The strong point of Jewish Museum of Berlin, designed by Daniel Libeskind, derives from his determination to make his message immediately clear. Allegorically, the building itself, with its theatrical contortions, and sharp edges is a warning to future generations. Such a catalysing force of awareness has attracted an unprecedented flow of visitors.
When the museum was inaugurated it was completely empty , the furnishings were not ready and so there were no works on display; yet the museum itself with its studied route of pain and purification, with its pathetic and tragic theatrical effects , was enough - better than any furnishings, so thousands of people can "re-live" the tragedy of the Holocaust, paying to visit an empty museum.
The museum is wholly covered with zinc and aluminium, having the shape of a deformed Star of David, planimetrical, zig-zag , a symbol of a journey fraught with accidents.. No windows but long narrow wounds, informal tears devoid of any apparent logic , in the symbology adopted by the architect. We recall , "topographical traces of places in the city, where Jews lived and were eliminated. " And truly, it is an ensemble of incomprehensible signs, for the most part, that outline a disturbing trauma. The building is a self-enclosed structure , introverted, with no direct entrance from the outside. The main entrance is in the old museum.
One enters, and descends by a stairway to a floor below ground level, then, one has to rise again. So, the pre-existing building of the eighteenth century is all one with the extension only on the ground floor, showing above ground the visibly anomalous independence of the two buildings. The old museum assumes the function of a preparatory place and waiting room, before we embark on the route of purification which leads into the museum proper. The ground floor, marked by a passage from natural light into net cold neon light, gives access to three routes, is the junction of routes to different sections of the building. The three routes symbolize different destinies of the Jews. One leads to the garden of E.T.A. Hoffman which symbolises exile; another, on the staircase, represents the continuity of the history of the Jews. The third route leads goes towards the Tower of the Holoocaust.
The garden is dug in the ground and its square shape is underlined by a high wall in reinforced cement which indicates imprisonment to which the Jews in exile were subjected The floor of footfalls is inclined at six degrees to express the unease of exile on foreign soil.
On the inside of the fence a forest of columns is crowned by actual trees which represent the hope of return to the homeland.
Another route leads to the Tower of the Holocaust, the only building of the museum not used for the exhibition, destined to remain as a dramatic warning. One enters through a thick heavy steel door tin to a trapezoid space almost thirty metres high, completely empty and dark, the only fount of hope being a small slit in a corner of the ceiling. The walls and floor are in reinforced cement and there is no kind of air conditioning.. The muted sounds from outside create a sensation of unrest. The third route leads up entrance stairs to different floors of the museum. There is a straight stairway that climbs into one empty space, and a stairway which leads to the exhibition rooms disposed on three floors of the building. This route is brusquely interrupted by a wall. The narrow high space of the other stairway is shot through by a tangle of beams of different dimensions and slanting diagonally which has dramatic effects.
Every detail has been studied to provoke the sensation of instability, and anxiety; the handrails of the stair are fragmented; the pilasters are slender splinters of reinforced cement; the windows follow slit after slit in the ceilings and floors. The intersecting of this tangle of lines and glazed surfaces is so great that portions of cement remain suspended, floating in a void precariously.. The broken line itinerary of the museum is cut through by a straight line. And the plan metric and spatial compenetration contains six trapezoid voids, which interrupt the whole itinerary through the museum. The void symbolizes the absence of millions of Jewish lives after the Holocaust.
An architecture constructed around symbols clearly involves pathos, with an arbitrary emphasis; it is almost didactic architecture, that "accompanies" the spectator through "narratives" that arouse certain sensations, forced upon us by architectonic expedients. And often the architecture that emerges is so charged with tragic evocations , by disquieting gashes or physical destabilizes that it becomes pedantically pompous or, worse still, gratuitous and demagogic. But Libeskind's project has a planned coherence that guides every choice of form, and structural detail, throughout the whole building. This makes the museum a great scenic machine to less attentive minds. His purpose is not to let us forget the Holocaust and this objective is reached, even at the cost of exaggerating with forced analogies.
