012 in the former flower market hall.
• The archives, library, museum education department, and a lecture hall can all be
found in the academy
 CONCEPT

• Daniel Libeskind's design, which was created a year

before the Berlin Wall came down, was based on three
insights
• it is impossible to understand the history of Berlin
without understanding the enormous contributions
made by its Jewish citizens
• the meaning of the Holocaust must be integrated into
the consciousness and memory of the city of Berlin
• for its future, the City of Berlin and the country of
Germany must acknowledge the erasure of Jewish life in
its history
 DESIGN
• The Jewish Museum Berlin is located in what was West Berlin before the fall of the Wall.
• Essentially, it consists of two buildings - a baroque old building, the "Kollegienhaus"(that formerly
housed the Berlin Museum) and a new, deconstructivism-style building by Libeskind.
• The two buildings have no visible connection above ground.
• The Libeskind building, consisting of about 161,000 square feet (15,000 square meters),is a twisted
zig-zag and is accessible only via an underground passage from the old building.
• A line of "Voids," empty spaces about 66 feet (20 m) tall, slices linearly through the entire building.
Such voids represent "That which can never be exhibited when it comes to Jewish Berlin history:
Humanity reduced to ashes.
• "In the basement, visitors first encounter three intersecting, slanting corridors named the "Axes.“
• Here a similarity to Libeskind's first building - the Felix Nussbaum Haus - is apparent, which is also
divided into three areas with different meanings. In Berlin, the three axes symbolize three paths of
Jewish life in Germany - continuity in German history, emigration from Germany, and the Holocaust
• The first axis(Axis of Continuity) ends at a long staircase that leads to the permanent exhibition.
• The second axis(Axis of Emigration) connects the Museum proper to the E.T.A.Hoffmann
Garden, or The Garden of Exile, whose foundation is tilted.
• The Garden's oleaster grows out of reach, atop 49 tall pillars. The Garden of Exile is reached
after leaving the axes. The whole garden is on a 12° gradient and disorients visitors, giving them
a sense of the total instability and lack of orientation experienced by those driven out of
Germany.
• The third axis(Axis of Holocaust) leads from the Museum to the Holocaust Tower, a 79foot (24
m) tall empty silo.
• The bare concrete Tower is neither heated nor cooled, and its only light comes from a small slit
in its roof.
• The Jewish Museum Berlin was Libeskind's first major international success.
• 10 000 faces punched out of steel are distributed on the ground of the Memory Void, the only
"voided" space of the Libeskind Building that can be entered.
• Visitors are invited to walk on the faces and listen to the sounds created by the metal sheets, as
they clang and rattle against one another.
• Zig-zag best describes the form of the Jewish Museum's New Building.
• The architect Daniel Libeskind's design is based on two linear structures which, combined, form the body
of the building.
• The first line is a winding one with several kinks while the second line cuts through the whole building.
• At the intersections of these lines are empty spaces - "Voids" - which rise vertically from the ground floor
of the building up to the roof. Libeskind imagines the continuation of both lines throughout the city of
Berlin and beyond.
• The façade of the Libeskind Building barely enables conclusions to be drawn as to the building's interior,
the division of neither levels nor rooms being apparent to the observer.
• Nevertheless, the positioning of the windows - primarily narrow slits - follows a precise matrix.
• During the design process, the architect Daniel Libeskind plotted the addresses of prominent Jewish and
German citizens on a map of pre-war Berlin and joined the points to form an "irrational and invisible
matrix" on which he based the language of form, the geometry and shape of the building.
• The positioning of windows in the New Building was also based on this network of connections.
• The whole of the New Building is coated in zinc, a material that has a long tradition in Berlin's
architectural history. Over the years, the untreated alloy of titanium and zinc will oxidize and change color
through exposure to light and weather.
• The Voids represent the central structural element of the New
Building and the connection to the Old Building.
• From the Old Building, a staircase leads down to the basement
through a Void of bare concrete which joins the two buildings.
• Five cavernous Voids run vertically through the New Building.
• They have walls of bare concrete, are not heated or air-
conditioned and are largely without artificial light, quite separate
from the rest of the building.
• On the upper levels of the exhibition, the Voids are clearly visible
with black exterior walls.
MATERIALS
• The facades are made of concrete with an outer sheet metal. This
layer is made of zinc and titanium panels placed diagonally
THANK YOU