Jonathan Glancey : Architecture
Where on earth is this momentous stair, these vertiginous walls angled in on us like a scene from Metropolis or the Cabinet of Dr Caligari? Somewhere between heaven and hell, reached through a doorway in the heart of what was until so very recently East Berlin.
This is one of the extraordinary routes up and through the new Jewish Museum, a challenging and perhaps unexpected addition to what will be the capital of a united Germany by the turn of the century.
The Jewish Museum, designed by the Polish- born architect Daniel Libeskind, is unlike any other building you may have seen. Outside, it is built in the guise of a deconstructed Star of David, clad roofline to pavement in sheets of zinc.
It is a bolt of architectural lightning – Donner und Blitzen – in a quarter of Berlin that is noted for its coolly regimented neo-classical temples to the music, art and military precision of old Prussia, many pockmarked by Soviet shrapnel more than 50 years on from Marshall Zhukov’s victorious assault on Hitler’s citadel.
Since the Berlin Wall came tumbling down eight years ago, the city has been rebuilt at breakneck speed in the showy and deeply unspiritual clothes of late-flowering capitalism.
European architects of international repute have flogged their talents, sold their souls for fat fees and parachuted into Berlin a tumescence of near-pornographic trash. Friedrichstrasse. Potsdammer Platz. Leipziger Platz – all destroyed by blitzkrieg reconstruction, the big guns of fast-buck development.
The Jewish Museum promises some sort of refuge from this architectural hyperactivity. While, when fully open to the public next year, it will display arrangements of historic artefacts relating to the history of Jews in the city, it will also be, as this haunting stairway reveals, a place of contemplation, a secular temple if not of worship then of remembrance.
Yet this forceful architecture also points in zig-zag lines to a pluralist and optimistic future.
The structure of this, the first major European building that can be labelled deconstructivist, is complete. Over the past few months, many hundreds of visitors have toured the unfinished building quite overwhelmed by the experience.
They have written messages of support on early coats of wall paint. Emotionally, this is a highly charged architecture, although it will not be to everyone’s taste.
Yet there are moments in great cities when the corset grid of boulevards, streets and alleys, or a city’s skyline, benefits by being unbuttoned or bodice-ripped. Thank God (and Gaud) for the gloriously mad Expiatory Chapel of the Holy Family (the much maligned and far from complete Sagrada Familia) in Barcelona. Thank Mammon (and Rogers) for the Lloyds Building in the City of London.
History is rarely acted out with the taste and impeccable manners of cautious architects. Sometimes, architecture should break its canonic bonds to reflect, rather than contain, the melodrama of human life.