Cross-posted from No Mean City, Alex’s personal blog on architecture
I wrote a piece last weekend for The Globe and Mail about Daniel Libeskind’s latest: the German military museum, outside Dresden. The piece touches on the architecture – which will look awfully familiar to those who’ve seen the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal at the Royal Ontario Museum. Or the Frederic C. Hamilton Building of the Denver Museum of Art.
Which raises an interesting question: where do representational forms fit into contemporary architecture? In other words, when is a metal triangle just a triangle, and when is it a crystal, or a mountain, or a vector?
Back in the 1980s heyday of Postmodernism, architects were explicitly playing in this arena, making buildings that resembled other things – historic architectural forms, say, or a Chippendale sideboard.
Clearly Libeskind is not doing quite the same thing. And yet we are expected to read his forms in and of themselves – they have only passing relationships to real programmatic needs, and they certainly aren’t driven by the logic of structure or the realities of cost.
In Dresden, Libeskind’s office explains the project this way: “It was not my intention to preserve the museum’s facade and just add an invisible extension in the back. I wanted to create a bold interruption, a fundamental dislocation, to penetrate the historic arsenal and create a new experience. The architecture will engage the public in the deepest issue of how organized violence and how military history and the fate of the city are intertwined.”
And it is hard not to read this as an expression of violence, a skewering of German martial order. A true deconstructionist, he prefers not to affix a specific reading to his work, but it demands to be read.
I was thinking of this recently when I read Philip Nobel’s essay in Metropolis about the Ground Zero memorial and reconstruction. Different city, different site, different architects, but a similar problem and Libeskind is involved here too, as master planner and architect of the (superseded) spiky “Freedom Tower.” About Snohetta’s memorial pavilion, Nobel writes:
“The architects of the little building made the extraordinary decision—a poor, poor one—to mimic in its structure and the lines of its metal-and-glass skin a diving, angular calamity. It is a time-worn contemporary effect, to evoke the unstable, to eschew the steady and true… Truly, in this place, now and probably forever, aping collapse is a despicable, morally empty way to build.”
In Lower Manhattan, perhaps. In Dresden, or in Berlin in 1999, you could argue it’s precisely the right way to build. But in Toronto and Denver? Not so much. And the promiscuity of these points and jabs makes them all a bit closer to meaningless.
9 comments
how boring, we get it triangles. whatever, let’s see something new.
In terms of form, the addition to the Dresden is very appropriate, like a blade cutting through this neo-classical building, the metaphor does not get much better for a military museum. Without much information about the interior I cannot comment on how that works, but judging from ROM, Libeskind seems to be pay much less attention to the function and interior space than to the showy outer shell. It contrasts with Gehry, whose less assuming AGO has quite some beautiful interior space for the visitors to enjoy. Of course, that could be intentional, the cold, harsh space that Libeskind creates inside the shell may work for a military museum or Holocaust memorial; but I don’t think it worked out that well for ROM.
The War Museum in Ottawa uses triangles very successfully, and the shapes really support and enhance the program – unlike the ROM. It is, to me, an architectural masterpiece (not a term I use lightly). I am not at all impressed with Liebskind, he is predictable and seems to have contempt for the spaces he mangles.
Utterly tiresome architecture. If the buildings had super-compelling spaces inside, or were cleverly functional within the formalist conceit, that might be okay. Sadly, they don’t seem to do that, so… meh.
It’s a pretty common paradox at this point:
You only get to be a starchitect if you have a certain style — the guy with the pilotes (Alsop), the guy with the curvy titanium (Gehry), the guy with the stabby triangle things (Libeskind), the guy with the nice concrete (Ando), the guy with the white boxy museums (Piano), the woman with the curvy wacko stuff (Hadid), the guy with the curvy white steel (Calatrava) etc. etc. etc.
But, having reached that Starchitect plateau by establishing your “brand”, you then jet around the world jamming your same old signature style into whatever you were hired for, be it a college building or an apartment tower or a BMW factory, all the while talking total BS about how this time the triangle, say, represents “memory”, or this time it represents “freedom”, or this time it represents “past schism”. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Libeskind is by far the absolute best/worst at this – every darn thing he touches looks identical, but he comes up with a black-turtleneck-and-eyewear lecture on why it is different every time. About time someone called him out on it.
You can avoid all this by not using starchitects, of course, but then you lose some of the PR that those brands provide, PR which is very real. It’s not an easy call. If I was the head of U of T or a big bank or such, would I really turn down the chance to build a Richard Meier even if I knew I would just get a white box out of it? Tough call.
Ah, now it’s Germany’s turn to have an otherwise attractive historical building butchered by this pretentious architectural vandal.
I just returned from a trip to Manchester and Copenhagen, which gave me the chance to see two more Libeskinds. The Danish Jewish Museum and the North Imperial War Museum both fit with the idea discussed above, that the harsh lines look like an interruption in the norm, and it works as an architectural statement about war. However, after seeing the same thing done again and again in every Libeskind building, the statement seems to be diluted and quite frankly boring and cliche. Talking to the employees at the Imperial War Museum, they told me that they suffer the same challenges as the ROM – the angles of the walls and the design are now a burden to overcome when displaying their exhbitions. I think this does a disservice to Libeskind’s clients – he needs to also think about the function of the building and design interiors that work for them.
@J :”Ah, now it’s Germany’s turn to have an otherwise attractive historical building butchered by this pretentious architectural vandal.”
The ass-kissers of the rich who commission these starchitects have no more architectural knowledge or common sense than the people cleaning the floors.
The ROM is awful on the inside and out. I am not saying that all Libeskinds work is bad, just this one. Speaking of way better architects, lets use the name Raymond Moriyama once in a while when talking about the Canadian War Museum and many other really good buildings.