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The
Jewish Museum Berlin (fig. 1, 2), otherwise called with a longer name
that is the result of continuous changes of mind: «Extension of
Jewish Department in the Berlin Museum», is an architectural
masterpiece realized by Daniel Libeskind. This construction is often
included among Deconstructivist architectures, buildings that have
lost the static solidity of classical architecture dissolving in
fluid forms that convey big energy to structures that are no longer
architectural boxes.
The
Jewish Museum is an anticlassical structure or, using new expression,
it is a liquid architecture whose fluidity depends on zigzag and
broken up profile that gets away from Euclidean world. Architectural
fluidity’s concept is not probably understandable and admissible
because it is associated with the art of building that is always
taken care to erect durable, solid and static structures.
But
in contemporary age dominated by virtual fluidity of World Wide Web
and Cyberspace, it is clear that the world of solidity and
concreteness undergoes the influence of new concepts. From this
«labyrinth without end»
that is the Cyberspace, it is taken the element of disorientation.
This is a characteristic of the Jewish Museum built by Libeskind and
it is in conformity with architectural destabilization of Peter
Eisenman who was teacher of Daniel Libeskind and also the
theoretician of deconstruction’s concept in architectural context.
The
labyrinthine characteristic is omnipresent in the Jewish Museum, from
the underground to three exhibition upper floors where the visitor is
fluently carried among various objects and findings that are
chaotically preserved and disposed there. So they hamper grid-route
with the black walls of inner voids and they oblige to pass round
these obstructions that significantly re-propose a “tortuous”
history.
Chaos, dynamism (both inside and outside) and complexity are the
foundations of the geometry of reference: it is not the Euclidean
geometry of order, solidity and stability, but it is the fractal
geometry.
There
are not geometrical figures anymore, but intersecting lines that
don’t create 90-degrees angles longer by rejecting the classical
grid of nine squares that Daniel Libeskind disliked intensely since
he was at Cooper Union School. Marcos Novak’s reflections about
this virtual architecture always mutable, impalpable and difficult to
realize, are suitable for the graphic and building activity of Daniel
Libeskind who realized many drawings and plans for an imaginary and
utopian architecture in which Piranesi’s Carceri
or Kandinskij’s abstract art (and I quote only these two examples)
are very recurrent. These artists are mentioned by Marcos Novak
because they are the forerunners of Cyberspace’s abstract spaces in
which architecture «aims to become music»,
a continuous and mutable symphony, an elusive and dynamic piece of
music like Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in which the art of music is
very important.
Berlin
construction erected on Lindenstrasse – built in Kreuzberg quarter,
significantly near the city centre
that puts a Jewish small collection up in the past - was constructed
from 1989, a particularly important year for the historical
developments of the entire world and for the progress of German
culture (especially with reference to Jewish culture). Horrors and
crimes committed by Nazi prevented to talk with people decimated for
a long time; the weight of shame hushed everything up.
An
almost unpronounceable word – Vergangenheitsbewältigung
(comparison
with the past) – was coined in the 50’s, but this word was used
only thirty years later.
Jews could be a problem in the bipolar world of Cold War, as East
Germany and West Germany were separate politically and ideologically
but they were united by a common and sad past. The fall of the Wall
and the consequent reunification allowed German people to admit the
horrors and the crimes that they committed and to recover the
memories of the tragic parenthesis of 20th-century
history from the oblivion in which they were sunk. Remember was
necessary for confronting and trying to overcome a collective drama
that pooled - and it sometimes still pools – defeated and winners,
survivors and descendants of dead people in a condition of anxiety
and sense of guilty. Historical memory is the fundamental concept of
this architectural project: Holocaust cannot and mustn’t be
forgotten because it is the most unmistakable event of Jewish past
that must incite new generations to build a future in which there
will not be tragedies. Kelsey Bankert spoke about traumatic
architecture to
underline that this structure not only commemorates a historical
tragedy dramatically, but it also helps to overcome this sorrow with
the setting up of therapeutic and cathartic spaces.
Libeskind
is ingenious in the design of this architectural metaphor: every
single structural element and probably the numbers that indicate the
sizes and colours of the spaces, the architectural plan of the whole
shows a particular meaning. Libeskind builds thin symbolic references
to various disciplines of humanistic field like
historical-philosophical themes, or History of Art, Music and
Literature, besides scientific notions that are necessary for
building a structure. We know the four main sources of this project
with absolute certainty: a map of Berlin’s city, Schönberg’s
composition Moses
and Aron,
Gedenkbuch
and
Einbahnstrasse
written
by Walter Benjamin.
We
wonder what was the utility of the map given that the place of
edification was already established and the architects had inspected
the site. The chosen area was near the Kollegienhaus that was an
ancient courthouse – then used as a museum for showing historical
findings - built by Philipp Gerlach in 1735. Libeskind meticulously
searched the addresses where renowned men of culture lived in the
eighteenth and nineteenth century on the map. Then he joined these
names in a kind of «marriage»
with a simple line. Ironically or out of thought, the lines on the
map produced a star with six points, the Star of David that is the
emblem of Jewish religion and discriminatory symbol in the twentieth
century. The couples are: Rahel Levin Varnaghen with the Lutheran
theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (this line is superimposed on
Lindenstrasse where the museum is built), Paul Celan and Mies van der
Rohe, the poet E.T.A. Hoffmann and Friedrich von Kleist. In this
typically Jewish “frame”, Libeskind placed his structure with its
forms reproducing again a star with six points, but it is broken up
and it is reproduced with a twisty form that does not render
immediately understandable its meaning. It is necessary to underline
that this contour is visible only by an aerial view and it seems a
lightning so the Berliners use the word blitz
to
indicate this structure (fig.3).
The
second source is musical: Libeskind focuses his attention on the
third act no music of Arnold Schönberg’s Moses
and Aron. This
musician was Jewish so he was obliged to leave Europe in the 1930s
because of inflamed anti-Semitic hate. So his musical work that
exalts biblical personalities has remained incomplete and this very
concept of incommunicability and the silence that characterizes the
third act inspired Libeskind. He transforms the absence of sound into
voids
that are impenetrable spaces that divide the architectural structure.
The void
is
the most important structural element of this construction because it
is particularly meaningful to indicate physical absence of people
murdered in concentration camps, or the silence of physicists,
writers and artists.
Therefore
the same Schönberg was victim of Hitler’s hate, so he is
remembered like many other murdered or exiled Jews that left a void
and a bitter silence, but the memory at least. In this museum that is
like the sacred places in which we enter with a «processional
ritual»,
it is possible to render homage to Holocaust’s victims with a
silent prayer or with the reading of many names that would have
filled the voids. So our voice would have modulated a hollow litany
or a lugubrious dirge by reading that interminable list of names then
not engraved on the walls. These names of ghostly identities are not
fruits of his amazing fantasy, but they are written in Gedenkbuch
(third
font) that are two voluminous books in which there are the names of
deportees with the dates of birth and deportation and the name of
concentration camps.
Fourth
and last source is the above-mentioned essay of Walter Benjamin that
is a collection of aphorisms for friends in which surrealistically it
is possible to reconstruct the topological and spiritual profile of
Berlin in the 1920s, but by following a not linear and confusing
route. Thoughts, dreams and places are not described consequently,
provoking «the sensation of lack of sense of direction, the fail of
spatial and temporal sense (to) reader-visitor»
and this surrealistic peculiarity of loss that makes this literary
text similar to the architectural text of Libeskind, because
architecture is a text, as suggested by Derrida.
Analyzing
the urban context in which the Jüdisches Museum is placed, it is
possible to observe the considerable unlikeness between this
construction and those built in the past (Kollegienhaus and houses)
on the same side of Lindenstrasse. This museum shares only the height
with other structures in accordance with town-plan. But in front of
Kollegienhaus there is the Academy of Jewish Museum built by
Libeskind in 2011.
This structure talks with pre-existing ones and it recalls the Jewish
Museum particularly for the covering (in this case wood) that is
ploughed with diagonal lines and also for the inclination of the
entrance’s cube that recalls the Garden of Exile. The museum is in
a vast green area. The green colour is present both in the lot of
construction and in the lying space behind, the glazed court that
Libeskind realized in the square space among three wings of the
ancient 18th-century
courthouse.
The
two gardens were planned independently: the green space behind the
Kollegienhaus was organized by Hans Kollhoff and Arthur Ovaska in
line with the style of the 18th-century
palace; the one around Libeskind’s structure by Cornelia Müller,
Jan Wehberg and Elmar Knippschild. They created a space that allows
Libeskind’s structure to be integrated in the surrounding
environment by using flagstones and by planting particular and
symbolic trees. The reference to Paul Celan, poet and award-winner
man of letters explicitly commemorated by Libeskind, is very
interesting: in a space obtained among building walls, Celan’s
court is accessible from the outside and presents a relief on the
floor designed by the poet’s widow Gisèle Celan-Lestrange.
While
the close structures show a composition based on first geometrical
forms and volumes in the light of geometrical analysis – for
example the Kollegienhaus is inscribed in a square, or the houses are
disposed rhythmically one in front of the other in a proportional
manner that re-propose cubes – the Jewish Museum is notably
different because it is a structure with a fragmented development
based on an open broken line. By tracing the prolongations of
individual segments that constitute the zigzag line it is not
possible to obtain important centres of projection. The irregular
form is produced by two directional lines: one is tortuous and taut
to infinite (blue line) acting as a model for elevation; the other
one «straight but broken»
(red line) determines the continuous inner void (fig. 4).
The
structure is mixed, as a result of the union among continuous and
point-shaped structures, realized with steel pillars that are
visible also in the “cuts” on the surface and that exceed the
typical dimensions of a full masonry structure (fig. 5), and with
reinforced concrete which is possible to see in the inner voids. This
allows to individualize other differences between the plans of the
museum and the Kollegienhaus because the latter has a full masonry
structure - in line with 18th-century
architectural rules – that conveys the solidity and the static
nature that are absent in the fluid museum of Libeskind.
It
is interesting to analyze the relationship between full and empty
spaces that are subject to a transposition from the outside to inside
and vice versa. The long and thin windows that are the voids of the
external surface take shape inside by means of reinforced concrete
pillars (fig. 6) that are disposed obliquely and are incumbent like
«always present menaces»
on the principal stairwell. The pillars are the inner prosecution of
the external gaps as well as, by contrast, the windows are the
continuation of the inner girders. Moreover the light contributes to
make a connection between inside and outside, full and empty, because
the rays of light that enter through the windows (or voids precisely)
are reflected on white and bare (but full) inside walls. Following
the “anticlassical code”, the windows are all different and are
not disposed sequentially and modularly; instead Gerlach chose to
divide the surface horizontally with two orders of windows and to
scan it rhythmically also with pilaster strips that individualize
five rectangular modules vertically (fig. 7).
So
the design is based on the concept of symmetry: the main module, in
which Kollegienhaus’ hallway is placed (but also the Judisches
Museum’), is particularly accentuated through bigger windows, a
balcony on the second floor and a tympanum on which there are two
allegorical statues representing Justice and Prudence. It is possible
to discern another characteristic that distinguishes the two
buildings from a bird’s eye view: the ancient courthouse has a red
mansard-roof, while Libeskind’s building has a flat roofing (a
homage to Schinkel who, with his flat roofings, revolutionized
19th-century
Berliner architecture) on which it is possible to see pipes and all
parts of different systems. All is displayed, nothing is hidden in
the masonry.
Also
Daniel Libeskind appeals to labyrinthine scheme in accordance with
the principles of Decostructivism, of which he is a member (even if
he does not like to be defined as such), for undermine the classical
sense of direction produced from the traditional architectural boxes.
This way the visitor is involved both emotionally and physically.
Heart, mind and all senses are stimulated to make the visitor
identify himself with a Jew. So the usual practice to put passively
the visitor in or in front of a structure is changed. The trouble,
uncertainty and anxiety are considerable when going into the museum
or even before entering it because it is possible to notice an
anomaly by staying on the Lindenstrasse: the contemporary building
that appears autonomous looking onto the courthouse – that is so
different for colour, style and form – instead depends tightly on
it because Libeskind’s museum does not have a hallway. This choice
that is in line with an anticlassical canon – in fact the hallway
is often accentuated in the classical tradition to put it in a
central position into the symmetric decoration that is typical of
modular planning of the front, like the Kollegienhaus – is
symbolic. In a competitive examination it was clearly expressed that
the building would have been erected significantly in the
triangular-shaped area near the Kollegienhaus and it would have been
presumably autonomous. Instead Libeskind has connected the two
buildings through a steep stairway and an underground passage that
takes - like he said- to the «roots» of Berliner history in which
it is not possible to separate the German history from the Jewish
one. So whoever wants to visit the new Jewish Museum has to go into
the adjoining 18th-century
building and go down through some stairs that provoke a new and
strong sense of uncertainty because it is impossible to see what is
at the end of the staircase.
The
insecurity (especially in the first part of the route) makes the
visitors have something in common with the dramatic experience of
exile, of the last journey towards death and of the resumption of
life (for the survivors) after so much suffering. Hebrews did not
have certainties and assurances when they left for new, unknown and
distant lands; they did not have awareness of destination of that
journey – for many without return – towards the concentration
camps; the survivors did not have the serenity and the peace to turn
their attention to a new life that brought the unforgettable signs of
a painful past.
So,
how is it possible to re-create those unpleasant sensations with
reference to classical architecture, to its forms and its reassuring
principles which inspired the art of the enemy? It was an obliged
choice to reject the 90-degrees angle for the acute angle, to incline
the floor to tire the visitor during the visit, to make the windows
smaller to prevent too much light from entering and avoid contact
with the exterior.
So
the grey atmosphere of the concentration camps is recreated, in which
the people lived in half-light, in complete alienation, having only
the certainty to have been imprisoned, to be maltreated and probably
to be led towards death. For an emotional or sensible architecture in
which all senses – also the ones before disregarded- are stimulated
to promote «sensorial perception in the aesthetic experience and in
the cultural fruition»
it is compulsory to reject the classical statement of the box and the
established planning of the expositive route that required a common
state of visitors. Instead they have to play an active role, search
for the right way and therefore change their sense of orientation.
This
is further complicated in the underground space built in reinforced
continuous-septum concrete in which there are three passages that
are all serving spaces (or spaces of connection) and served spaces
because it is possible to see cases in which there are objects of
some Jews (fig. 8). After the descent through the staircase between
the two buildings, the visitor is on the Axis of the Continuity
which is a long corridor which ends with another staircase that
brings to the surface. So it is possible to continue the route by
following the signs of history even if it is possible to do it only
after a purification by crossing the other two axes. Like a “second
Dante”, the tourist has to go down to infernal abyss and he/she has
to experiment the absolute evil produced principally by the Shoah.
Even
if
various
findings telling of two thousand years of history are silently
preserved in this museum, Daniel Libeskind decided to stress the most
tragic historical event because it interlaces with the past and the
future of Jews, but also with those of all humanity.
At
first the visitor is invited to cross the Axis of Exile that ends
with a trapezoidal wall of glass near a door that takes to Garden of
Exile, otherwise called E.T.A. Hoffman Garden. It is a served space
with an area of forty-nine square metres (fig. 9). It is an open
space but paradoxically claustrophobic because the colours of the
nature are overcome by the grey and the grass is replaced by
concrete; because it is not possible to see the sky; because the
visitor finds himself in a forest of pillars and over them, through
an overturning, there are olive trees. So it is not a classical
garden, it is not an oasis of peace, it is not a green space in which
it is possible to admire the classical natural views: by entering
this garden the sense of alienation is very strong and it induces to
escape. Here the labyrinthine element is particularly evident and the
lack of balance that forces some people to lean to pillars, by
stimulating also the touch, is caused not only by the use of equal
and equidistant pillars but also by the inclination of six degrees of
the floor.
The
same expedient was used by Peter Eisenman for the Memorial to the
Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin (fig. 10). Also in this space,
which appears like a big crackle by Burri, the apprehension is very
strong when walking through two thousand and seven hundred
parallelepipeds of increasing height. Fabio Colonnese defined the
E.T.A. Hoffman Garden «the most labyrinthine interpretation of the
hypostyle hall»
the ceiling of which is the sky that leans on the soft foliage of the
olive trees that are planted on the top of the forty-nine pillars to
symbolize the regeneration after the tragedy and –as Zambelli said
– the adaptability of the “people without earth”.
The number of the pillars is not fortuitous but it is symbolic:
forty-eight pillars filled with Berliner earth represent the year
1948 (the date of birth of the Palestine); the forty- nine placed in
the middle of the area and filled with Palestinian earth represent
the city of Berlin in which the remarkable Jewish community played an
important role not only for economy but also for culture. Libeskind
describes this garden as the «wreck of history»,
the space in which every certainty fails and contrasting feelings
collide like despair and hope represented by the green of the
foliage.
After
this dramatic experience, the visitor has to face another one more
dramatic: the Holocaust. Physically the route is challenging because
the Axes of Exile and of the Holocaust have a floor inclination and
the body is submitted to a strong change of temperature. The Axis of
the Holocaust has laterally trapezoidal cases containing objects of
the victims of the Shoah, but it is necessary to get close to see
them because the cases are closed with opaque glass as if the objects
were relics. By contrast this passage, that intersects significantly
the other two, ends with a black door that takes in another space in
which there is no warmth because the trapezoidal tower called Voided
Void (a served space) intentionally lacks heating and cooling
systems.
The
heavy infernal door is slammed behind the visitor making a thud that
roars in the darkness of the tower illuminated only by a slit. There
is nothing in this claustrophobic space, only a staircase (perhaps
Jacob’s Ladder that joins earthly world and heavenly world) which
is not reachable. There is no escape. In this space of death it is
possible to hear only the roar of the metal door from which other
“deportees” pass and the voices of children who play in the near
kindergarten. The tourist hears the sound of life that swarms out of
this oppressive space that recalls the chimneys of crematoriums,
or gas chambers
or also the wagons in which the Jews were condensed during their last
journey. Actually the light that enlightens the darkness in the tower
recalls Yaffa Eliach’s book Non
ricordare…non dimenticare: l’Olocausto raccontato con la speranza
chassidica nell’umanità. Initially
Libeskind thought to build a big void room to suggest the image of a
gas chamber, but the tale of this woman distorted his projects. Yaffa
Eliach remembers her journey: she saw a white line (probably a cloud
or a trail of an airplane) that gave her the hope to see again the
sky. And it happened.
Also
in the underground it is possible to see two voids in the learning
center on the right of the staircase. It is possible to arrive to the
voids through a zig-zag course created by different separators. The
only accessible void is the Memory
void
which is reachable through the Eric F. Ross Gallery on the first
floor where temporary exhibitions are organized. In the Memory
void there
is the installation Shalechet
(Fallen leaves) created
by the Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman: many bronze faces of
different sizes and with open mouths that silently shout completely
cover the floor (fig. 11).
Now
we have to identify ourselves with the anti-Semites and trample on
the dignity of “different” men, women and children: by walking on
those faces it is not possible to feel any pleasant sensation because
the noise is very disturbing and the run is rough. So the visitor
runs the risk of falling, hurting himself because a physical fall
becomes the symbol of a spiritual fall. After this cathartic journey
it is possible to continue and to discover other fundamental events
of Jewish history by following the Staircase of Continuity or Sackler
Staircase (from the name of a supporter of the museum). Oblique beams
of cement hang over it and a white wall is erected at the edge. By
turning left the expositive route starts and it allows reviving
Jewish history from the Middle Age to our days through artistic
objects, dresses, papers, photographs, small models and tales that
are visible and audible by means of many different interactive
objects that stimulate all the senses.
The
rout is labyrinthine also in this only zig-zag passage that does not
have rooms as in a classical museum, but small cosy or raised spaces
that are obtained by zig-zag or trapezoidal separators or by voids,
recognizable from the black colour of the walls, that cross the whole
structure. The expositive spaces are illuminated by artificial lights
because the natural one that filters through the zinc-plated blanket,
on which there are one thousand and five hundred windows that
represent the piece of the shattered Star of David, is very dim.
As
for the colours chosen to paint the walls, Marco Biraghi talked about
«cromoclastia»
because the predominating colours - or non-colours- are white and
black with the intermediate grey for the six voids that are
symbolically built with unrefined concrete. It is a matter of
journalistic colours that are suitable for the narration, for a sad
narration that remembers many histories equalized by a tragic
epilogue. Grey is also used for the external covering made of zinc
that permits to change the colour of the surface – that is
destined to become blue (this is another element that makes this
structure mutable depending on temporal fluidity, on Eraclito’s
panta
rei)
- and to make an umpteenth and fine reference to the more known and
tragic events of Jewish history that are remembered in the
underground also by means of the Raphael Roth Learning Center. Hugh
Aldersy-Williams understands the metaphoric value of zinc through a
reference to psychoanalysis, to the oneiric world, to the
interpretation of dreams, because this metal is associated to
emigration (symbolized by the Garden of Exile) and to the death
because it is used to close the coffins. In fact the researcher
defines this structure like «a big sarcophagus»
that contains the ashes of the thousands of victims of the Holocaust
(represented by the trapezoidal Tower) and to preserve the memory.
I
think that the ashes are represented by the sand containing a sort of
a trapezoidal seeded-patch located in the outside garden. The
trapezium, a geometrical figure that is continually used for spaces
which represent void, absence and silence, allows us to get a subtle
and presumed reference to the setting of the concentration camp. The
connection is with the first lager built in Dachau where the
crematory ovens, symbolized, as I remember, by the Tower, were placed
in a trapezoidal plot.
This geometrical form is also present in the Felix Nussbaum Museum in
which a Jewish painter killed in a concentration camp in 1944 is
remembered and in the plot of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of
Europe erected by Peter Eisenman.
From
the summary description it is possible to understand that Daniel
Libeskind has been particularly involved emotionally by planning this
construction as if his parents, who were interned and who were forced
to do continuous escapes after the liberation, had transmitted him
their pain genetically. Tales, papers and discrimination permitted
Daniel Libeskind to win and to materialize a project for the first
time. The Jewish Museum Berlin is the first construction erected by
him in parallel with the Felix Nussbaum Museum in Osnabrück
(figg. 12, 13) when he was fifty-year old. Previously he devoted
himself to a teaching career and to graphic activity in which the
echo of Metaphysics, Surrealism and Cubism (but not only) is very
recurrent. So, why did Libeskind manage to overcome a very long
period of pure conception exactly in that moment and with this
project? Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani asked this question to him in
1991 and he answered that «idea, method and desire» melted in
relation of continuity and evolution in comparison with what he had
done previously.
Many
announcements of a competitive examination are on his writing-desk
but he chooses only those in which he can convey a message and the
Jewish Museum is one of these. In his autobiography he says that we
have to “read” his architectures like a text,
«destabilizing architectural texts»,
as Eisenman says, that are subject to different interpretations and
that present many references to other writings of different natures.
This metaphor strengthens further the connection with the
philosophical-literary world from which the De-constructivism
derives. With this name it is classified a group of architectural
works in which «repressed impurities»
re-emerge and through which it is possible to deliver a new
architectural language in the past, sometimes without consideration.
The
project of Jewish Museum is known with the name Between
the lines probably
by recalling also Eisenman’s between.
This architect approached deconstruction theories to destabilize
architecture since the 1980s and he defined the between
«a juxtaposition of structures» in which one does not prevail on
another. He talked about «middle interstice forms that admit the
irrational in the rational, so as the presumed ugly in the presumed
beauty whose respective borders are not now so distinct and
universally recognizable yet».
It
is possible to notice this mixing of different elements also in the
work done of Libeskind who creates “harmonic contrasts” by means
of approaching stylistically different structures: for example the
Jewish Museum is a contemporary and liquid structure linked to the
eighteenth-century that has the traditional plan of a box.
Libeskind defines harmony what is considered a contrast in a banal
way and he explains this concept with a musical image: disparate
pieces that show many differences are included in the whole of
classical music and yet they live together under the same name and
their performances one after the other don’t produce any violent
contrast.
The
reference to the musical world is recurrent in the treatises about
Libeskind’s work because he did not forsake this big passion
cultivated since he was a child and then only apparently set aside
for graphic and architecture. The title of the project has a literary
and musical background: the lines are not made of thought; they are
not only the drawn and intersecting lines to create the inner voids,
but they are also the lines of the staff on which he showed
graphically and descriptively his project to submit it to the
judgment of the committee. The connection with music was troublesome
in the past because he couldn’t play the piano when he was a child
because this instrument could arise suspicion. He was obliged to play
an accordion that was used for folk music and so it was not the
object of anti-Semitic retaliation. Also he won a prestigious prize
with this instrument. Even when he decided to dedicate his time to
the design, music continued to have an important role and it is
confirmed by the continuous references to the paintings of Kandinskij
(influenced by Arnold Schönberg)
whose abstract art gets inspiration from the music that is not
regulated by the principle of mimesis
imposed
by the academic culture in the figurative context.
Libeskind
has been always anti-academic by rejecting the comparison with the
90-degrees angle, the «nine square grid problem» and Euclidian
geometry since he was at school.
«(Libeskind)
non
utilizza il mondo reazionario dei morfemi classici, quanto le
immagini appartenenti alle esperienze avanguardiste del Novecento»,
Antonello Marotta said and the Jewish Museum shows it. So
it had been necessary to wait ten years before seeing the completion
of the construction at the risk to forsake the work and to rectify
(suffice it to think of external walls that were sloping at first).
Few people believed in his work so eccentric and almost utopian and
also the best architects of the twentieth century were skeptical, as,
for example, Philip Johnson who gaped when Libeskind showed him the
project. And yet he made it by resisting tenaciously the reviews like
the one published on Casabella
in
November 1989, in which it is possible to read an article in which
the winner is announced, but the second best project, Walter Nobel’s,
is exalted.
Also I remember that the museum opened empty in 1999 (the same year
Libeskind won the Architecture Prize) recording a conspicuous number
of visitors.
This
event caused other controversies after the official inauguration in
September 2001 (a very significant date for Libeskind because of the
downfall of the Twin Towers)
because it spread the idea that the museum, considered a
three-dimensional artwork, had to remain empty because the emotional
impact would be superior. The sense of emptiness, nihilism and
absence would be stronger; the visit would be more exciting. In
fact Bruno Zevi defined this structure «Espressionismo
a scala metropolitana, non più pago di urlare, deciso a rievocare
l’orrore in modo gelido, tagliente, spietato».
The
reference to Expressionism well recaps the work of Libeskind and of
all Jew artists because by means of this artistic movement artists
can express their emotions through disturbing and monstrous figures,
through distorted images that it is not possible to see in the nature
because they are not realized with the classical principle of
mimesis.
And doesn’t Libeskind plan architectures that break up with the
classical rudiments to better express his reflections and his pains?
The reference to Expressionism becomes more suitable linguistically
and terminologically because the German Expressionist group chose the
name Die
Brücke
(that means Bridge) by taking inspiration from Nietzsche’s
philosophy and Kelsey Bankert used the image of the bridge to
indicate the function of this building that is an «architecture of
trauma»: «
a bridge between the memory of tragedy and the future of traumatized
people».
These
references reaffirms the liquid anti-classicism which is at the basis
of architecture and of this architecture, or «anarchitettura»
that can be included in the group of anti-monuments erected in Berlin
after the reunification. The choice to reject the monumentality and
the classical rudiments is symbolic because these characteristics
have been exasperated from Nazism, so the artists called to
commemorate the victims of the Holocaust chose a style opposed to the
one used to glorify the Nazi ideology. For example in the German city
of Kassel with the “anti-fountain” built in the square in front
of the municipal building, Hoheisel overturned the monument because
the old neo-Gothic fountain built by a Jew entrepreneur and
demolished at the end of the 1930s was rebuilt but in the opposite
direction. So the water does not gush upwards but it converges in the
earth. It is possible to render the memory more living by
re-proposing its absence rather than restoring its original aspect.
Returning to Berlin, the concept of absence and emptiness is
re-proposed also by Micha Ullman at Bebelplatz (fig. 14) where twenty
thousand books have been burned by Nazi in 1933 and the memory of
this sad event is materialized by a window opened on the floor and
trough which it is possible to see an empty underground bookcase. It
is necessary to put it in connection to Libeskind’s voids in the
Jewish Museum because the message the two architects want to
communicate is the same: remember even if there is not anything
anymore.
«Only
the spirit of the books and the people remains; they meet each other
in the heavens».
After
the construction of the Jewish Museum Daniel Libeskind has become an
Archistar and many countries in the world ask him to leave his
signature through a building and so he is forced to move
continuously. Like an old Jew, Libeskind is a “nomadic architect”
who, since he was a child, has been forced to emigrate and look for a
place in which it was not necessary to compare himself with
“diversity”. The United States and particularly the Bronx gave
him serenity and liberty which is symbolized by the most famous
statue in the world that was also the first image appeared to him
when he disembarked in that land. Libeskind has started again to
ravel for specializations, then for teaching career and now for
construction of buildings: he still is a stateless person but now he
leads his existence under the banner of nomadism with a different
spirit.
English translation revised and corrected by Giulia Martina Weston.
NOTE
M.
NOVAK, Architetture
liquide nel ciberspazio, in
Cyberspace.
I primi passi nella realtà virtuale,
Padova, F. Muzzio, 1993, p. 257.
Fabio
Colonnese says that the grid-labyrinth recalls World Wide Web’s
hyper textual models because they agree rather with liquid, mutable
and pulsating virtual architectures than static construction of real
world.
I suggest the following texts for investigation: N. SALA, G.
CAPPELLATO, Architetture
della complessità: la geometria frattale tra arte, architettura e
territorio, Milano,
F. Angeli, 2004.
A.
MAROTTA, Daniel
Libeskind, Roma,
Edilstampa, 2007, p. 25.
M.
NOVAK 1993, p. 261.
V.
VANNUCCINI, F. PEDRAZZI, Piccolo
viaggio nell’anima tedesca,
Milano, Feltrinelli, 2005, p. 65.
K.
BANKERT, The
Architecture of Trauma: Daniel Libeskind in New York City and
Berlin, CreateSpace
Independent Publishing Platform, 2013.She examined carefully studies
of the psychoanalytic nature effects on people that suffered from
collective dramas and then she analyzed two buildings by Daniel
Libeskind erected with the same emotional participation: the Jewish
Museum Berlin and the Ground Zero project to restore the quarter in
which Twins Towers rose to life. Even if there are differences
between the two structures, their projects are very similar for the
concept of drama associated with notion of absence and materialized
by means of architectural void. Impracticable and most significant
spaces of Berliner architectural structure are the six voids and the
Voided Void, like New York depth of twenty-one metres – where
Libeskind went down with his wife Nina and where he saw the
retaining wall – is the main core of the sophisticated New York
project. That impressive wall – a wall that would have inundated
the city if it had collapsed – is the crucial point of a project
like the Berliner voids in which the victims’ absence materializes
itself. Also this wall is the only physical proof of that
architectural whole shattered. One of the differences is the time
passed between the tragic event and the architectural commemoration:
New Yorkers set to work immediately not to forget and overcome the
drama; instead it was necessary to wait many years in Germany
because of political reasons and because the authors of “tragic
sacrifice” were German themselves.
S.
CRICHTON, D. LIBESKIND, Breaking
Ground. Un’avventura
tra architettura e vita, New
York, Sperling & Kupfer, 2005, p. 87. Libeskind
enumerates the six names that constitute the six vertices of Star of
David in these pages in which there is the list of sources and he
uses the verb «to marry» to indicate the connection of respective
addresses by specifying the couples of names. The personalities
mentioned by Libeskind are particularly important because they had
particularly opposed existences that are characterized by exiles or
suicides. For example Paul Celan threw himself in the river Seine
when he was fifty-year old after continuous moves in many cities.I
suggest another book for deepening: L. SACCHI, Daniel
Libeskind: Museo Ebraico, Berlino, Torino,
Testo & Immagine, 1998, pp. 50-51. Other references are in the
following essay: D. LIBESKIND, Trauma,
in
Image
and remembrance: representation and the Holocaust, a
cura di S. Hornstein e F. Jacobowitz, Bloomington, Indiana
University Press, 2003, pp. 43-59.
L.
SACCHI 1998, p. 59.
W.
BENJAMIN, Strada
a senso unico,
a cura di Giulio SCHIAVONI,
Torino,
Einaudi, 2006, p. IX. The
figure of Ariadne that allows to exit from Benjamin’s labyrinth is
Asia Lacis, the woman loved by the writer that dedicates a street to
her (the street opened in his hearth). The woman is called
«ENGINEER» with capital letters. This work was dear to the
Constructivists – as Giulio Schiavoni remembers – who were
exponents of an artistic avant-garde Russian movement that is
inspired by Cubism and Futurism, movements that are connected with
Deconstructivism for anti-academic character and for the concept of
separation into parts. Constructivist artists are brought back to
life by Deconstructivist artists, as Mark Wigley said (he was the
curator of the exhibition on Deconstructivist Architecture at MoMA
in 1988 with Philip Johnson).
Jacques
Derrida is a philosopher of the twentieth century who elaborated the
theory of deconstruction tied initially to literary text in which it
is possible to pick different explanatory levels by means of
division of the whole text in many small parts. Then these remarks
have extended to architecture that is considered a metaphorical
expression of many messages like literature. Initially the word
“deconstruction” was used, then “decostructionism” and from
1988 “deconstructivism”. An exhibition entitled Deconstructivist
Architecture
was organized in New York and the curators chose this name by
referring terminologically to artistic- architectural
movements
of the twentieth century. Derrida moved his idea from literary
context to architectural
ambit
thanks to the help of two well-known architects: Bernard Tschumi and
Peter Eisenman. The latter, who was a teacher of Daniel Libeskind at
the Cooper Union School, examined carefully this concept to make his
architecture nearest to Jewish culture’s artistic rules and he did
it through copious drafts of treatises and also structures that rely
on this composition. With
reference to C. ROSETI, La
decostruzione e il decostruttivismo: pensiero e forma
dell’architettura, Roma,
Gangemi, 1997.
The
Academy of Jewish Museum – built where there was a flower market
in the past – is made of three main bodies in which there are an
auditorium, a library with reading rooms and the entrance. Two
letters of Jewish alphabet, Alef
and
Bet,
are
re-proposed
in
form of skylights on the cube of the entrance to underline the use
of this construction. Also the building material has a symbolic
significance and so it is possible to connect this structure with
the Jewish Museum. On the left side of the front there is the
following phrase translated in various languages: «Hear
the truth, whoever speaks it».
B.
ZEVI, Libeskind,
in
L’architettura:
cronache e storia,
n. 7, luglio- agosto 1994.
I
believe that this outline is re-proposed also in the garden that
surrounds Libeskind’s building because there are two long
intersecting slabs of cement on which there are a straight line and
an another one broken in ten segments. However it is not a
three-dimensional representation of the project because the straight
line would have had to intersect all ten segments. Therefore
probably the architects made only a reference to directional lines
and to lines of thought. They did not reproduce the intersection of
the lines faithfully, perhaps also because of the small space.
From
the top it is possible to see two parallel skylights that represent
one of the two directional lines (the red line of fig. 4). The
skylights illuminate the voids and produce a luminous contrast
between the dark expositive spaces that are illuminated with
artificial lights and the void and impenetrable spaces that are
instead very bright.
The
architectural
solutions
mentioned are typical of a building erected with an «anticlassical
code» that is explained by Bruno Zevi in an essay published in
1973. It looks like that his indications are followed in the next
ten years when many deconstructivist projects were realized by some
future Archistars. Bruno Zevi speaks about an architectural
language
that is dead: it is that of Classic tradition that demands a careful
research because some drifted apart from Beaux Arts, we did not
perceive that there are slight asymmetries even in the sacred place
of classic of the Athenian acropolis. I
indicate the following essay for further investigation: B. ZEVI, Il
linguaggio moderno dell’architettura: guida al codice
anticlassico, Torino,
Einaudi, 1973.
I.
PEZZINI, Architetture
sensibili. Il Museo Ebraico e il Monumento alle Vittime
dell’Olocausto a Berlino,
in EǀC,
Rivista
on-line dell’ AISS Associazione Italiana Studi Semiotici,
www.ec-aiss.it,
16 ottobre 2009.
F.
COLONNESE, Il
labirinto e l’architetto, Roma,
Kappa, 2006, p. 297.
M.
ZAMBELLI 2000.
D.
LIBESKIND, Jewish
Museum Berlin, Berlino,
G+A Arts International, 2000, p. 41.
I.
PEZZINI 2009.
M.
ZAMBELLI 2000.
S.
CRICHTON, D. LIBESKIND 2005, p. 53.
M.
BIRAGHI, A. FARLENGA, Architettura
del Novecento. Teorie, scuole, eventi,
Torino, Einaudi, 2012, p. 193.
H.
ALDERSEY – WILLIAMS, Favole
periodiche. La vita avventurosa degli elementi chimici, Milano,
Mondolibri, 2011.
Many
debates have been made about the plans of concentration camps. Some
of them, like that of Treblinka, have been prepared in trapezoidal
plots. By using aerial photographs and confused and imprecise
testimonies of survivors, historians have tried to reconstruct those
dead spaces dismantled before the enemies’ arrival. Despite the
levelings and the plantation of lupines grafted in those boundless
plots, some tracks are yet visible and the researchers continue to
reconstruct the tragic profiles of the lager with these information.
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