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
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.
 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.
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
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
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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’.
PROGRAM
The 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.
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.
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.
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.
• 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

 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.
HOLOCAUST VOIDS
The 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.
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.
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.
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.
MATERIALS

Libeskind got the idea to use zinc from Schinkel.

In Berlin untreated zinc turns a beautiful bluegray.
Materials used enabled Libeskind to bring the
total cost below the original budget.
Libeskind’s obsessive perfectionism of the detail is
everywhere evident.
• Secondary steps
• Stair Parapets
• Handrails
Lighting systems tracked within preplanned Recesses
in ceilings overall, ordinary materials
and products were used.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.