Berlin, 1989. The jury of the competition for the extension of the Berlin Museum, with the section devoted to the city's Jewish history, chooses a project nobody had ever seen before: a broken line of zinc, long and fragmented, superimposed on a deformed Star of David. The author is Daniel Libeskind (b. 1946), an architect of Polish origin, the son of Jewish Holocaust survivors, who had taught for years, drawn a great deal and built nothing. His first building, the Felix Nussbaum Museum in Osnabrück, opened in 1998, when he was fifty-two. The Jewish Museum, completed in 1999 and opened to the public in 2001, is the second.
The museum has no entrance from the street. You enter through the Kollegienhaus, the Baroque building of 1735 that housed the old Berlin Museum, and descend into an underground passage. There the visitor meets three axes: that of Continuity, which climbs to the exhibition halls; that of Exile, which leads to a garden of tilted pillars; that of the Holocaust, which ends against a concrete tower with no openings. The building holds the history of the German Jewish community, but it reads first as a physical experience: you walk, you lose your orientation, you feel the weight of the concrete.
A musician who drew architecture
Libeskind's biography explains a great deal about his way of designing. He was born in 1946 in Łódź, Poland, to Jewish parents who had survived the war. As a child he was a talented accordionist, to the point of winning a scholarship from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation in a competition in which the young Itzhak Perlman also took part. The family emigrated to Israel in 1957 and then to New York, where Libeskind gave up music for architecture and studied at the Cooper Union, a pupil among others of John Hejduk, an architect who built very little and taught how to think about architecture through drawing and poetry. From 1978 he headed for some years the architecture department of the Cranbrook Academy of Art, near Detroit.
In those years Libeskind did not build, he drew. The series Micromegas (1979) and Chamber Works (1983) are dense sheets of lines, fragments and intersecting planes, halfway between technical drawing, musical score and abstract art: they do not represent buildings but explore what space might become. In 1988 the Museum of Modern Art in New York included him in the exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture, alongside Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi and Coop Himmelb(l)au. When he won the Berlin competition the following year, many still regarded him as a theorist: the museum would prove that those lines could become concrete.
The first building actually completed, however, was not in Berlin but in Osnabrück, in Lower Saxony. The Felix Nussbaum Museum, opened in 1998, is devoted to a Jewish painter born in that city, who went on painting in hiding in Belgium during the Nazi occupation and was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944. The building consists of three volumes that meet and collide, clad in different materials, and the route passes through narrow, increasingly dark corridors, like those in which Nussbaum spent his last years. Libeskind called it "a museum without exit": a sequence reproducing the condition of someone with no way out. It is, in effect, the dress rehearsal for the language the Jewish Museum would bring to a much larger scale.
Between the lines: where the form comes from
Libeskind called the project "Between the Lines" and explained its origin with four references. The first is a map: on the plan of Berlin he marked the addresses of Jewish and non-Jewish citizens who had shaped the city's cultural history, and joining them produced a network of lines from which he derived the building's broken form and the pattern of the windows. The second is musical: Arnold Schoenberg's unfinished opera Moses und Aron, whose last act was never set to music, a missing word. The third is a list: the names of Berlin Jews deported and murdered, collected in the large memorial volumes published after the war. The fourth is literary: Walter Benjamin's One-Way Street, a text made of short stations that Libeskind translated into the sequence of spaces.
One may debate how legible these references are to a visitor who does not know them. But they explain an important point: the museum's form does not arise from a taste for oblique lines, but from the attempt to translate into space a history made of broken connections. The slit windows cutting across the zinc panels of the façade in different directions are the traces of those lines on the city. The zinc, left untreated, has lost its initial shine over the years and taken on a duller, blue-grey patina, as the design intended.
The voids: an architecture of absence
The decisive gesture is the void. Libeskind calls it void: a vertical cut of raw concrete, as tall as the whole building, that crosses the structure in a straight line and that no one can walk through. There is a series of them, and they intersect the route at several levels. In the exhibition halls the visitor meets the void without being able to occupy it: seeing it through a slit, crossing it on a bridge, feeling it as a physical lack. A void is the direct consequence of the design, not an added symbol: it means that a part of the story (the people, the houses, the lives) is no longer there and cannot be rebuilt.
The Garden of Exile and Emigration, one of the three axes, is a square of 49 tilted concrete pillars planted on sloping ground. Forty-eight are filled with earth from Berlin, one with earth from Jerusalem. Russian olive trees grow from the top of each. Walking among the pillars, the visitor loses balance without understanding why: the ground is sloped. It is a technical device that produces real disorientation, and produces it without captions. The Holocaust Tower, at the end of the darkest axis, is a tall room of bare concrete from which a single ray of light filters, too high to be reached.
One of the voids houses a work that many visitors remember more than any object on display. In the Memory Void the Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman laid on the floor more than ten thousand round iron faces, with eyes and mouths open as if screaming: the installation is called Shalekhet, Fallen Leaves. Visitors are invited to walk on it, and each step produces a metallic clang that echoes in the concrete of the void. It is one of the rare cases in which a work of art and an architectural space become one.
There is also an episode that says a lot about the building's power. Completed in 1999, the museum remained without a collection for about two years, awaiting its installation, and was opened to the public like that, empty. During that period some 350,000 people visited it, coming to see nothing but the architecture. Some proposed leaving it that way for ever, as a memorial; instead it was decided to make it a museum of German Jewish history, with a permanent exhibition renewed in 2020. In later years Libeskind added to the complex a glass-covered courtyard in the Baroque building (2007) and, across the street, an academy housed in a former flower market (2012).
From museum to brand: the career after the void
The success of the Jewish Museum changes Libeskind's life and, at a certain point, creates a problem for him. For two decades he receives commissions around the world: the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester (2002), made of three fragments of a shattered globe; the extension of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto (2007), a crystal of aluminium and glass that wedges into the historic building; the Military History Museum in Dresden (2011), a wedge of glass and steel that slashes the neoclassical arsenal. In 2003 he won the competition for the World Trade Center masterplan in New York, although the project would later be profoundly altered.
The problem is one of method. In Berlin the void was a necessity: there was a specific history, and the form was born from it. Elsewhere, the same grammar (broken lines, wedges, oblique surfaces) risks becoming a style, applicable to any program. The harshest critics note that in Toronto or Denver the gesture is spectacular but detached from place. Libeskind's answer is that architecture must nonetheless remain an act of memory and civic responsibility: whoever enters a building should feel the weight of the history that runs through it. In Berlin, that principle is visible. Elsewhere, it is intimated.
Ground Zero and after
The World Trade Center case clearly shows the gap between a master plan and what gets built. Libeskind's scheme, called Memory Foundations, left visible the foundations of the Twin Towers and the retaining wall that had withstood the collapse, arranged the new towers in a spiral around the memorial area and proposed a main tower 1,776 feet high, about 541 metres, a reference to the year of the Declaration of Independence. Over the years the plan was profoundly altered: the tower was redesigned by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the memorial was entrusted to Michael Arad and Peter Walker with its two great pools in the footprints of the towers, and what remains of Libeskind is above all the general layout and the symbolic height of One World Trade Center.
In the same years the practice grew and built a great deal, including in Italy. In Milan, in the CityLife district built on the site of the old trade fair, Libeskind designed a residential complex and one of the three office towers, completed in 2020, with a façade that curves and twists as it rises. In the United States, the extension of the Denver Art Museum (2006) takes the grammar of titanium-clad wedges to its extreme. These buildings attract very different judgements: for some they prove the consistency of a personal language, for others they show that a form born for a precise place and history loses strength when applied to ordinary programmes.
For visitors to Berlin, the advice is to give the museum more time than you might expect and to walk the underground axes before the exhibition rooms, letting yourself be guided by the slope of the floors and the light. The Garden of Exile should be crossed on foot, not viewed from outside, and the Holocaust Tower needs a few minutes of silence to be understood. It is a building grasped with the body before the captions, showing better than any textbook what architecture can do when it has to tell of what can no longer be seen.