Coincidentally, three other local exhibition spaces are hosting shows about architecture and “progress” — sometimes known, more ominously, as gentrification. Sean Lynch’s “Bandits in the Ruins” considers the conflicts between tradition and development. And the two-site “In Our ‘Hood” show takes a street-level approach to the issue, with works by and about residents of central Washington at two venues in that area.
These are all exhibitions of text as well as images. Libeskind, who often places dramatically angular modernist structures next to classically proportioned ones, explains his designs in symbolic terms. “Architecture for the Angel of History” doesn’t feature many of his words, but his futurist-style drawings for the Ground Zero project include some jottings. The height of the main tower will be 1,776 feet — one of the few aspects of his plan that survives — for the purposes of hailing U.S independence and “reasserting the skyline.” The sunken areas of the scheme are for “revealing the heroic foundations of democracy for all to see.”
Yet Libeskind’s buildings are not easy to see. The Jewish Museum Berlin (the only one of these structures I’ve visited) is a tight series of metallic zigzags. These are largely hidden by trees and the 18th-century baroque pile, a former courthouse, that provides the museum’s entrance. The 1999 museum’s overall form is visible only to birds, helicopter pilots and people looking at an aerial photograph (provided here). A subterranean spine, “the void,” offers a suitably stark memorial space, but the cramped galleries are subordinate to an overall design that seems authoritarian.
The architect explains his plan as reflecting “two lines of thinking. . . . One is a straight line, but broken into many fragments; the other is a torturous line, but continuing indefinitely.” Whether that’s genius or nonsense, it’s not evident in the structure’s unseeable design.
Libeskind’s work, like that of other global architecture stars such as Frank Gehry, is bold, striking and very limited. These designers are drawn to museums and other cultural institutions, which are among the few clients prepared to subordinate all other aspects of a new facility to its status as a unique work of art. But for every building to be a unique work is unfeasible and exhausting. And Libeskind’s designs, like much architectural modernism, rely heavily on contrast with existing traditional structures. Perhaps that’s why the architect works so often in Europe, which is lousy with venerable buildings. In the 1920s, the Bauhaus developed an aesthetic that rejected ornamentation. Nearly a century later, Libeskind is still practicing the architecture of reaction, just with a few more oblique angles.
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