Notes on the Art of Daniel Libeskind with Reference to Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Paul Valéry
Looking back one day we will realize that the year 1999 represented a milestone, if not a complete break, in the history of modern architecture. The completion of Daniel Libeskind’s building for the Jewish Museum Berlin and its opening to the public in January of that year was the end of a process that is called ‘fulguration’ in chaos theory – a flash of lightning in which the particles of the surrounding atmosphere are rearranged into a new pattern. When lightning becomes a building – you can see it with your own eyes at the intersection of Markgrafenstraße and Lindenstraße in Berlin.
The event happened simultaneously on three levels and was clear to see for anybody close enough to witness it. On the first and most visible level, this building is articulated as an artistic phenomenon – as an apparition in the true sense of the word. It flashes in its surroundings like a unique object, unexpected, undeserved and elusive. The erection and completion of this building represents a contradiction to the venture of twentieth-century architecture yet gives it a new beginning at the same time. There were probably only a few other buildings in the history of architecture that have their own individual laws. This one has canonical power, although by its nature it can only exist once. Aside from all its other meanings and dedications, from first to last this building is a manifesto of architectural modernism recognizing itself after a hundred years of history and reaffirming its methods in a supremely conscious way. The building is a piece of art in every detail, a work of art by virtue of its regal character, infused with its triumph over the greatest obstacles – even the god of architects holds his breath in these rooms. Visitors, meanwhile, find themselves transported into an atmosphere of masterly discretion, far from lecturing and over-imposing showiness.
This building is an event for other reasons, too: because of its timing and, even more, because of the site on which it was built. When the city of Berlin awarded the commission in the 1980s for construction of a new Jewish Museum at a prime location in the city, it was obvious that the project involved high moral aspirations and a careful historical and political approach. Libeskind, who was already seen as one of the great contemporary architects because of the works he had designed but not yet built, saw this enterprise as the chance for a unique ethical and aesthetic gesture. In 1990 he moved to Berlin with his family to be free to immerse himself completely in the project. This was more than a practical issue – it was an affirmation of the opportunity Berlin offered and a sign that he was prepared to take a position in contemporary German reality. As a Berliner by choice, Libeskind defined the city as a workplace from two main viewpoints: first, as the setting for an architectural venture; and, second, as a construction site in terms of memorial policy. Fifty years after the Holocaust, with the surviving historical witnesses passing away, the time had come to understand the memory of the monstrous evil the Nazis had perpetrated and the remembrance of Berlin’s lost Jewish culture in a different medium and at another stage of development – a situation that was illustrated by the form of the museum as an object, as it were. Following a flash of wisdom in Berlin’s cultural policy, the authorities took the risk of entrusting Libeskind with this task. His design of the model had inspired hopes that Libeskind, the poet, the chamber musician, the contemporary architect who specialized in studying complexity, would succeed with this practically insoluble object. Today we know that the result exceeded all expectations. Even Berlin’s ordinary citizens have gradually realized that the city owns a jewel now, and they can intuit that its presence means that a form has been found for relating to the traces of exterminated Jewish life.
This brings us to the third reason why the Jewish Museum Berlin represents a major event. Its erection marked a new state in the ecology of historical memory for Germans, Europeans and Jews all over the world. Through its location and form it sealed a memorial pact between the building’s owner, who inevitably represented not just the city of Berlin but German society as a whole, and the architect with his entire team and the museum’s curators, who are inevitably regarded – each with his or her own uniquely personal touch – as representatives of contemporary Judaism. The building, seen in terms of both its materiality and its aesthetic effect, is in itself the contract between the memorial parties who have pledged themselves to a common effort to do justice to the past as far as the present generation is able to in the light of the terrible events to be commemorated. This makes architecture into a conciliatory event. The Jewish Museum demonstrates a historically unknown combined effort for peace in the shadow of remembrance of the extermination. From this perspective, Libeskind’s building is a research workshop of irenics, of peace studies – or, perhaps even better, of the art of peace. It embodies a hypothesis on the possibility of cooperative coexistence between the survivors of moral catastrophe.
After the museum building in Berlin was erected, Libeskind wrote a note on why he felt emotionally willing and ready to enter the architectural competition in 1988: ‘I felt this was not an agenda I had to invent or a building I had to research about: this was something I was implicated in from the beginning [. . .].’ I would like to look carefully at this by exploring the meaning of the phrase ‘implicated in from the beginning’ in the context of a contemporary theory of space and participation in surrounding situations.
When the artist realizes that he does not have to invent anything to understand something, and does not have to search for anything to find something, it indicates a dimension of the work prior to the work for which we shall suggest the provisional term ‘participation’. In what particular way can the erection of a building be understood as a manifestation of membership of a space and participation in a generational complex?
We can find the key to this in the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose major work Phenomenology of Perception from 19471 was concerned with the riddle of the physical participation of human beings in their spatial environment. We only need to highlight the decisive formulation: ‘The body is not in space, it inhabits space.’ (Le corps n’est pas dans l’espace, il l’habite.)2 In this context the apparently simple term ‘to inhabit’ describes a participatory relationship that is evidently older and deeper than any definition of location offered by the wisdom of geometry or population registration offices. The same applies to the relationship to time in which human beings participate existentially by inhabiting a period, a history or a drama deep in their hearts. Shared inhabiting in space and time sets up a relationship of existential immersion.
Paul Valéry showed very convincingly how this kind of consideration comes close to the essence of art and the arts. In 1921 Valéry had already worked out related ideas in a passage in his dialogue essay Eupalinos or The Architect. He rescued the figures of Socrates and Phaedrus from Hades and depicted them in an imaginary conversation about the principle of immersion and inclusion in the work of art in relation to architecture and music. Socrates’ reflections on people being immersed and enclosed in manmade environments began as a meditation on the dualism of ‘In’ and ‘Opposite’:
I feel compelled to chat about the arts. [. . .] A painting, my dear Phaedrus, only covers a mere surface such as a panel or a wall. [. . .] But a temple, along with its precincts, or again the interior of this temple, forms for us a complete greatness within which we live. [. . .] We are, we move, we live inside the work of man! [. . .] We are caught and mastered within the proportions he has chosen. We cannot escape him.3
This reflection highlights two moments at once: first, it insists that what encompasses us in this case represents the sublime; and second, it emphasizes that what surrounds us is an artificial construct and not a natural environment. We are talking not about Kant’s concept of the dynamically sublime, which describes nature as a superpower, but about the artificially sublime, whose ubiquitous presence can allow us to experience a work made by human hand like an integrated environment. With a single leap, Valéry’s Socrates lands in the fiery centre of modern aesthetics and is directly confronted with the riddle of the total work of art. Because, according to the avant-garde, this encompasses the whole environment, the observer has no possibility of absorbing it only in the ‘bourgeois’ pose of watching from the sidelines. In relation to the temple I am standing in, being-in-the-world means being in the work of someone else, and, even more, being consumed by the artificial magnitude. Is it only coincidence that this Socrates used expressions reminiscent of the sermon of the former (theatre) tent maker Paul on the Areopagus, the speech about the God in which we live and move, and have our being?4
According to Valéry, the same thing was valid for only one other form of art: music. In Eupalinos he says:
To be in the work of a human being like fish in the wave, to bathe in it thoroughly, to live in it, to belong to it [. . .].
Did you not live in a mobile edifice constantly renewed and reconstructed, incessantly renewed and reconstructed within itself and entirely dedicated to the transformations of a soul none other than the soul of extension itself? [. . .] And did not those moments [. . .] seem to surround you, slave as you were of the general presence of music? [. . .] And that inexhaustible production of enchantments, were you not enclosed along with it, nay forcibly locked up, like a Pythia in her chamber of vapours?5
These comments on the sojourn of humans through the theory of the enclosing work of art lead directly to the explanation of aesthetic totalitarianism or voluntary servitude in a manmade environment. Both cases immediately establish a relationship to the aesthetics of the sublime.
There are then two arts which enclose man in man [. . .] in stone or air [. . .] and each of them fills our knowledge and our space with artificial truths [. . .].6
Modernism appears to be an experimental scheme to prove that the sublime is just one step away from the banal. At the time Valéry wrote these reflections, the cinema film, the main medium of mass culture, which was evolving into the medium of superior force, was still in its early days but was already moving towards a system for mass immersive experiences of daydreaming and imitation. It worked towards enslaving the eye and making the organ of detached observation into an organ of submersion in a sort of tactile environment. At the same time people at the Bauhaus school in Weimar had begun to argue about an integral intervention in the area of everyday living situations under the heading of Gestaltung – which describes the German approach to design. Not only music is demonic territory, as Thomas Mann asserted; spatial design, like architecture, is related to the uncanny feeling of belonging permanently or occasionally to an environment totally created by human beings. These arts explain why humans stay in places with the aid of immersion systems that are merely proposals for enslaving the consumers of pre-formed situations. Through these systems, dwelling or being-in-the-house is interpreted as welcome submission to one’s surroundings. To the extent that houses are installations or fitted immersion systems, they explain existence as a sculptural task. The installation is the aesthetic explication of embedding. One of the ways this is shown is in the two basic values of aesthetic judgement that embedding shares: embedding in comfortable, banal surroundings is called ‘beautiful’ and embedding in uncanny, mysterious surroundings is called ‘sublime’.
Libeskind’s architectural art shows how it is possible to create a third kind of embedding, which is both beautiful and sublime and yet simultaneously neither of the two: not seductive by being pleasant nor simply overwhelming by being tall and uncomfortable. Libeskind’s space – for which he often uses the word ‘meeting’, or encounter – is a proposal for immersion in spatialized freedom. His interiors receive visitors like a font in which the intelligence of the people immersing themselves is baptized in the name of mindfulness. Just as Malebranche defined mindfulness as the natural prayer of the soul, Libeskind has given the invitation to mindfulness a new form with a startling interplay of light and dark spaces.
Aristotle remarked in Physics that when a man builds a house, he is simply doing what nature would do if it made houses grow. This tells us which role traditional philosophy assigned to architecture: that of a vassal and assistant of physis, of nature. In situations where nature cannot be objectively imitated because it has not produced any model houses, the traditional architect must assume nature’s role and do its work on a caretaker basis; in this case the imitation refers to the modus operandi of nature, which is depicted as the mistress of growing things. The houses of human beings thus stand in nature as things above nature, as second-order plants, so to speak, in the midst of an environment where plants grow naturally. We hardly need to say how radically the constructivist ‘revolution’ of modernism rejected the old metaphysics of growth. We could sum up the architecture of modernism at first sight as the rebellion of crystals against the character of plants or as the revenge of arbitrary against involuntary forms. In his own personal way, Libeskind, one of the great masters of architectural modernity, is evidently involved in the revolt of the artificial; willingly or not, he is a representative of crystals and contra-natural geometries. In relation to this adventure he could have simply said he was implicated in it from the very start. In his case, being implicated in the history of modern art is overlaid with being implicated in the tragedy of Jewry in the twentieth century. It is tempting to say that when Libeskind the architect builds a house, he does what history would do if it made houses ‘grow’. This yields a formula for Libeskind’s contribution to the canon of architectural modernism: What happens when crystals become receptive to history…
From now on we should redefine the meaning of participation: the artist’s dual citizenship in the spheres of forms and those of tragedies creates demands on both sides. Crystals should receive what belongs to them and history should receive what belongs to it. The citizens of Berlin and visitors from all over the world have been able to see for themselves since January 1999 how these contradictory demands take shape in one and the same building. After taking the tour through this building, even the naïve visitor unacquainted with the history of modern architecture leaves with the lasting impression that something crucial has happened to the space itself. If Libeskind’s museum building has become a kind of myth within a short time, it is mainly because the presence of voids, the empty spaces that cut through the building in a mysterious rhythm, creates a sensual feeling of gaping discrepancy that nearly every other building only implicitly acknowledges.
This might give us the impression that abnormal tectonic forces have lifted the cellar above ground level as if it were weary of its subterranean status. On second glance it is clear that this is not about crazy cellars, nor about the projection of a hypothetical architectural subconscious. Libeskind’s voids actually articulate an event relating to the grammar of the space: they touch not only on the myth of the master plan but also on the dogma of the overview and the idea that remodelled space should be universally accessible.
If history made houses grow, it would have to leave open spaces in buildings – or, even better, leave blank spaces – which shall remain inaccessible and uninhabitable. Someone who is a participant in the history of European Jews in the twentieth century and who reconceives the space has to try to preserve the memory of events that can never wholly become the property of the people who live there. It is impossible for us to live in the Great Evil – yet in a building that explodes the history of the crystal it is necessary to preserve a dimension that takes account of this uninhabitable state. Understood on this level, the voids embody the symbolism of absence. They radically formalize the world beyond within the world of the living. But as they lack the festive and communicative qualities of normal graves, they refer instead to those who were not buried, who perished without a trace in the catastrophe. The voids can thus be seen as manifestos for peace. If ordinary cemeteries – true to their name in German, Friedhöfe, enclosed courts – represent enclaves bordered by walls in social space in which the dead and the living can meet each other, close yet far away, the spaces Libeskind left out are, to some extent, ontological enclaves or meta-cemeteries that provide a form for the impossible intercourse between the living and the victims of the Great Evil. They embody the austere peace of commemoration of things that cannot be depicted. In this sense they are a Jewish approach to defining what is sublime. The empty spaces give all observers a glimpse of the limits of observation; they rebuff any kind of close approach with sublime justice and put all visitors in the same situation. No individual can take possession of these rooms and incorporate them into his or her personal perspective. Neither the architect nor any kind of privileged interpreter of history has access to these spaces of absence. Precisely because of this, the empty spaces participate in things that inherently withdraw from participation.
By removing free access to specific spaces in the interior of his building, Libeskind has modified the way people experience the accessible fields. In doing so he is demonstrating that architecture is much more than the application of three-dimensional geometries to human content. The space inhabited by people is revealed as a multivalent entity. Wherever people stay, a divorce of spaces occurs: the habitable is contrasted with the inhabitable; the immersible with the non-immersible; the visible with the invisible; the transparent with the opaque; the penetrable with the impenetrable. If Sigfried Giedion is correct in his thesis that the adventure of modern architecture began with the breakthrough to perception of sculptural space, Libeskind’s Berlin project can be defined primarily as a culmination of the interplay of mass and emptiness. However, as the heir of Le Corbusier, who developed the dialectic of le plein and le vide [the full and the empty] in the art of constructing buildings, Libeskind introduces an intersubjective dimension into the closedoff space. The voids are spaces for someone precisely because they are no man’s spaces. They demarcate the strange territory in which mortal human beings are summoned to practise coexistence.