The Jewish Museum Berlin, exhibits the social, political and cultural history of the Jews in Germany from the 4th century to the present. The museum explicitly presents and integrates, for the first time in postwar Germany, the repercussions of the Holocaust. The new extension is housed on the site of the original Prussian Court of Justice building which was completed in 1735 and renovated in the 1960s to become a museum for the city of Berlin. The new design, which was created a year before the Berlin Wall came down, started with the identification of a common feature that bound together both East and West Berlin: the relationship of Germans to Jews. This connection was used to plot an irrational matrix that makes reference to the image of a compressed and distorted star — the yellow star that had historically been worn by Jews on the same site.
The relationship was used to plot an irrational matrix that makes reference to the image of a compressed and distorted star — the yellow star that had historically been worn by Jews on the same site.
The design identifies a common feature that bound together both East and West Berlin: the relationship of Germans to Jews.
Architect Daniel Libeskind’s “Between the Lines” design won the competition in 1989 for the “Extension of the Berlin Museum with a Jewish Museum Department.” It was the first time that one of his designs was actually built.
The old building
Forty-nine concrete stelae are laid out in a 7-by-7 square on slanting ground,
Oleaster plants, a symbol of hope, grow out of the stelae.
On the building’s titanium-zinc façade - the crisscrossing, oblique slashes of windows appear unsystematic and make it impossible to distinguish the individual floors from outside.
The structure of the windows is designed based on the addresses of notable Jewish and non-Jewish Berlin figures
The Axis of Exile and the Axis of the Holocaust in the building basement,
At the points where the two lines intersect are the “voids,” empty spaces that cut through the building from the basement to the roof. Memory Void and Shalekhet installation by Menashe Kadishman
Daylight only penetrates the unheated concrete silo through a narrow slit
current Drawings and documents
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The floor plan is designed based on two lines: the building’s visible zigzagging line and an invisible straight line.