jewish museum - axis of death 1

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Taken in Berlin, Berlin (See more photos or videos here)

52°30' 07" N, 13°23' 42" E

The Jewish Museum in Berlin is really, really good architecture in my opinion. Granted, it was our first major visit of the trip and probably made a strong impression for that reason alone, but for me it became a sort of touchstone or shorthand for the unexhausted possibilities of binding metaphor and poetry into space.

Here we stand in the underground portion of the museum, which at first presents itself as a jagged series of miscellaneous paths intersecting each other. You wander around a little bit lost - possibilities present themselves, I could go this way, I could go that way - and then you turn on to this path, labeled the Axis of Death - and see a short dark path to nowhere, floor and ceiling skewing into each other, a black wall cutting off the promenade. Actually coming to this wall, though, you find a huge, heavy door, detailed to blend into the wall and be basically invisible from further away. This door leads to the sepulchral Holocaust Tower (of which I have only one inadequate photograph) which places the visitor at the bottom of a tall, black chimney of a space. This room has a few solemn accessories: a series of extinguished light bulbs, set alongside a ladder whose bottom rung is just out of reach. Each foostep is an echo in this tomblike space, lit only by one shaft near the top: hope? Or the closing of a boxcar door? We'll encounter several other buildings in this trip that attempt to architecturalize the meaning of the Holocaust, but none of the others attempt to capture the actual experience of being murdered.

Delaney and others would argue that these effects derive directly from program: because the building is addressing the Holocaust, we'd probably feel somber and unsettled no matter how it was architecturalized. But I dunno. I also just (9/01/07) finished a book by Philip Nobel concerning the reconstruction of the World Trade Center. Nobel is critical of Liebeskind and his ilk, arguing that without the architect around to tell you what the building means and put labels on it, the building is mute. This seems possibly true for a New York skyscraper, but less true for the Jewish Museum. Anyone who's in this corridor will, barring very unlikely curatorial decisions by the museum, be given the names for the spaces - they will always be a part of the way the place is experienced! It seems reasonable to lean on nomenclature in a situation like that.

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Taken in Berlin, Berlin (map)
Taken on August 30, 2007

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Replaced on August 30, 2007

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jewish museum - axis of death 1

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