Encountering empty architecture: Libeskind’s Jewish Museum Berlin

Abstract

Claire Farago and Donald Preziosi once pointed out how recent art museums by architect Daniel Libeskind allow for altered relationships between exhibitions and visitors. Indeed, when Libeskind’s Jewish Museum Berlin was first opened in a vacant state during the years 1999-2001, the building itself provided the exhibit for initiatory visits. The present study hightlights the fragmentary process of groundbreaking encounters with this building. The text shows how an embodied and reflexive experience of its architectural interiors and discourses go beyond the simplistic symbolism one finds in mainstream interpretations of Libeskind’s architecture as well as in certain discourses by Libeskind himself. In reality, his extra-functional architecture in Berlin and his early presentations of it constitute a kaleidoscopic field of experience in which critical self-reflexion may occur.

Keywords

• Daniel Libeskind
• Jewish Museum Berlin
• architectural perception
• ornament
• experience
• Donald Preziosi
• anamorphosis