"Between the Lines" the Jewish Department - Berlin Museum

"Any architect or city planner who´s dealing with the future, has the responsibility of knowing the general trajectory, and the ethical responsibility for these decisive lines. They can be devastating lines, lines that end in total closure and demise, or lines of faith, of hope and of spirit."

Daniel Liebeskind was born in Poland in 1946, studied music and mathematics in Israel and New York, architecture at the Cooper Union with a masters at the university of Essex, England.

His previous projects have included graphical works such as "Micromegas" and " Dream Calculus", exhibition pieces such as the "Memory machine" and competition entries for amongst others Potsdamer Platz and the former SS Barracks at Orianienburg near Berlin. These are characterised by linearity and fragmentation, a dense fabric of explosive graphic noise. His principal architecture studio is in Berlin and the Jewish Department - Berlin Museum his first major built work. Including the renovation of the old museum building, the project will be completed by summer 1998.

As with all major public buildings in Germany, the commission was awarded through open competition. The brief was for an extension to the existing Berlin Museum - which seeks to convey the historical and cultural background of the city - and was to hold principally the large collection of Jewish cultural objects. The existing Museum is one of the few remaining Baroque buildings of the Friedrichstadt to the south of Unten den Linden, an area largely destroyed in the war and which is now characterised by a mix of styles from 1950´s high-rise blocks to pre-war remnants and the 1980´s IBA housing including Herzberger´s Kochstrasse project. Kohlhof´s 1984 Masterplan for the area designated the open site to the south of the existing Museum for the extension and to be also part of a green east-west corridor.

The competition was announced in December 1988, with the task of designing an extension to the Museum to house the Jewish department which at the same time should have a large degree of autonomy within the Museum structure and, importantly, to give it an appropriate form. The new building must have room for both temporary and permanent exhibitions, storage, offices, workshops and a restaurant - a total floor area of 10,000m². Originally DM 77 million were allocated to the project, the end costs, including the renovation work, will be nearer to DM 120 million.

Liebeskind´s conception of a museum is as a place where citizens should be able to find their collective heritage, thus the Jewish Museum is an attempt to connect Berlin with its own past and, through this perhaps painful confrontation, to its future. He calls the project "Between the Lines" wherein line becomes a principle of architectural organisation, of movement and of metaphor. As such it is conceived as a built allegory of the German-Jewish relationship in Berlin. It is described by two lines: one visible, continuous but bending, the other more imagined, straight but fragmented. The fragments appear as empty spaces in the building, a void. The continuous line can be read as German Berlin, the void is what is lost: the profound depth of Jewish life and culture in the city. Its aim therefore is to give a presence to the invisible.

The site next to the old museum provided the opportunity to demonstrate spatially the close association between the Jewish and general Berlin history. Liebeskind chose to visually separate old and new stressing externally their independence, although in places almost touching. It is at basement level where old and new are joined, demonstating the reality of their interdependence.

Linearity is the organising principle for the basement level: one line is the line of connection between new and old, starting in the concrete stair tower which Liebeskind has inserted into the old building. One line connects to the Holocaust Tower - the dead end - an empty, cold, naked, concrete tower lit by a vertical narrow slit in the wall. And one line leads to the ETA Hoffman Garden of Exile and Emigration - a gently inclined plane on which sit 49 identical square towers each crowned with a tree.

The main stair commences in the basement and runs successively through the three exhibition floors - a minor stair leads to the top floor administrative level. The walls of the zig-zag building hold the service functions: the stair, toilets and lifts. The stair itself provides one of the most exciting new spaces crossed by a succession of slanted beams and with its containing side walls scarred by the lineal openings in the facade.

The exterior of the building is criss crossed by a myriad of lines which let light into and out of the building. These are not arbitary but are tracings on the elevations laid flat as a map surface. Each line is a geographical connection of the names and addresses of Berlin Jews interned in concentration camps during Nazi rule. These names and addresses were all obtained from the Gedenkbuch which might be subsequently exhibited in the Holocaust Tower.

The building of the Museum has forced many construction conventions to be reassessed: the reinforcement bars became a geometrical challenge, the formwork a piece of timber craftmanship - the logic of the openings held scant regard for constructive logic but the builders showed their ingenuity in connecting temporary downpipes through window openings to allow the poured concrete to reach otherwise inaccessible points. The windows - and only five in the whole project are the same - are technically derived from the automobile industry. Every contractor was asked to go just that one step further. What has been lost from the original scheme are the inclined walls of the zig-zag, partly out of cost grounds and partly because it was thought that the form had more than enough strength without this further excess. The in-situ concrete walls have also become somewhat subdued from the original mosaic concept and are clad in zinc - a recommendation from Schinkel to all young architects practising in Berlin!

Liebeskind sees in every project not only the visible trace of the site and city but also an invisible matrix of related connections - past lines, lines already drawn in history and future trajectories. This is the context within which he works and his aim is to develop multi-layers of meaning. The path for Liebeskind has a strong temporal stability, linearity becomes place (and in the Victoria and Albert extension, linearity, through the chaotic spiral, becomes volume).

The building lives up to its promise to challenge both in its form and its content - it is an architecture which permits no diffidence. And for Berlin, this sharp edged building will transform its domestic museum to both national and international importance.

Daniel Liebeskind, Interview with D. Bates, p13 El Croquis, Madrid 1996.

Michael Haslam. Hamburg 18.11.97, published in Architecture Today 1998