Libeskind's Jewish Museum Research Articles

The Libeskind Jewish Museum in Berlin, the unpresentable and experience

This paper is an attempt to interpret the design or spatial modulation of an important work of architecture in Berlin, Germany, namely Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum. This is done by activating the heuristic potential of a number of relevant concepts from a variety of thinkers. After a brief introduction on modern architecture in Berlin, the focus shifts to this specific building, which is briefly described before interpretively introducing the notions of the ‘real’ in the work of Jacques Lacan – which denotes that which surpasses symbolisation, and is encountered in traumatic experiences – and correlatively, of ‘earth’ in that of Heidegger, which suggests something that only manifests itself in so far as it withdraws from scrutiny. The hermeneutic significance of these concepts for the Jewish Museum is explored, followed by a similar examination of the interpretive relevance of the notions of the ‘unpresentable’, ‘unsayable’ and sublime (Lyotard, Kant) for Libeskind’s building. Given the enormity and unpresentable horror of the event (the Holocaust) indexed by the Jewish Museum, any analysis of the meaning of this building would be incomplete without focusing specifically on the experience(s) afforded to visitors. In this regard the work of Arleen Ionescu on the Jewish Museum – on the significance of its ‘voids’, for example – and the (written) work of Libeskind himself (on the relevance of light, for instance) prove to be invaluable. Finally, Karsten Harries’s insights concerning the ‘ethical function of architecture’, ‘a sense of place’ and ‘community’ are employed to draw together the strands of the present interpretive essay

Conceptual diagrams in creative architectural practice: the case of Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum

The Jewish Museum in Berlin is the first major building of Daniel Libeskind [1,2]. The project for the museum has instigated a wealth of discussions in architectural circles and achieved a rare status of attracting the attention of scholars from other disciplines. Kurt W. Forster put the design for the Jewish Museum on a par with Piranesi's Carceri d'Invenzione, an unusual position for any building since very rarely does an architectural design ‘[…] bear this double burden of representing both actual buildings and mental structures, and which therefore have to submit to being measured by both standards: the durability of their ideas and the imaginative faculty of their designer.’

Teutonic Shifts, Jewish Voids

This article chronicles several visits to Germany's most prominent Holocaust monuments: Peter Eisenman's Holocaust Memorial and Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum, both located in Berlin. Juxtaposing memories with observation, the author argues that in the German national imaginary Eisenman's and Libeskind's architecture of abstraction offers a space for ‘wall love’: a certain German nostalgia for the innocence of a history that never was; a longing for the return of the Berlin Wall, that safeguard of German post-war identity.

Memory Museum and Museum Text

In the last 20 years the institution of the museum has gone through a period of redefining its role and its functions in society, its forms of representation, its authority in discourses on the past and its objects. The stated aim of many of the ‘memory museums’ which were established during this period is to invite reflection on the aestheticization of memory and on the fact that the exhibition is seen as a narrative which is challenging conventional codes of perception. By granting a voice to what has been left out of the dominant discourses of history and of everyday experience, they try to integrate diversified and sometimes even incompatible narratives – a mode of representation that has so far been the domain of art and specifically literature. This contribution argues that it is not only between the museum and the memorial that distinctions between different memory media are getting blurred: examples such as Libeskind's Jewish Museum, which wants to be read as a text, and W.G. Sebald's novel Austerlitz, which he described as an alternative Holocaust museum, indicate that aspects of intermediality gain importance in the contemporary memorial landscape.

The Spoiler's Art: Embarrassed Space as Memorialization

This essay looks at three architectural responses to the task of memorializing the mass murder of European Jewry. Both Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum and Peter Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe are tautly theorized and well-defended instances of contemporary architecture that are nevertheless subject to—and to a degree invite—embarrassment in the context of Berlin as a historically burdened location. In contrast, Ernö Goldfinger's house at 2 Willow Road, Hampstead Heath, London, formulates a different response to the problem of properly acknowledging the historical past, in the form of a permanent threat to the interior's governing aesthetic.

Citizenship without community: Time, design and the city1

This article engages with the concept of design as a way of re-working the standard understanding of citizenship as what takes place within a political community. In doing so, the paper draws on recent attempts to rethink citizenship as ‘acts’ rather than status and seeks to bring that work together with attempts at re-imagining community as ‘encounters’ and ‘confrontations’ rather than that which is contained within a bounded space. Specifically, the paper argues for an approach that is attentive to ideas of time and seeks to open up an idea of community that avoids the requirement of commonality. Using a focus on citizenship as a temporal phenomenon, the article suggests that designers have engaged with ideas of time as multiple, fragmented and splintered, and that these form useful material for reworking ideas of community beyond something that can be calculated. The article offers a study of two sites of memory drawn from the city of Berlin, Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum and Peter Eisenmann's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and an art installation by the artist Gustav Metzger called Flailing Trees exhibited at the Manchester International Festival of 2009. Gathering material offered by these designs, and a tradition of writing the city as a splintered social space, the article explores the different forms of community that circulate and are instantiated at these ‘sites of memory’ and argues for an understanding of community without unity.

Moneo, Libeskind and a question of influence

This paper focuses on two museum buildings designed in the 1980s: Rafael Moneo's Museum of Roman Art in Merida (1980–86) and Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin (1988–99, 2001). The first consolidated the initial phase of Moneo's career, while the second, over-interpreted in subsequent criticism, ignited Libeskind's reputation as a theorist who could build. Approaching the design of both museums with Aldo Rossi's influence in mind, the particular focus is the relationship between concepts of order and contingency associated with the theme of temporality recurrent in his architecture. This retrospective examination was initially conceived in response to Robin Evans's review of Libeskind's Chamberworks, where he remarked on the efficacy of Rossi's short preface. Relationships discovered in comparative examination of these two polemically divergent buildings credit Rossi with a more nuanced influence on late twentieth-century architecture than is generally attributed to his work (currently at the margins of architectural discourse).

Walks through Berlin's Cemeteries

the fall of the Wall in 1989, the reunification of Germany in 1990, and the subsequent move of the capital back from Bonn, Berlin has been arguably the liveliest and most changeable city of Europe. Its political and cultural energies are reflected in the physical reconstitution of a city that was extensively damaged in World War II and that, especially in its historic center (Mitte), continued to languish under the communists, who unhesitatingly tore down buildings such as the great baroque royal palace that they regarded as symbols of an oppressive Prussian past. As a result, during the last decade Berlin has provided a gratifying playground for international architects, featuring such a potpourri of forms as Norman Forster's glass dome floating luminously on the massive structure of the Reichstag, the classical glass-and-stone modernism of I. M. Pei's Exhibition Hall appended to the historical museum in the baroque Zeughaus (Arsenal), the harsh metallic zigzags of Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum, the three thousand concrete steles designed by Peter Eisenmann near the Brandenburg Gate as a monument to the Jewish victims of Nazism, and the miniskyscrapers surrounding Potsdamer Platz. Although the forest of building cranes that dominated the cityscape only five years ago has been thinned, almost every street in the historic center changes and grows from year to year as new buildings go up and old ones are restored. In the midst of this

The Stigmata or the Tattoo

The Stigmata or the Tattoo

Holocaust Controversies in the 1990s: The Revenge of History or the History of Revenge?

During the 1990s it was often remarked that controversies about the persecution and mass murderof the Jews between 1933 and 1945 had acquired an unprecedented volume and vehemence. Indeed, the esca...

Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin: The Uncanny Arts of Memorial Architecture

L'article traite du museum juif de Berlin qui est l'oeuvre de l'architecte Daniel Libeskind. L'A. retrace d'abord l'histoire de la genese du museum juif a Berlin avant la guerre. Il aborde ensuite la conceptualisation contemporaine du museum et la reponse architecturale de Libeskind aux problemes qui se posaient.

Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin: The Uncanny Arts of Memorial Architecture

Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin: The Uncanny Arts of Memorial Architecture

Daniel Libeskinds jødiske museum som musealt prosjekt og urbant erindringsrum

Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum as museum project and urban remembrance room.This paper examines the museum qualities of Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin. It focuses on the significance of the museum space and suggests that this is a museum which substantially requires the visitors to regard it as a cultural, spatial text. Furthermore, it states that the city of Berlin is a crucial part of the museum. The history of the city is woven into the building and is an important part of the understanding of the museum.