{"id":22974,"date":"2011-10-06T16:35:56","date_gmt":"2011-10-06T20:35:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacingtoronto.ca\/?p=22974"},"modified":"2013-01-21T14:36:01","modified_gmt":"2013-01-21T19:36:01","slug":"22974","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2011\/10\/06\/22974\/","title":{"rendered":"On Daniel Libeskind, and what buildings mean"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Cross-posted from <\/em>No Mean City,<\/em><\/a> Alex’s personal blog on architecture<\/em><\/p>\n

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I wrote a piece last weekend for The Globe and Mail about Daniel Libeskind\u2019s latest:<\/a> the German military museum, outside Dresden. The piece touches on the architecture – which will look awfully familiar to those who\u2019ve seen the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal <\/a>at the Royal Ontario Museum. Or the Frederic C. Hamilton Building <\/a>of the Denver Museum of Art.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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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. <\/a><\/p>\n

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\u2019t driven by the logic of structure or the realities of cost.<\/p>\n

In Dresden, Libeskind\u2019s office explains the project this way: \u201cIt was not my intention to preserve the museum\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I was thinking of this recently when I read Philip Nobel’s essay in Metropolis about the Ground Zero memorial and reconstruction. <\/a> 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:<\/p>\n

“The architects of the little building made the extraordinary decision\u2014a poor, poor one\u2014to 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.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s latest: the German military museum, outside Dresden. The piece touches on the architecture – which will look awfully familiar to those who\u2019ve seen the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal at the Royal OntarioContinue reading “On Daniel Libeskind, and what buildings mean”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4088,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[22,21759],"tags":[6296,174],"class_list":["post-22974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","category-features","tag-alex","tag-no-mean-city"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nOn Daniel Libeskind, and what buildings mean - Spacing Toronto<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2011\/10\/06\/22974\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"On Daniel Libeskind, and what buildings mean - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"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\u2019s latest: the German military museum, outside Dresden. 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