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Daniel Libeskind

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Page 1: Daniel Libeskind
Page 2: Daniel Libeskind

JEWISH MUSEUM, BERLIN.

“The Jewish Museum is conceived as an emblem in which the Invisible and the visible are the structural features which have been gathered in this space of Berlin and laid bare in an architecture where the unnamed remains the name which keeps still.”

-- Daniel Libeskind

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OVERVIEW

Location: Berlin, Germany Design: Daniel Libeskind Completion: 1999 Opening: 2001 Client: Land Berlin Net Area: 120, 000 sq. ft. Structure: Reinforced Concrete with Zinc Façade Building Cost: USD 40.05 million Four Story Building Shortest Elevation Parallels and breaks the Lindenstrasse frontage and entrance to the site.

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The aim of the project was a critical reconstruction of the historical city plan, using contemporary architectural means.

Competition for the design of the new building was held in 1989, building was completed in 1999 but officially opened in 2001.

An international jury headed by Josef Paul Kleiheus reviewed 165 submissions and awarded first prize to Daniel Libeskind.

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The museum has defined its scope as German-Jewish history from Roman times to the present. So, a Jewish Museum in Berlin simply could not be designed outside of the historical and emotional parameters of the Holocaust.

HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL

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Libeskind, a theoretician and intellectual, considered these matters in great depth. Viewing the structure inside and out is akin to immersion in a huge piece of sculpture. Libeskind‘s sense of space and light and volume is calculated and precise. It is astounding to learn that this was his first building.

HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL

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SITE

The Jewish Museum marks a special point on the map of Berlin. Its located at the intersection of Markgrafenstrasse and Lindenstrasse lies on the edge of Friedrichstadt. Markgrafenstrasse, paralleling Friedichstrasse, connects the main museum with Gendarmenmarkt, the most important square in the former Royal Residence.

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"An irrational and invisible matrix" (Daniel Libeskind, 1995)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.

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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.

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CONCEPT STRUCTURE

The site is the new-old center of Berlin on Linderstrasse. Libeskind at the same time felt there was an invisible matrix of connections between the figures of Jews and Germans. Libeskind plotted an “irrational matrix” which resembled a distorted star: the yellow star that was worn often on this very site.

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CONCEPT STRUCTURE

To give dimension to the deported and missing Berliners Libeskind inspired by the ‘Gedenbuch’ which contains all the names, dates of births, and places/dates of deporation and/or deaths.

Incorporated Walter Benjamin’s text ‘One Way Street’ into the continuous sequence of 60 sections along the zigzag, each representing of the ‘Stations of the Star’.

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PROGRAMThe Jewish Museum goes under the existing building and crisscrosses underground. Externally the buildings are independent of one another.

Three Underground ‘roads’ are programmatically different.1 The longest road leads to the main stair, to the exhibition spaces of the Jewish Museum.2 Leads to the exterior Hoffman Garden and represent exile of the Jews from Germany.3 Leads to the dead end: the Holocaust Void.

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For the visitors, ahead of them lies a path system made up of three axes symbolizing three realities in the history of German Jews.

The first and longest of these axes is the "Axis of Continuity." It connects the Old Building with the main staircase (Sackler Staircase) which leads up to the exhibition levels. The architect describes the Axis of Continuity as the continuation of Berlin's history, the connecting path from which the other axes branch off.

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The "Axis of Emigration" leads outside to daylight and the Garden of Exile. On the way there, the walls are slightly slanted and close in the further one goes, while the floor is uneven and ascends gradually. A heavy door must be opened before the crucial step into the garden can be taken.The "Axis of the Holocaust" is a dead end. It becomes ever narrower and darker and ends at the Holocaust Tower. The glass cases on the way display documents and personal possessions testifying to the private and public life of their owners who were killed.All three of the underground axes intersect, symbolizing the connection between the three realities of Jewish life in Germany.

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Cutting through the form of the Jewish Museum is a void; a straight line forms the space the exhibitions are organized around. Visitors cross sixty bridges to cross from one space to another. Zigzag best describes the form: two linear structures, combined to form the body of the building.

It is a museum for all Berliners, all citizens. It is an attempt to give a voice to a common fate. The extension is conceived as an emblem of Hope. The void and the invisible are the structural features. In terms of the city, the idea is to give new value to the existing context.

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• The Voids represent the central structural element of the New Building.

• From the Old Building, a staircase leads down to the basement through a Void of bare concrete which joins the two buildings.

• Five Voids run vertically through the new building.

• Walls of bare concrete: not heated or air conditioned.

• Largely without artificial light

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The E.T.A. Hoffmann Garden, said to represent the exile and emigration of Jews from Germany, is an enclosed concrete space with a 7X7 square of 49 massive pillars, each a planter holding at the top a willow oak tree. All but one of the pillars contains German soil; the other contains soil from Israel.

The whole garden is 12° gradient meant to disorient visitors with a sense of total instability and lack of orientation.Oleaster grows on top of pillars: symbolizing hope.

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HOLOCAUST VOIDSThe Axis of the Holocaust leads through a heavy black steel door into the Holocaust Tower.It is a void outside the museum building.It is a bare concrete tower 24 meters high.It isn’t heated, air-conditioned, or insulated.It is lit by a single narrow slit high above the ground.Noises from the outside can be heard.The bare and empty tower pays tribute to the numerous Jewish victims of mass murder.

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Within the building Libeskind created what he calls underground "streets," each leading to a different part of the complex, each carefully reasoned as to both the practical and the symbolic purposes of the structures. One street leads to the interior of a freestanding tower (the lighter colored structure towards the left in the bottom left photo), a memorial that Libeskind calls the "Holocaust Void." Entering this uninsulated, non-climate-controlled space, the heavy door closing with a menacing thud, is to experience an instant sense of confinement. The sloped floor has a rough finish, creating a sound like scraping sandpaper as visitors walk about.

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The acoustics amplify sound, which bounces off the towering, hard surfaces of the angled walls, windowless but for one vertical strip, where light penetrates high up near the top of the structure. It is a space calculated to evoke a disconcerting disorientation, emotionally evocative.

At the same time it is an extraordinarily handsome piece of design; in proportions, composition, spatial relations, and textures, its statement is as powerful in its esthetics as it is in its allusive literal context.

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The metal sheathing, weathers into varying shades of verdigris, depending upon exposure.Structural members are made externally visible within the zinc cladding.Provides a sheathed building with a tectonic connotation.Zinc clad monolith remains tectonic and solid. The structure seems to sit lightly on the surface of the park. The detailed zinc cladding lightens the critical mass of the object.In time the shine of the zinc will dull down to blue-grey.

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MATERIALS

Libeskind got the idea to use zinc from Schinkel.In Berlin untreated zinc turns a beautiful bluegray.Materials used enabled Libeskind to bring thetotal cost below the original budget.Libeskind’s obsessive perfectionism of the detail is everywhere evident.• Secondary steps• Stair Parapets• HandrailsLighting systems tracked within preplanned Recesses in ceilings overall, ordinary materialsand products were used.

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The Jewish Museum has sharp, angular shards, with gravity-defying walls. Libeskind reproduces the horridity of the Concentration camps by using high-tech materials to define a specific geometry. This geometry is intended to make you feel physcially ill and recreates the terrible purpose behind the camps.

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The design is based on a rather involved process of connecting lines between locations of historic events and locations of Jewish culture in Berlin. These lines form a basic outline and structure for the building. Libeskind also has used the concepts of absence, emptiness, and the invisible—expressions of the disappearance of Jewish culture in the city—to design the building.

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This concept takes form in a kinked and angled sequence through the building, orchestrated to allow the visitor to see (but not to enter) certain empty rooms, which Libeskind terms ‘voided voids.’ The ideas which generate the plan of the building repeat themselves on the surface of the building, where voids, windows, and perforations form a sort of cosmological composition on an otherwise undifferentiated, zig-zagging zinc surface.

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If the intellectual narrative which generates Libeskind’s work is complicated and inaccessible to the uninitiated, the building itself should stir emotion in even the most casual visitor. The stark meeting of the zinc-paneled exterior and the sky and the sharp incisions of windows are somewhat forbidding—if beautiful.

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CONCLUSION

A paradox, perhaps, of Libeskind's concept is that, while it is full of deliberately, tangibly dramatic effects aimed at disorientation, at the same time the composition is so powerfully controlled and balanced that it provides a counterpoint, an immensely satisfying sensation of aesthetic "rightness." It functions emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually all at once, as great art always does.

The Jewish Museum is a triumph for Libeskind's debut work and a gift of surpassing splendor for Jews and non-Jews alike, for Berliners, and for visitors from the world over, for whom this building has already become a destination of pilgrimage.