Musée Juif

Between the lines, by Daniel Libskind

“I did something I believed in… which was to transform the entire structure into discourse about German-Jewish history”

Link to the existing building

The collegienhaus and the new extension are linked through the central spine of the old building restoring the staircase to its original baroque position. Thus the collegienhaus is preserved in its autonomy and, at the same time, more fully tied to the new building. And in this way, the underground Jewish-Berlin collection services as “the interchange station” between the different levels of the museum and the collection itself. Fragments of the museum _ in the form of indeterminate closed/open voids _ lodge themselves in every part of the territory: dispersed traces suggestive of past and future public use. Therefore the link itself becomes _ as connection _ the structural key to the full integrations of underground galleries, restaurant, external fragments, extension, and disrupted interior.

Structure, Materials, Façade

Precast and cast-in-place concrete elements form a tube-like structure with a variable inclination. The project makes use of various cladding materials, including metal, glass and mosaics; the quality and control of illumination are especially emphasized. The façade is a richly textured, visually denatured, luminous surface designed to create tension between the experience of the hand and that of the eye.

Open Spaces and Parking

In the E.T.A. Hoffmann plaza, whose focus is the Mechanical Garden of Olympia, moving images are projected onto four planes, forty-nine cubes, one hundred ninety-six sufaces, and ninety-eight hidden facets. The spectacle, though oriented for thhe mueum-goer, can be observed by the people outside the museum and in the restaurant. The rotation of images includes: Altrani (a baroque staircase gently rising to the church); Navy (a children’s playground in the form of tall sailing ships); Versailles façade (closely cropped planting and topiary), Heidelberg castle (ruins jutting into the sky), Aleazar, sleeping ear to eternity); Freiburg Munster; St Basil’s Moscow (life-size wooden dots); Boscotercase (stone-pine forest); Museo Nazionale, Naples (a child holding out a bunch of freshly picked flowers); Florence Baptistery (an arm stretching for a fruit the remains beyond reach); Sky (a line, a maiden, a scale); Polar Sea.

The existing children’s playground and pedestrian paths and an anticipated bicycle path constitute a “fresh-air” corridor. Above-ground parking for fifty-three automobiles is situated on a reinforces grass field.

A museum for the city of Berlin must be a place where all citizens, those of the past, of the present, and of the future, discover their common heritage and individual hope. To this end, the museum form itself must be rethought to transcend the passive involvement of the viewer, it must actively confront change.

The extension of the Berlin Museum, with especial emphasis on housing the Jewish Museum, attempts to give voice to a common fate; common to both what is being and what is other than being. The museum must not only inspire poetry, music, drama, etc., but also give home to the contradictions of the ordered/disordered, the chosen/unchosen, the welcome/unwelcome, the vocal/silent. In this sense, the particular urban condition besomes the spiritual site wherein the nexus of Berlin’s destiny is at once mirrored, fractured, and transformed.

The past fatality of the German-Jewish cultural relation to Berlin is enacted now in the realm of the invisible. It is the invisibility that must be made visible. This project seeks to reconnect Berlin to its won history, which must never be forgottem. Great figures in the drama of Berlin who have acted as bearers of an immense hope and anguish are traced into the lincaments of this museum: Heinrich Kleist, Rafael Varnhagen, Walter Benjamin, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Arnold Schonberg, Paul Celan. They spiritually affirm the permanent human tension polarized between the impossibility of the system and the impossibility of giving up the search for higher order. Tragic premonition (Kleist), sublimated assimilation (Varnhagen)=, inadequate ideologiy (Benjamin), mad science (Hoffmann), displaces understanding (Schleiermacher), inaudible music (schönberg), last words (Celan); these constitute the critical dimensions that this works as discourse seekes to transgress.

The new extension is conceived as an emblem wherein the invisible, the void, has made itself apparent as such: Void/invisible. These structural features have been gathered in the space of the city and laid hare in the in an architecture where the unnamed remains in the name that keeps still.

The exsting building is tied to the extension underground, preserving the contradictory autonomy of each on the surface, while binding them together below. Like Berlin and it’s jews, the common burden _ this insupportable, immeasurable, unshareable burden _ is outlined in the exchanges between two architectures and forms that are not reciprocal, that cannot be exchanged for each other.

The urban, architectural, and functional paradox of closed/open, stable/added, classical/modern, museum/muse can co longer be reconciled through some theoretical utopia or presuppose the fictitious stability of state or power or organization. By contrast the paradox presupposes the unchanging, that is, change proceeding directly out of chat would exclude changing attitudes and unchanging opinions alike.

All this amounts to two broken lines: one straight but fragmented; the other fortuous but continuing into infinity. As the lines develop themselves through this limited-infinite “dialectic”, they also fall apart _ become disengaged _ and reveal themselves as separate, so that the void that runs centrally through what is continuous materializes outside as something that has been ruined, or rather, as the solid as something of independent structure, as a voided void.

Fragmentation and splintering mark the coherence of the ensemble, for it has come undone in order to become accessible, functionally and intellectually. The torn shards inside and out never existed as some prior whole (either in the ideal Berlin or in the real one) not can they be reassembled in some hypothetical future. The fragmentation is the spacing, the separation brought about by the history of time and as the fulfillment in time of what is no longer there.

The absolute event of history, the Holocaust, whit its concentration camps and annihilation _ the incineration of meaningful development for Berlin and for humanity _ shatters this place while bestowing a gift of

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