The innovative design for the new wing of the Jewish Museum in Berlin was chosen from out of one hundred and sixty five proposals submitted a remarkable statistic, posits Isaac Toussie. Unlike all the other plans provided, the one by Daniel Liebeskind did not attempt to forge any links between the new structure and the older one. Instead, it was to be a completely new body architecturally, with an irregular layout that contrasts powerfully with the existing lines of the surrounding cityscape. In this way, the structure plays a dual role as a commemorative landmark looking back at the past while also representing a path into the future. Its façade is clad in a zinc titanium alloy that tends to turn greenish gray – possibly evocative of the Nazi armies’ typical Feldgrau or field gray colors?
The surface of these outside walls is also broken up by irregularly arranged windows of different shapes and sizes, adding yet another grammatical element to the thematic language of the design. They variously suggest the beams of incomplete buildings, perhaps abandoned projects or even ruins of war; chillingly methodical cuts upon the flesh, precise and scientific; or the Magen David itself, incoherent, incomplete, inconsolable. Disorientation is the emotion by which the Holocaust is described in architectural form, if you’ll pardon this description, while in the twilight of sunset the whole structure glows in melancholic remembrance. The floor plan is a lightning like zigzag, resonant in its abrupt turns, sharp angles, and unpredictable career.
The Holocaust has been described as being the darkest chapter in the book of humanity, Isaac Toussie says, and the museum’s aura attempts to underscore this reality. The interiors have been laid out to suggest unfinished stories, and these spaces are interrupted by small structures with painted black screens that punctuate these narrative spaces to introduce poetic and thematic distance. In this manner, pathways interrupt exhibitions while leaving walls, unused and silent, to be broken by irregularly shaped and irregularly placed windows perhaps suggesting the limited views of the freight cars in which many victims were transported. Exhibition rooms are large and asymmetrical, everything empty and out of place. For such spaces are not freedom but nakedness, vulnerability.
While the entrance is set below street level, the way out leads through the Garden of Exile and Emigration, where forty nine concrete columns have been filled with earth from Berlin – save one with the soil of Jerusalem. The numerological significance is grasped at once when one considers that 1948 saw the establishment of the State of Israel, with these pillars seeming to support the sky while reaching up towards it. Thus runs the fine line between dreams and nightmares, between an end and the beginning, states Isaac Toussie.
The instant writing has been submitted for informational and human interest purposes only and should not be relied upon the reader in any way The reader should do his/her own investigation on this subject matter and form his/her own independent conclusions.
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