A critical response

The Work of Daniel Libeskind: Two Museums and a Garden is a powerful exhibit. It highlights several projects by Libeskind, who comes to Yale with an impressive collection of international awards and degrees. There is a cohesive solemnity to this small show—the plans on the wall look like collages from a distance, and the exhibit's texts provide immediate grounding in the intense emotional impetus behind each of the three structures.

The E.T.A. Hoffman Garden, the Jewish Museum of Berlin, and the Felix Nussbaum Haus of Osnabrück are captured by blueprints, photographs, drawings, and slide projections, allowing the experience of Libeskind's ideas, if not their actual realization. In the exhibit's catalog, he writes, "I have sought to create a new Architecture for a time which would reflect an understanding of history, a new understanding of Museums and a new realization of the relationship between program and architectural space."

However, all three projects have public functions that stem from a much more personal history. It is the seeming ease with which these structures travel between the intimate and the universal that is so amazing. When he was invited to participate in the 1988 competition to design the Jewish Museum, Libeskind wrote, "I felt that this was not a program I had to invent or a building I had to research, rather one in which I was implicated from the beginning, having lost most of my family in the Holocaust." The concepts behind all three structures are rooted in this deeply personal interpretation of purpose.

The Jewish Museum was designed to resemble an irrational matrix, like a distorted Star of David worn on a Jewish person's sleeve. Libeskind wanted it to be an architectural completion to a Schönberg opera and a response to the list of names of people deported from Berlin and killed in concentration camps. The result is an incredible building of converging planes and reflecting metal, with windows like pieces in a kaleidoscope.

In the Felix Nussbaum Haus (1995), the ways Libeskind deals with the inspirational life and tragic death of the painter Nussbaum are moving. The geo-metric bulk of the building is cut by slashed windows, like wounds of light. The metal building that links the Nussbaum extension to the rest of the Cultural History Museum Osnabrück rises like a giant tanker in a field of sunflowers. The photographs on the wall are tantalizing glimpses into the building's true imaginative power.

The most engaging element of the exhibition is its only three-dimensional piece, a reinterpretation of Libeskind's E.T.A. Hoffman Garden. A collection of black columns leans diagonally and creates a tight maze on the gallery floor. Walking through of these rectangles is like wandering some strange, dark forest out of one of Hoffman's horrific stories.

Libeskind's two museums are presented with powerful conviction, but it is the Garden that can be most immediately experienced for its stark physical presence. One can only imagine what it might be like to stand in the actual buildings of Libeskind's design, feeling the light filter through his careful incisions into spaces of perpetual history.

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