histrionics, cont'd
The tragedy franchise rolls on... Danny just opened the
Danish Jewish Museum in Copenhagen. The project is equipped with the usual Libeskind vulgarities: spooky atmospherics, "tortured" geometries that represent painful history, etc. As usual, it is high literal-mindedness posing as abstraction. Libeskind bizarrely claims that the architecture somehow emotionally communicates the holocaust--aggravated geometries somehow representing the experience of genocide (!) through a vague sense of disorientation and discomfort. Apparently, "Libeskind wanted to convey a sense of what the Danish Jews went through as they fled from the Nazis. At the same time, he also wanted to convey the moral courage of many Danes." These contradictory values are, I suppose, "represented" by tilty walls and slitty lights.
Perhaps the best recent comment on Libeskind was an oblique one in the May issue of Blueprint, which explained Londoners' mixed reactions to his new Graduate Centre for the Metropolitan University of London. Somehow, they claim, Libeskind's architecture isn't really successful without memorial programs; if it's not pre-loaded with Holocaust or War or 9/11, it really isn't that powerful:
With most of his work to date, Libeskind has successfully used architecture as an intellectual and emotional force. Without the context to do that in this instance, the same formula is less successful..."
I think this is a really valid question: how much of this is good architecture, and how much opportunism? Does anyone else remember, 15 years ago, when the crooked forms represented semiotic slippage? And why does a graduate centre in London use the same distorted geometries that memorialize tragedy?
* joshua, 6/10/2004 09:54:00 PM
