Metropolis Feature: The Mystic of Lindenstrasse

When he won the Berlin Jewish Museum competition in the spring of 1989, Daniel Libeskind was among the best-known nonbuilding architects in the world.

Ten years after the MoMA show, Daniel Libeskind unveils his first major building--the Jewish Museum in Berlin--and proves himself less deconstructivist than magical realist.

by Philip Nobel

Aby Philip Nobel Nina Libeskind moves easily through the tortured angles of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, keeping up a well-practiced narration, pointing out some of the building's more eccentric details. She stops at the end of one of the museum's long galleries, where the colliding patterns of strip windows--part of a network that forms a torqued Star of David on the facade--chop into the concrete walls, isolating a triangular chunk that appears to float freely in the glass. "That's a window and a half, I tell you," she says. The building has more than a thousand others, all but five unique.

Now that he has completed his long-awaited signature project, Daniel Libeskind would rather let others show it off. He prefers to be absent when people size up his work--a luxury he enjoyed in the years when it existed only on paper. His wife and partner, Nina, or one of the aspiring architects in their Berlin office, receives visitors to the museum, which will open to the public, empty (because of ongoing political battles about funding), sometime this month.

In the 10 years since Libeskind won the competition for a Jewish-themed extension to the Berlin Museum, the world has been watching the building evolve. Images of the project have figured prominently in his lectures at universities and conferences, and in the many media accounts of its progress, which have featured aerial views of the roofless, floorless museum, slashed walls propped up like an unfinished foam-core model. Anticipation for the building has already resulted in one book, A Passage Through Silence and Light (1996) by Raoul Bunschoten, with black-and-white photographs by Hélène Binet that show the sun washing through the runic figures of the unglazed windows. Such hype long ago made the site a destination for architects and students from Europe and elsewhere (a group approached Libeskind recently in Melbourne, Australia, to brag that they had broken in and stayed the night), and for Berliners, who come in waves to peer through the construction fence, worrying the guards and their German shepherds.

Explaining his sometimes arcane work from within its solid walls may be an uncomfortable experience for Libeskind, but it is one that he will have to endure more frequently in the coming years. The Felix Nussbaum Museum in Osnabrück, Germany, dedicated to the work of the painter who was killed in the Holocaust, opened last July. As a result of its popularity, Libeskind has been commissioned to design a 100-seat restaurant and a bookstore in an adjacent gatehouse. His addition to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, a cause célèbre since its unruly planar spiral was first unveiled in 1996, is moving toward final design approval, and several other projects, including the 70,000-square-foot Jewish Museum in San Francisco's Yerba Buena cultural district, an artist's residence on Majorca, the Imperial War Museum in Manchester, England, and university buildings for a new development outside Guadalajara, Mexico, are progressing through different stages of design development. By 2003 or so, it is possible that Daniel Libeskind will have completed seven buildings. Thom Mayne, a partner in the Los Angeles architecture firm Morphosis and a teacher at SCI-Arc, remembers Libeskind visiting the school in the 1970s: "He would come in talking about 'challenging the morality of building.' I just smiled and said, 'Talk to me in 10 years.'" It took longer, but Libeskind has finally stopped questioning the act of building long enough to indulge in it himself.

When he won the Berlin Jewish Museum competition in the spring of 1989, Daniel Libeskind was among the best-known nonbuilding architects in the world. The Libeskinds were then living in Milan, where Daniel had started a school, Architecture Intermundium, in 1985, after stepping down as head of the architecture program at Cranbrook Academy, a position he had held since 1978. He had recently accepted an appointment--the first ever offered to an architect--as a senior scholar at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, which would have capped his career as an academic and paper architect. He had already won more than a dozen awards and taught architecture at 14 schools in seven countries, and his work had been shown in more than 60 exhibitions, including the 1988 "Deconstructivist Architecture" show at the Museum of Modern Art, which identified him as part of the next big thing. (Though Libeskind distances himself from that controversial show--"Look, it was like a ship with different passengers; I don't derive my work from those notions"--the MoMA curators' forecast was borne out in the competitions he began to win with greater frequency and the commissions to build that sometimes followed.)

With their household belongings packed into a freighter that was working its way through the Panama Canal to California, the Libeskinds arrived in Berlin to accept the competition award. They were planning to proceed on to Los Angeles and the Getty, to live "a life without cares, with assistants and computers and access to this incredible institution--just to think," Libeskind recalls. But, he says, as they crossed Berlin's wide Bundesallee after collecting the award, "Nina turned to me and said, 'You realize what this means?' and I suddenly knew that if we were serious, we couldn't leave. Because of the politics, how is anybody going to build without the architect being there every day, talking to everybody?" They called the Getty Center and the shipping company, checked into a hotel, and stayed. Libeskind has been handcrafting the building ever since, while navigating, with the help of Nina's natural political expertise (her father was David Lewis, one of the founders of Canada's New Democratic Party), the bureaucracy and public anxiety involved in building a museum for Berlin's vanished Jews, at a moment when the city is transforming itself from an anomalous outpost into the capital of a united Germany.

The Jewish Museum sits in one of those neighborhoods that gives Berlin its reputation for punctuated barrenness. Setting off in any direction from the museum, at 14 Lindenstrasse in Kreuzberg, you move into a world of graying housing developments, grand empty boulevards, and block-size vacant lots. Though it is hard to tell today, Kreuzberg was once a center for artsy West Berlin nightlife, before the famous szene decamped for points east, principally to the old, rediscovered Jewish quarters around Oranienburgerstrasse and Prenzlauerberg. (There, in renovated but sparsely attended synagogues and restaurants serving "bagel mit lachsfisch," you can see evidence of the popular, and some might say, terribly belated, appreciation for German Jewish culture to which the Jewish Museum is the official institutional response.)

Berlin sprawls, so you have to wind in and out of the area on the elevated U-Bahn line that passes through one of the vast construction sites that pock the city. Well before it was split by the Wall in 1961, Berlin was fragmented by impassable barriers: arcing railway viaducts, impenetrable industrial zones, and canals. As the city prepares to resume its role as the seat of national government in 2000, it is trying to suture itself together. Huge swaths of broken ground around Potsdamer Platz and the Reichstag--the sites of the future business and government centers, respectively--are thick with cantilevered construction cranes, put to bed every night with German fastidiousness, each one pointing due north.

The postcard shot of the Jewish Museum standing as the alienated other next to the ochre Baroque edifice of the Berlin Museum is an easy metaphor for the ghosts of Germany's past and future, but Libeskind likes his metaphors more difficult. In linking the buildings (he connected them underground and restored the old museum's exterior, cladding its dormers with the zinc skin he used on the Jewish Museum), he resisted operating on the existing building as if it were simply a proxy for the old regime. Because of this restraint, when the buildings do interact, the effect is magnified. Just inside a shared foyer in the Berlin Museum, the entrance to the Jewish Museum proper is a stair that descends 18 feet below grade, passing under a concrete shaft that rises unbroken through the gallery floors of the old building. It is the first of the new museum's voids, the realization of Libeskind's scheme to invite "absence" into the museum by building gorgeous containers for it.

The Berlin Wall used to run its own angled course not far from the site of the Jewish Museum, and visitors in years to come, unaware of the personal, theoretical, and pragmatic decisions that informed the building, may think Libeskind was merely riffing on the L-shaped concrete barrier that once zagged through Berlin. Given some of the building's geographical and historical circumstances, this reading might not seem unreasonable: The Libeskinds moved to Berlin in June 1989, and the Wall came down that November; the building lies roughly parallel with the path of the Wall--Checkpoint Charlie is only a few long blocks to the north--and shares the Wall's sharp geometry. But although the Wall is highlighted on the drawings with which Libeskind won the hearts and minds of the competition jurors, it is not central to the design. Typical of Libeskind, the thinking behind the building is more enigmatic, combining elaborate analysis with a passion for the occult.

As explained in his competition statement, the form of the Jewish Museum was derived from four ideas. First, responding to a feeling that "the physical trace of Berlin was not the only trace, but rather that there was an invisible matrix or anamnesis of connections" between Germans and Jews, Libeskind constructed "an irrational matrix in the form of intertwining triangles which would yield some reference to the emblematics of a compressed and distorted star: the yellow star that was frequently worn on this very site." Plotted on the map of Berlin, this matrix connected the addresses of Jewish artists, writers, poets, and composers to the addresses of their German counterparts, creating a "cultural constellation of Universal History." Through a series of graphic manipulations, this pattern became the basis for the geometry of the museum's windows.

The second inspiration was Arnold Schoenberg's unfinished opera, Moses and Aaron. Libeskind says he was drawn to it because it ends in spoken words, not singing, so "one can understand very well the missing word which is uttered by Moses, the call for the Word." In the building, this idea became associated with the play of absence represented by the line of void spaces that interrupt the museum's crooked galleries. The third idea relates to Libeskind's research in the Gedenkbuch, an alphabetical list of the names of Holocaust victims with the times and places of their deaths. He catalogued the variations on the name Berliner, a common German Jewish name. Repro-ductions of these lists were applied to various study models over the years, usually on the inside walls of the voids. The final idea, reflected in the number of sections in the museum's zigzag plan, came from Walter Benjamin's One-Way Street, a collection of 60 vignette fantasias on life in Berlin before the war.

In other projects, Libeskind often takes a similar approach: He looks for a constellation of ideas that resonate with the program, the site, and, crucially, his own demons--in this case, the role of a Jewish architect designing a Jewish museum in Berlin. "When I got the competition materials, the project was called 'the extension of the Berlin Museum with the Jewish Department.' But the German word for department, abteilung, has terrible connotations. It was a word the Nazis used to deal with Jewish affairs. Of course everything has an abteilung--it's a bureaucratic term--but the word was always associated with the Holocaust: Eichmann ran an abteilung. So when I started work, I thought a lot about the word, and that, for the first time, gave me the notion that you can't put Jews in a department because they are not in a department of history in Berlin, they were integrated into it fully. They were in business and the working class and in the arts and the sciences; they were Berlin's musicians."

Daniel Libeskind was born in Lodz, Poland, in May 1946, a year and a week after V-E Day. Many of his relatives died in the Holocaust. His immediate family fled postwar Polish anti-Semitism, going first to Israel in 1957 and then to New York in 1960--a route that left him with the telltale "k" he sometimes adds to his terminal "g's," as in "buildingk." Famously, Libeskind was a musical prodigy, a childhood accordion virtuoso by necessity when his family didn't have a piano, and then a concert pianist once they did. In 1959, at age 13, he won a prestigious American-Israel Cultural Foundation prize in music--Isaac Stern was on the jury--and he is probably the only architect working today who has played accordion in Carnegie Hall. Libeskind does not like to make too much of this past life. "I was a performer; I never composed. Finally, what I didn't like about playing was that I was always interpreting someone else's work." Stepping away from music in 1965, he went to study architecture at Cooper Union.

In Fishing from the Pavement, a book of poetry Libeskind published in 1997, he describes "a cherubic picador, peaceful survivor / of Armageddon's circle, [who] calculates the positions of stars while the horoscope is brimming with spontaneous tenderness." Through this device, perhaps accidentally, he sketches a wonderfully compact description of himself: a quiet provocateur who escaped cataclysm by one year, and who now oscillates between precision and ecstasy. Libeskind's poetry also hints at his mysticism, which takes a specifically Jewish form. In Jewish mysticism, which is found not only in the books of the Kabbalah, but in approaches to reading all sacred Hebrew texts, letters live a dual life: they bear the sounds of the words they form, but they are also freighted with other meanings. These hidden codes can be mined by an adept, but even when they are left "unrevealed," the letters do not lose their talismanic ability to evoke higher powers; the forms of the letters are the ideas. Although a strong belief in the tenacity of hidden meanings is apparent in much of Libeskind's work, it tends to become more pronounced in his designs for Jewish proj-ects. (In addition to the museums in Berlin and San Francisco, he designed a synagogue for Duisburg, Germany, and is consulting with the city of Orianenburg on uses for the site of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.)

In his preliminary work on the Jewish Museum in San Francisco, which could be completed as early as 2001, he takes a textbook Jewish mystical approach to the geometry of the building. It is based in part on the shapes of two Hebrew letters, het and yud, which make the word chai--life--a shorthand reference to the idea of the museum that stresses living Jewish culture over the remembrance of disasters in the past. For Libeskind, the letters themselves are like batteries that charge the construction from within; they do not have to be read or even seen in the finished building: "That whole geometry is generated in order to experience in space the experience of the letter. But they are not emblems projected into space. It's not like you are taking the Star of David and extruding it. It's about the substance of the letters--What are the letters of life?--because life is in those letters also."

This mystical strain is everywhere in the work that precedes Libeskind's architecture, in the conjured spaces of his abstract and layered "Micromega" drawings, the appliqué of fragmented texts that "charges" many of his models, and in his poems, which are so impenetrable that reading them is almost like eavesdropping on the architect's personal communion with the divine. Although it is passed off as a more scientific ardor, Libeskind's mystical urge can also be found in his architectural drawings, in the occasional spatter of numbers implying calculation or the tentatively swung arcs and the deep, sometimes gruesome pockets of cross-hatched tone.

In his balance of exactitude and emotion, head and heart, and the practice of supplementing architecture with verse, Libeskind has affinities with John Hejduk, the charismatic professor, now dean, with whom he studied at Cooper Union. During his quietly influential career, Hejduk has helped to cultivate what could be called a warm--mystical, intuitive, authorial--strain of theoretical architecture that contrasts with the more coolly determined intellectual mechanisms through which Peter Eisenman and his fellow-travelers create the armatures for their buildings. A debt to Hejduk is clear in some of Libeskind's early projects, notably the medieval machinery of his "Three Lessons in Architecture," exhibited at the 1985 Venice Biennale, but this influence is now fully synthesized into the native Mittel-European expressionism that is rearing undeniably in his built work.

The highest praise that can be given to the Jewish Museum is simply that it is a building, not an inflated, inhabitable model of an intellectual exercise, as so many who have not seen it fear. The visitor arriving wary and leaving seduced has been a strong theme of reports in the last year. One such visitor was Frank Gehry, whose own approach to design--he works out his buildings in study models, intuitively, before scanning their petals and lobes into a computer--is far from Libeskind's haunted intellectual elaboration of governing concepts. "I wasn't skeptical, but until you do it, it's not done," Gehry says from his Los Angeles office, referring to the reservations he had before he visited the Jewish Museum last summer. "A young kid from the office took me through the building, but he started at the top--all those long corridors and slot windows--so I was confused. He took me through in the wrong sequence, not the way you would see the building if you came in the front door. The kid was explaining the voids, but they just looked like shafts in a New York tenement building. But when I got down to the bottom, and I saw what the voids were really doing, I understood the building. I understood that it was a building that expressed anger. The anger is shown in the zigzag and the voids, which deny public space, and it is continued in the windows. Libeskind expressed an emotion with a building, and that is the most difficult thing to do."

To achieve this difficult thing, Libeskind moved beyond the ideas outlined in his competition statement while remaining open to those that came from the process of building itself. At the beginning of a project, Libeskind says, "you find the lineaments of a certain thing, something which could be beautiful, which is true, which is not compromised by idiocies," but as it becomes a building--and this is the prerogative of the Jewish mystic--one is free to focus on other issues. Because of his faith in the revelatory powers of concealed meanings, Libeskind can move on, assured that the aura of his original ideas will remain. Rather than belaboring his ideas into life, a pitfall common in experimental architecture, his mystical bent allowed him to let meaning enter quietly into the Jewish Museum.

In this spirit, Libeskind transferred his intensity to the museum's details: the flourish of seven angled beams that cross over the main stair hall, for example, and the piano-wire pigeon guards required by Berlin code. The windows, of course, demanded a lot of work; Libeskind's office developed a special installation system, almost like the kind used for car windshields, so they could wander as they do around the facade. This unexpected attention to detail tipped the scales for Libeskind when his design, "the Spiral," was being considered for the addition to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Before making the final selection, the trustees came to Berlin to tour the Jewish Museum. Alan Borg, director of the V and A, said they all came away with a feeling that the building had "the spirit of the Arts and Crafts in its detailing," giving them confidence that Libeskind's addition could be taken from paper to construction in a way that would not do violence to the Arts and Crafts spirit of the original building, as the Spiral's many critics argue.

The most profound examples of Libeskind's success in guiding the development of the Jewish Museum from a paper project to a real one are the changes to the design that took place around 1991, as he began to prepare drawings for construction. In what was universally assumed to be a financially motivated move, he straightened the inclined and overhanging walls, in effect pruning the long prows that hung from each of the building's jagged corners. As Libeskind tells it, this change was dictated by the project's growing pains as it progressed into a new medium: "Believe me, I have thousands of drawings of this and thousands of models. The angled walls did not add anything, so I dropped them. Then, whenever I would give a lecture, architects would say, 'Oh, Mr. Libeskind! Why did you compromise? Why did you drop the part that was most exciting?'" (The Berlin Senate, which controlled the budget, worried that they would be blamed for the change, and asked him to file a letter absolving them of any responsibility.) Whatever the motivation, the "straightening out" of the Jewish Museum contributed to its success. As Thom Mayne says of the building, it seems "enormously mature" for an architect's first work; though the Jewish Museum is anything but barren, Libeskind judiciously limited eye-popping effect for its own sake, resisting a freshman's inclination to show off all his moves.

Without the tilting walls, the building is an almost pure extrusion of the plan, as revealed by a mystifying longitudinal section where almost nothing happens: it looks like just a stack of floors. Since spaces can often be most effectively conceived by examining a design in cross section--and architects tend to value spatial over graphic competence--not developing the design of a building "in section" generally raises eyebrows and red flags. But, as Libeskind must have seen, the sectional complexity of the first scheme was a sort of formal game, in the sense that architects use the term to chide peers and students who deploy exotic forms without justification. In the original design, the building unpacked itself from some presumed zero-point at the Lindenstrasse sidewalk: the walls increased their slope at every turn (from vertical at the front to a steep 60 degrees at the rear) as the angles of the plan opened and the frequency of its kinks decreased.

In the revised design, as built, the only deviations revealed by the section drawings are the small drops in ceiling height where bridges span the building's voids, creating the deep black shadows that ornament those otherwise empty spaces. This careful, minimal tweak is just enough to distinguish the bridges as such without confusing the issue with other formal ideas. Any additional play in the slope of the walls, though alluring in drawings and models (the building did, after all, seduce the jury in its wilder adolescent form), would risk obscuring the experience of passing through and standing in the sky-lit spine of voids.

In turning his attention to building, Libeskind also directed his dreamy-theoretical outpourings to practical ends. Both he and Nina stress the importance of the well-articulated, well-documented generative concepts in getting the building through the heavily politicized bureaucratic process they faced in Berlin. "If this museum had been a box it would never have been built, because nobody would have had the money to build a box. But because the design communicated to them through these issues of the void--or whatever--it sparked public involvement."

The big ideas, and the challenge of producing the convoluted forms that convey them, also inspired the construction workers who built the museum. "They were not Swiss or from Munich. They were East Europeans," Libeskind says. "These are not workers who are associated with incredible technical virtuosity, but it became their project." One of them was so affected by the message of the building that he surreptitiously stenciled his own contribution in red ink on a wall at the bottom of one of its voids. According to the Libeskinds, it is an old Bosnian saying: "When the Jews are leaving, it is a bad sign for a city."

The stencil, of course, will stay; Nina Libeskind refers to it as the first item in the museum's collection. It is important to remember, however, that the rest of the exhibition space is empty. Right now, it is just a museum of itself, and it will remain so until the curatorial plans are sorted out and a permanent exhibition is funded and designed, probably not before October 2000. Michael Blumenthal, the museum's director, is assembling an impressive staff, including Shaike Weinberg, the founding director of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and Tom Freudenheim, the former head of YIVO in New York, a research institute with one of the world's largest Jewish historical collections. Blumenthal says the museum will house an education department and a permanent exhibition on "the high points and disasters of German Jewish history, from Roman times to the present," although the museum's program has gone through many politically motivated changes to date--at one point opponents of a separate Holocaust memorial in Berlin even proposed converting the museum to this use--and more are likely to follow.

The uncertainty over the role of the museum building is reflected in its changing name. After Libeskind won his argument against ghettoizing the exhibits in an "abteilung," it became "the extension of the Berlin Museum with the Jewish Museum," then "the extension of the Berlin Museum and the Jewish Museum," "the Jewish Museum in the City Museum," and finally the curatorially independent Jewish Museum of Berlin. "It changed five or six times, and I'm sure there is a seventh coming," Libeskind says. "It will probably be the 'Jewish Museum of Germany,'" when the government returns to Berlin.

In October, with the Jewish Museum almost complete and designs moving forward in San Francisco, Majorca, and Manchester (but not in London, where the Victoria and Albert addition was waiting on another round of approvals), Daniel Libeskind came to New York to work on his newest commission, for a site just outside of Guadalajara--his first group project. Jorge Vergara, a Mexican millionaire with dreams of architectural immortality, has hired 10 brand-name architects to design a business, entertainment, and educational complex on 750 acres of former cornfields at the edge of his hometown. He assigned the university, a small campus for schools of government, education, and architecture, to Libeskind, after the architect had asked to design anything but a museum.

Though the Guadalajara project is similar to many other star-studded ventures (in Fukuoka; Vienna; Columbus, Indiana; Celebration, Florida; and elsewhere), Vergara is perhaps alone in citing Brasília as his inspiration. Hoping to avoid a World's Fair menagerie, he has asked the architects to work together to create an orderly ensemble. At the New York meeting, they were presenting their designs to each other for the first time.

Several of the architects had already developed buildings, but Libeskind came armed only with ideas and a carousel of slides: white-on-black diagrams comparing educational philosophies and a conceptual drawing of the site interlaced with braided lines of numbers. Around the conference table, Billie Tsien, Tod Williams, Enrique Norten, Carme Pinós, Thom Mayne, Stephen Holl and his deputies, and Toyo Ito and his translator all listened to Libeskind (Wolf Prix took snapshots; Jean Nouvel missed the meeting) as he seemed to revert to what he has called his "former life" as a teacher and provocateur. As a preface to a thorough history of campus building, Libeskind explained his intention to "shift completely away from the idea of a university, to shift away from the idea of a campus, and to shift away from all of the technologies associated with learning."

His proposal, at its most preliminary stage, suggested that the university should not be corralled within a few buildings, but should be allowed to disperse into other areas of the site--essentially into the other architects' buildings. Brows were furrowing, but Libeskind went on with his lesson: "Part of the program that I have worked on is how to overcome the distinction between the university as a spiritual and cultural entity, on one hand, and the university as something which is a stigma, on the other. You know: You go to a university. You go to class at a certain time. You enter a certain room on a certain date, and you enter that room again and again and again, and after a certain amount of time you can leave the place. Not by coincidence did Foucault consider that the contemporary university comes straight out of the models of incarceration."

After his presentation, he met with resistance--who in that group would let Libeskind tinker with his plans?--although it was probably less than he would have encountered a year before, when he was still an architect without a completed building, relying heavily on performances like this one to advance his cause. But it's possible that a new thought crossed the other architects' minds. If they had been to the completed Jewish Museum--as many of them have--they might have realized that there is a message in the gap between the way Libeskind talks and the way he is beginning to build. The tales that architects tell themselves and others in order to sustain a project--the great machines of thought that line the bookshelves and cloud the lecture halls--are useful, maybe essential, but they fall away in the end and you are just left with uncaptioned spaces. If your ideas are "true," in Libeskind's sense, then you might be left with spaces that tell a story. If your ideas are true and you connect with them passionately and intelligently, as Libeskind seems to have done in the Jewish Museum, if you can, as he says, "unlock the specific genius of a possibility which is there in a constellation of cultural linkage, without which a project would just turn into a folly," then you are left with spaces that tell the right story: They mean something.

"And so many projects are just follies," Libeskind continues. "No matter how well detailed they are. No matter how slick they are. No matter how admired they are by the public at the time when they are built."

Keywords:
Daniel Libeskind, Nina Libeskind, Jewish Museum in Berlin, deconstructivist, Felix Nussbaum Museum, the Spiral (addition to the Victoria and Albert Museum), Berlin