Can History Exist in a Modern World?
Sienna Dichiera
Museums have long contributed to the fabric of our urban society and landscape. As public institutions, they have become trustworthy repositories of collective memory, facilitating and sharing knowledge of the past. The etymology of museum, ‘collection of objects’, has evolved to encompass the building itself. How does one integrate an appreciation of memory and context within the confines of modern progress? Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum Berlin was opened in 1999 as an extension to the Berlin Museum, Germany. The architecture tells the complex 2000-year history of Jews in Germany. Comparably, Bernard Tschumi’s 2009 New Acropolis Museum, Athens, Greece, designed in collaboration with Michael Photiadis, celebrates the ancient history of Greece juxtaposed against the nearby Athenian Acropolis and Parthenon.
Jewish people have lived a long and complicated history in Germany. Their presence is marked by great prosperity, and equally great prosecution, spanning as far back as Roman times. Centuries-old tension has existed between Christian German society and its Jews. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jewish culture was inextricably intertwined within the web of the German population. Berlin’s first Jewish Museum, a celebration of this symbiosis, opened in 1933, to the backdrop of Adolf Hitler becoming Chancellor of Germany. The devastations of this period have left a black hole of guilt within subsequent generations of Germans, burdened by a crime they did not themselves commit. James Young writes in 2000, “Nothing in Berlin's history ever changed the city more than the persecution, expulsion, and murder of its own Jewish citizens. This change worked inwardly, affecting the very heart of the city.” It is within this context that the Jewish extension of the Berlin Museum was commissioned in the late twentieth century.
Libeskind speaks to a complex brief in his Jewish Museum Berlin design, challenging to ‘acknowledge the terrible void that made this museum necessary’, while ensuring the building was a celebration of integrated German-Jewish culture, and not just a memorial of tragedy. The architect spatially addresses this philosophical problem in his structure, which he titles Between the Lines. Libeskind builds a rich narrative through symbolism, layout, and movement. The themes of connectedness are further emphasised by Libeskind’s siting, locating his project across the Berlin Wall, which fell 10 years prior to the museum’s completion. Here, he aims to connect Berliners and Jews, not East and West ideologies.
The name Between the Lines exemplifies the origins of the floor plan, a dialogue between two axes, one straight but fragmented, the other torturous but continuing into infinity. The intersecting zigzagging of the two coordinates exposes a void which bisects the building. The overarching form symbolises a distorted Star of David. The focus of the design is its pockets of emptiness, metaphors for the erasure of Jewish culture in Berlin’s history. A broken past elicits and enshrines a broken form. Young again writes in 2000: “What you see here is only a mask for all that is missing, for the great absence of life that now makes presentation of these artefacts a necessity.”
The straight void line and five other voids cut on both horizontal and vertical planes violate spaces to create fragmented rooms and exhibitions, emphasising the deliberate creation of unusable space. Nothing about the form is regular. Its jarring and confronting nature is a reminder that sometimes being uncomfortable is necessary to acknowledge history.
The Jewish Museum Berlin takes the visitor on a journey through intentional architectural decisions, reflecting the plight of Jews in Germany. Upon entering, the visitor is poised with three axes of movement to track routes in a Jewish Berliner’s history. The main Axis of Continuity speaks to the current and evolving continuation of Berlin’s history. The second and third axes intersect and culminate in dead-end spaces, representing specific events. The Axis of Emigration leads to the enclosed Garden of Exile, a labyrinth of stone pillars growing Russian willow oak trees, symbolic of the hope and remembrance for the lost. The Axis of Holocaust leads the visitor to the Holocaust Tower, a cold and dark room of nothingness, immersing the viewer in the story of transport to a concentration camp. Libeskind moulds these spaces as immersive experiences with changed conditions to evoke deliberate emotions.
The New Acropolis Museum equally pays respect to the rich and long history of Greek culture. The Museum is reflected in and reflects the Acropolis, a domineering member of the cityscape of modern Athens. The Acropolis is emblematic of the thriving Ancient Greek civilisations of 700-480BCE, which postured a fundamental reorientation of thinking in the arts, democracy, and science. The flat-topped rocky hill rises 100m from its base. It was erected with all-marble edifices dedicated to the city’s patron goddess of wisdom, Athena. Three main temples, the Parthenon, Athena Nike, Erechtheion, an entrance building and a number of smaller shrines and statues comprise the complex. The area resulted in a place of worship still often referred to as Sacred Rock by Greeks today. In classifying it as a World Heritage Site in 1987, UNESCO recognised it as a universal symbol of the spirit of classicism and civilisation. Following the fall of the Ancient Greek Empire, the Parthenon reinstated its religious purpose as both a Christian Church and Ottoman Mosque.
The first Acropolis Museum erected in 1874 acted as a valued part of the cultural experience of the Acropolis. Its limited size, however, rendered it unfit for the extensive collection of antiquities available for display. In the late twentieth century, what became a thirty-year process of siting and design for a New Acropolis Museum began.
Tschumi’s build was to acknowledge the Acropolis although being located 300m south of the hill itself. This was achieved through a stacking form of two gallery prisms, the top formed with large expanses of glass to facilitate panoramic views of the Acropolis, also rotated off axis to connect to the Parthenon’s orientation. It is deliberately site specific, tailored to the architectural excavation work which occurs underneath. The grid system of foundational columns and glass flooring provides a connection to a directed visitor experience, one involving transparency and reflection of history-space and architecture. The connection to heritage is authentic and established by mimicking the guiding architectural principles of the structures in which the New Acropolis Museum is admiring. There is a successful architectural and cultural dialogue between old and new elements emphasising the profound influence of Ancient Greece on Western civilisation.
The spatial experience of moving through Tschumi’s New Acropolis Museum is deliberate and connotes chronology and symbolic meaning. The visitor is forced through a single loop moving not only chronologically from pre-history to late antiquity, but through the ascension of the typography of the Acropolis. The archaeological site beneath the museum mirrors the foot of the hill, the ground floor with a slightly ascending ramp reminiscent of the slope of the Acropolis, the first floor representing the Acropolis itself, and the top floor as the Parthenon, the highest point. This narrative unfolds while the visitor moves through the museum. The natural light penetrates the gallery through its large windows and skylights, which further enforces authenticity. Tschumi creates a sense of open-air space that reflects the external setting of the grand Acropolis. Moreover, each of the galleries are laid out to facilitate different interactions with the exhibitions, for instance pushing movement paths to the periphery in the upper Parthenon gallery, closer to the expansive views of the Acropolis itself.
Both Libeskind’s Jewish Museum Berlin and Tschumi’s New Acropolis Museum have become architectural moments in similar contexts. Both Libeskind and Tschumi utilise bold visual architectural gestures to mirror history; Libeskind’s motif of voids connote loss of life; Tschumi parallels the columns, geometry, and orientation of the Acropolis and Pantheon in his contemporary design. Their sitings are both deliberate and contribute a sense of commemoration and sympathy with the past. Both architects build a convincing and evocative narrative, immersing the experiencer in history by regulating circulation.
The intricacy of each context requires different considerations in the architectural response, leading to vastly different experiential outcomes. Where the Jewish Museum Berlin uses small and empty spaces, the New Acropolis Museum uses growing of spaces and scale to emphasise the history it is holding. Libeskind’s museum utilises two dead end spaces to compress events of years into a single spatial experience, whereas Tschumi applies chronology in layout. Where the Jewish Museum Berlin is invisibly linked to its city, focused, dark, and enclosed, the New Acropolis Museum is built to support visibility to Athens, open and light.
Libeskind’s Jewish Museum Berlin contributes to the legacy of modernism and post-modernism in its deconstructivist attitudes. The avant-garde proposition was nearly rendered unbuildable, hence it pushes the boundaries of structural innovation. The build illustrates that successful and innovative buildings do not need to be strictly functional, and can instead display complex, abstract ideas and emotions. Where traditional modernism attempted to avoid any trace of historical context in its form, Libeskind embraces the very history that haunts Berlin in the very foundations of the building. It is a testament to the success of his architectural proposition that critiques often claim that the unoccupied museum was more impactful prior to exhibitions being installed, in which state it existed for two years.
Both Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum Berlin and Bernard Tschumi’s New Acropolis Museum, stand as testaments to the enduring influence of the past. Libeskind’s philosophical proposition and symbolism through empty void spaces conveys the plight of Jews through German history. Tschumi’s site-specific design maintains a respectful dialogue with the classical architecture of the Acropolis, through orientation, form, and elevation changes. A common design approach led both architects to use spatial tactics to move visitors through history, enforcing the rich narrative of the cultures they are representing. As precedents for a successful exploration of history in a modern and post-modern context, Libeskind and Tschumi present museums that have become integral symbols and long-standing legacies of both Berlin and Athens alike.