ARCHITECTURE   OF   TERROR





J.   KRZYSZTOF   LENARTOWICZ




1.     Architecture and the Representation of Events

To consider the contemporary representations and memory of the Shoah means to talk about various relations, testimonies, and images of the Jewish Holocaust as a historical event. Today they are manifold; the Holocaust has been described often and in detail not only in original documents, but also in literature and visual arts: painting, prints, sculpture, and perhaps most of all, film. Referring to contemporary representations of the Jewish tragedy in architecture, first we have to assess the potential architecture has for communicating historical events.

Architecture, in the basic meaning of the functional art of shaping space, seems to be ill-suited to represent our memory of historical events. As all other arts, it operates on form, but its essence is to shape human behaviour and to provide safety. Thus the problems of function and use come before the issue of semantic communication, let alone portraying of events. Of course, architectural monuments last through time and perhaps they, most of all artistic achievements, thanks to Vitruvian firmitas, succumb to time least readily, transferring the memory of the time they were created in through their sheer existence. The image of the whole epoch is automatically retained in the architectural style of the buildings. Usually, architecture is a mute witness of events. It is difficult to imagine a purely architectural representation of human tragedy and destruction rather than material substance. Only metaphorically, through the ruin of matter, can one convey the idea of the ruin of a people. A question arises then, whether architecture can convey the image of events, or more precisely, to present them again, if we consider the literal meaning of re-presentation more closely.

Even more, can architecture, whose central purpose is to provide safety, in any way present a situation of threat, terror, the ultimate catastrophe? And, if the answer to these questions is yes, and we are talking about Shoah, can one imagine an architecture of fear, confusion, and uncertainty as the representation of the Holocaust?



2.     Architectural Ways of Imaging. A Typology

Architecture interacts with and affects both the intellect and bodies of its users. The semantic aspect of a building is operated intellectually and refers to the knowledge, memory and feelings of the viewer; the physical structure shapes behaviours and is perceived through senses. Architecture, as an essentially abstract and non-representative art, is unable to render historical images. What it can do, however, is to evoke them in the viewer's imagination basing on associations and the knowledge of history that he or she may have. It can also force upon them reactions identical to the experiences that the witnesses of the real events had, by creating specific environments and spatial situations. This results in the first level of the typological division in the architectural imagery connected with the way architecture interacts with and affects its users. It includes the examples based on the intellectual interaction with the viewers and instances enforcing physical experiences upon the viewers.

Another level of the typological division refers to the time in which a given building or architectural situation came to existence. The division here is also dichotomous. The first group of types includes structures and situations, which existed in the time when a given event actually happened, together with re-shaping of such structures and situations; the second group comprises the effects of artistic creation, structures and situations created after a given event.

The interdependence between these levels of systematic division is that all types belonging to the group of objects existing in the time of event and most types of creations are related to the intellect and feelings of the viewers. Only one type in the group of artistic creation is based on the recipient's somatic reactions.

In the following section of the paper, the typology of architectural ways to portray events has been presented, with examples related to the history of the Jewish Holocaust. The temporal division has been chosen as the starting point of the analysis. As in any typology, the dividing lines between categories are neither clear-cut nor exclusive; various types overlap or contain unnamed areas.

And so, in the groups of structures existing before and in the time of a given event, we can distinguish two categories. These are the witness and the transformed result of the event, where the former type includes a specific subcategory, i.e. the testimony.

The witness of an event is an architectural structure, which had been created before the events it is to represent took place. It can be called the one who remembers the events. However, its relation to the event is chronological only. Sometimes we are not even able to realize that the structure had anything to do with the events at all. An example could be the Old Synagogue in Kraków, a well-preserved, partly reconstructed Renaissance building dating back to the 15th century, which has survived the Holocaust. The information about the Holocaust is only conveyed indirectly, through the change in function from the place of worship to the museum, not to mention the exhibits. The structure itself, to the author's knowledge, was not involved in Shoah, although during the occupation the Nazis performed executions in the yard.

Some of the buildings-witnesses have their special record in history. Often, from the artistic (here: architectural) point of view, they are not worth of particular notice. An example of a structure connected with very concrete events, could be located at the meeting of three streets in Warsaw (ul. Wolno¶æ, Bacciarellego and Kacza), fragment of a leaning brick wall, part of the former walls surrounding the Warsaw Ghetto. It does not stand out in any way, its image does not represent the event in any way (there even is no memorial plaque on it); its spatial form does not "say" anything, especially about the tragedy. It is only the knowledge gained elsewhere, which, in the imagination of a sensitive viewer, transforms this common object into a medium of a vision.

In the category of witnesses we may also include certain spatial situations that influenced events in a particular way, which may be inferred from the testimonies of survivors. In Claude Lantzman's film from 1985 entitled Shoah, the survivors talk about the "Road to Heaven" or the "Road of Death" in Treblinka, Poland, which is closely connected to the topography of the extermination camp in Treblinka: "there was a hill and there was a crematory". The relation between the height and visibility of the objects in the death camp was important for the way the Nazis directed the final steps of the Jews. The subsequent sections of the road were arranged so as to prevent prisoners from seeing the final one. The element of surprise was very important for the crowd of newcomers to stay calm, actually unaware that they had been sentenced to death. The typical right-angle turn in the path between the buildings in which they undressed and the gas chambers, can also be seen in the former death camp in Sobibór. These spatial relations have survived until today (often such spatial details have been affected by later turning the places into historical memorial sites), yet understanding them requires historical knowledge.

Testimony to the events is a category included in the one described above: every testimony is a witness. It is a structure, whose present state (destroyed, reshaped, ruined) testifies to the historical event and brings to mind the memory of it. It is a "speaking" witness, evoking an image connected to a specific event. As an example, we can mention the Baroque Great Synagogue in S³onim; a building erected in 1642, the only monument of the Jewish culture of that time preserved in Belarus, and one of the best preserved ever (in spite of all the decay). Its terrible technical state and the change in function – today, it is an abandoned warehouse gradually being transformed into public toilets – testify to a dramatic change, which took place as a result of the historical events 60 years ago. The Great Synagogue with a collapsed roof in Brody is a similar case. The inspection of such buildings and our impressions force us to reflect on the annihilated nation, to ask why such things ever happen. To imagine the events today requires knowledge about them, although the sight alone may be shocking.

Of course, there are Holocaust testimonies in the form of camp buildings from that time; barracks and gas chambers, empty today, at the first glance inspire no terror. The viewer unaware of the Holocaust death machine will not necessarily associate them with its image.

Transformed result of an event is a new architectural situation, more or less consciously designed, which is a spatial result of historical events and not only functional decisions. Here we are talking not so much about the witness, as about what has survived from the witness-structure until today. This category includes structures, which were not meant to serve as memorials or representations of historical events. An example indirectly connected with the Holocaust may be the almost 100-metre high mound Teufelsberg in Berlin, which was made after 1945 from debris and ruins of the buildings destroyed during the Second World War and dumped onto one spot. Today, it is a recreational space for the inhabitants of Berlin with skiing slopes and bicycle paths; it no longer evokes the negative associations and historical reflection. A more compelling example, directly related to Shoah, is the Muranów housing estate in Warsaw. The ghetto, completely demolished and destroyed upon the order of Himmler 1), after the war posed a technical challenge which was difficult to solve. It was impossible to remove the rubble and ruins and collect them on one spot outside the city, like in Berlin. The crumbled building substance served then as the foundation for the building site of a new estate. In a designated area of Warsaw, an urban plinth about 1.5 metre high was formed. Its meaning and reason behind its existence are no longer legible today (over the years the information was intentionally kept secret); they require recognition and historical knowledge. When the knowledge is gained, the representation of the tragedy becomes a powerful vision on an urban scale – the foundations for the houses are the rubble mixed with the bodies and the blood of the victims.

In the group of artistic creations several types can be distinguished; these types have two things in common: they have been created after the events the representation of which is sought, and their design has been deliberately shaped. These types include: a monument expressing an idea, a monument directly exposing the results or testimony of an event, and a laboratory.

Monument expressing an idea is an ex nihilo created spatial structure or complex, whose idea was born in the mind of the creator, and whose realization is to evoke emotions based on knowledge, associations, and memories. Not always but usually, it preserves the memory of a given event in the very place connected with this event. In principle, it does not use the authentic material (testimony). This category includes numerous sculptures and architectural monuments already created in memory of the Jewish Holocaust. As examples, we can mention the oldest one in Poland: the Monument to the Heroes of the Ghetto Uprising in Warsaw, by Nathan Rapaport, erected in 1948 2) (later on copied in Jerusalem, i.e. a place unconnected to the Holocaust), and the latest one: the monument of the tragedy in Jedwabne. Such monuments, through their realistic artistic vision and inscriptions, are to evoke a clear image of the events.

Monument directly exposing the results or testimony of an event is a monument created with the use of authentic substance and/or original situation (testimony), which play the leading role in the composition. The artist's will is limited to providing the background. The added elements constitute a framework; they arrange the testifying elements and intensify their expression. The never-executed Auschwitz monument by Oskar Hansen and his collaborators 3) would be an example of that type of structure in relation to the memory of Shoah. Hansen proposed to recognize the entire camp as the monument by introducing into the existing situation a single new compositional and functional element: a diagonal asphalt lane – a ritual path, which would serve as both a framework conforming to the preserved historical reality, and a way to reach the sanctified ground. This solution was to inspire reflection based on knowledge, but this reflection also required some feeling, intensity and effort.

The Jewish Holocaust, according to Norbert Elias 4), was a result of the interplay of complex emotions and social resentments born behind the unified façade of the social order. Hitler once again evoked before the eyes of the German masses the phantom of hegemony held by the German Reich. This phantom, in the years 1933-1945, had its administrational embodiment, the centre for the main internal controls of the National Socialist regime: the headquarters of the Gestapo Police, SD and RSHA in the so-called Prinz-Albert Block between Stresemann-, Niederkircher-, Wilhelm- and Anhalterstrasse in Berlin. After the war, these buildings were deliberately blown up and demolished. A Swiss architect, Peter Zumtor, in his project, the motto of which is the Topography of Terror, has proposed to enclose the remaining ruins in a container extreme in its neutrality, a rectangular box erected over the hardly perceptible ruins 5). In a way, the representation of the Holocaust is present as a fulfilled memento of "who lives by the sword, dies by the sword". This project is on the borders of two categories: monument directly exposing the results of an event and another category described below, namely a container.

A container is a building serving as a package for the proper content relevant to the event. In such a case, the architectural style usually refers to the epoch and the nature of events, thus it is often anachronistic. It is easy to cross the border of kitsch, in which an artificially created reality is to evoke associations with the ambience of the past times and landscapes, just like in the case of open-air folk-museums. One of the examples could be the building of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, the logo of which says a living memorial to the Holocaust 6). The shape of the structure refers to a synagogue, although it looks more like a Babylonian ziggurat and its avowed aim is not to represent the Holocaust.

A laboratory is a structure, which plays on archetypal reactions, such as the experience of darkness or cave. It evokes such reactions 7). The structure is designed deliberately to interplay with the viewer's emotions; it places the contemporary viewer in the circumstances resembling the situation of a given historical event. It is indeed a new type of structure. The architect does not rely on the viewer's memories, knowledge or imagination, but rather directly affects his or her senses, by placing him or her in a situation of the original witnesses. The viewer is exposed, within acceptable limits, to environmental conditions similar to the conditions experienced by participants of the original event, although these conditions have been artistically processed. A direct, visceral interaction between space and senses takes place, remaining outside of the intellectual reflection. The user is to become a "surrogate witness". The examples of laboratories are the United States National Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the Jewish Museum in Berlin, which will be described in more detail in the subsequent sections of the paper.



3.     Laboratories of Psychological Architecture

The Post-Modern reaction in architecture was to put the stress on the semantic value of a building, which was what Modernism in principle rejected in favour of abstraction. Today, other means of expression are sought beyond the mere use of codes of meaning. Once again, architecture redefines itself as a spatial art. Recognizing this fact reinstates its proper balance. Search for new means of expression in architecture, which takes place in the whole of contemporary art, leads to interest in the human body. Achievements in psychology, which since 1960s has been focusing on environment research, have become more or less conscious foundations for architectural creative activity. The architectural psychology has led to the establishment of psychological architecture based on the reflections over the human being and behaviour.


Memory Resonator

The U.S. National Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., designed by James I Freed 8). can be categorized as a container-building. But it also includes motives, which make it possible for us to include it in the category of laboratories. These are aspects, which influence the somatic, automatic, subconscious experience of the viewer irrespective of his or her knowledge, awareness, or memory. These aspects interplay with the senses, not the intellect; this is the main aim of the architect’s artistic activity. The Museum in Washington, according to the concept of its creator, is not to be a neutral container, but an architectural structure referring to history through certain abstract forms. These metaphorical and symbolic forms are a system open for interpretation, a resonator of the visitor's memory. Freed wants his building to be experienced viscerally. It is the result of an assumption that, just like the Shoah was incomprehensible, also this building has not been designed to be comprehended intellectually. It is intended to engage the visitor and move him or her emotionally, evoke fear, sadness, anxiety, and as a result, force to reflection and leave nobody unaffected.

"For the permanent exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum the design approach was minimal and transparent, and the designers were in dialogue only with the story – not with the history of design or the conventions governing most museum penetrations; we reached for a sense of immersion by trying to erase the seams between exhibits and architecture. Installation strategies included the removal of conventional barriers of certain glass-encased vitrines: some objects can be touched, and reactions sought are visceral as they are intellectual. (...) The design intended to make the environment so united with its subject that memory of the museum experience and the sharing of memory through discussion will carry on in the lives of the visitors." 9)
The external architecture of the Museum in Washington is an after-vision of the places connected with the Holocaust visited by the architect: death camps, ghettos, their preserved structures and building materials. In Freed's conceptual sketches we can see a sort shtetl with protruding domes of synagogues; in the realization they become watchtowers of a concentration camp. The building contains elements of the hidden, elements of illusion, detachment of structure, and duality. The image of a "normal" building with stone facing as seen from the street contrasts with the interior, which is full of contradictions. Openings, which seem to be windows, have been bricked up; in the actual windows the canonical order has been reversed: the "panes" are non-transparent stone slabs, whereas their "frames" have been made of transparent glass. The glass skylight above the high central space of the Hall of Witness runs diagonally and constitutes a twisted, eccentric, irregular structure, which may resemble the fallen roof of the Synagogue in Brody. Freed claims this roof "tells the visitor something is amiss here". The constructional solutions and building materials from the times of the rapid industrial development (riveted iron beams, non-plastered pointed red brick) used in the interiors are to evoke the associations with the ideals of early modernism: the time of ideologies which eventually led to the construction of death factories. Glass bridges have been placed above the skylight; the figures of other visitors, spectrally deformed by the refraction of light, walking across the bridges create the situation of surveillance; they evoke the unsettling impression of being watched. (► Fig. 1).




Fig. 1.   The Surveillance Apparatus
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., arch. James I. Freed (Pei, Cobb, Freed & Partners), 1994.
(source: the Internet)


The main flight of stairs narrows up with the ascent; this emphasises the convergent perspective and is to (possibly) evoke the image of rail track leading to the transportation ramp in the camp. Generally, according to the architect's intention, the whole of the interior suggests the departure from norm, from normality. An important aspect of the Museum is the interplay of painting, sculpture and architecture. Four works of art have been ordered. Richard Serra brought his heavy steel plate titled Gravity and placed it in such a way that it cuts the staircase asymmetrically and parses the crowd of visitors. Thus the artist builds a situation of enforced parting. A particularly important and irreplaceable asset to the functioning of the Museum is the constant presence of a group of Holocaust survivors, who work there on voluntary basis. They are the living witnesses.


The Unspeakable Absence

The concept of the Jewish Museum in Berlin designed by Daniel Libeskind 10) and his original ideas underlying it are well known. Let us revise them briefly. The Berlin project has been based in its creator’s imagination on four motives/aspects. We have to know them in order to be able to see them in the completed building. It seems to be impossible for an unprepared observer to infer them from the inspection of the building alone.

The first motive was to develop the building "between the lines": a straight line divided into sections of discontinuing and unavailable space, and a broken line continuing "indefinitely" and defining the form. The void represents something the author tries to remind us: something "which has been lost and will never be set right again". The "lost cubature" is to make us aware of the "unspeakable absence" 11). The architect here adopts the role of the poet of the space (► Fig. 2).




Fig. 2.   The Unspeakable Absence
The Jewish Museum Berlin, arch. Daniel Libeskind, 2000.
(Photo:   J.K. Lenartowicz)


One may recognize the close resemblance (if not identity) with the attitude of Tadeusz Ró¿ewicz, an eminent Polish poet. According to Maria Janion, "the hidden lyrical event in Ró¿ewicz's poetry is the inexpressible – death. Ró¿ewicz was born as the poet of the Holocaust, a phenomenon unique in its terrible nature (...)" 12). But it is not merely the Holocaust that seems to bring Libeskind and Ró¿ewicz together. Janion has noticed that Ró¿ewicz's central dilemma is "how not to write a poem; how to get to the poet's silence", because "to struggle with the unspeakable/inexpressible is to struggle with silence. (...) Being silent is different from speaking silence." Similarly, Libeskind tries to express the inexpressible by using emptiness – instead of solid materials usually perceived as the substance of architecture. This emptiness can be understood as anti-space, "no architecture". To understand the design it is important to be aware of numerous essays by Libeskind 13), which are variants of his basic concept; such a knowledge would undoubtedly help the viewer to perceive the Museum's architecture in a more comprehensive and complete way. The perception of poetic proposals and attitudes in architecture requires education.

The second aspect is the figure of Arnold Schönberg and his unfinished opera Moses und Aron with its "notmusical fulfilment of the word". Libeskind sees the building of the Museum as an attempt at an architectural completion of the opera.

The third aspect is the list of Jews deported from Berlin, based on Gedenkbuch. By joining their pre-war addresses on the map of Berlin, the architect came up with a number of crossing lines, among which it was easy to highlight the ones, which formed a sort of Star of David 14). The Star's acute angle geometry is said to underlie the zigzag layout of the Museum. Again, only being aware of the architect's way of thinking can one read this idea in the actual building. We cannot see it from the street.

The fourth aspect is the text of Einbahnstrasse by Walter Benjamin, which has been incorporated in the sequence of sixty sections along the zigzag; every section represents one of the "Stations of the Star" described by Benjamin.

When aware of these aspects, the viewer can use the acquired knowledge of the architect's inspirations to get to know the work of art more fully and in accordance with the artist's intentions. The representation of an event is based on viewer's knowledge and memory, and also on the collective memory of the society. Cognition and experience is for the most part intellectual.


Representation Imposed by Senses

In the Museum in Berlin, apart from the narrative effect requiring recognition, knowledge and memory, we should also notice a new and clearly very important aspect: the behavioural impact of this architecture 15). This is achieved not only through the showcase and its content (the exhibits) but by direct interaction of the building space with the viewer's senses. Architecture shaped in an abstract way imposes impressions, the experiencing of which the viewer cannot avoid. Architect is able to exert influence upon the viewer's experiences without the medium of the anecdote, and to be able to place the viewer in the situation of the witness to the actual historical event. This takes place, obviously, under selected and acceptable conditions, but the achieved effects are nevertheless worthy of notice.

In order to obtain the desired effect, the architect uses elements, the aim of which is to make it impossible for us to perceive the whole structure in standard terms 16). The spatial structure of the building is a novelty indeed. The negation of the traditional (classical, "normal") paradigm of the building is achieved in several ways: axis in the disposition of the whole complex and symmetry has been rejected, the principle of the balance of forms has been rejected, too; there is no "main entrance"; the floors have been obscured (by hiding their number the scale of the whole building has been camouflaged); there are no windows and other elements of the traditional building.

There is no slightest echo of the academic classical axial composition, which, in a sense, still governs most of the buildings designed all over the world. The functional problem of the transparency of the entrance and driveway has been completely eliminated, simply because they are not there. By counting the levels of windows we usually determine the number of floors in a building and thus can roughly determine its scale. Here, this luxury is denied. The openings in the shell of the building, which in part play the role of traditional windows, form cracks, crevices, furrows, irregular areas arranged according to the super-graphic design of the façade, and they remain in very loose connection with the internal organization of the building as a functional structure.

Deprived of the traditional points of reference, in his or her reception, the viewer is purified, unarmed and intellectually naked in view of the inconceivable object, i.e. unusual space: a building with no doors, no windows, even with no roof, covered with a reptile metal layer.

Subsequent sightseeing stages lead through underground halls up towards the sky and the sense of sight, hearing, touch and kinesthesis are attacked in a way imposing a very unambiguous reaction. Nan Ellin 17) is right in noticing that fear has always been present in the human experience and houses in town have always had a function to fulfil the need for security and protection against danger. The Museum in Berlin, on the contrary, is a building whose purpose is to expose us. Libeskind, to the extent the building regulations allow him, creates architecture, which evokes anxiety, irrespective of historical knowledge, aesthetic sensibility, knowledge of literature or even essays by the architect himself.

Effects used by Libeskind have been known and used in the history of architecture. These include: distortion in perspective, use of light and its absence (light and shadow), drastic changes in the height of adjacent rooms, deviations from the vertical and the horizontal, changes in the acoustic quality of the space. New effects include acute "not-functional" angles in the deconstructed space.

The effect of scant lighting and smooth walls and long sequences of passages has been known from the architecture of ancient Egypt. It is important to separate Libeskind's design from earlier realizations of architecture parlante. Surprises, just like the raft trip down the underground River Styx in Zofijówka near Humañ, grottoes in parks, bridges yielding to our steps when we cross them (irritating our sense of stasis) (in Stourhead or Bagno Park near Münster), grottoes with surprises (usually a fountain, like the Hercules Grotto in Cassel) and other similar effects deliberately used in the 18th-century parks, were created to innocently frighten or entertain the users. Today too, one of the obligatory elements of an amusement park is the tunnel of terror. In the Berlin Museum, the novelty lies in the fact that these effects have been used in official architecture as a representation of a tragic historical event to evoke fear and anxiety and force us to profound reflection.


Road to the World of the Dead

The entrance to the Jewish Museum is located outside of the building in question, in a Baroque palace of the Museum of Berlin (Kollegienhaus). We descend along a path, which is a contemporary realization of the need for labyrinth (► Fig. 3).




Fig. 3.   Descent into the Abyss
The Jewish Museum Berlin, arch. Daniel Libeskind, 2000.
The steps of the main entrance to Kollegienhaus.
(Photo:   J.K. Lenartowicz)


Traditionally, the synagogue and the Romanesque church were accessed in such a way. Here, we simultaneously descend to the world of the dead. Dimly lit steps lead us down to the dungeons; the sense of engulfing darkness is very acute. The light intensity is very low. At the lowest level we find ourselves at the meeting point of three passages, which cross around a triangular glass case (► Fig. 4).




Fig. 4.   The Crossroads
The Jewish Museum Berlin, arch. Daniel Libeskind, 2000.
The meeting point of the underground passages.
(Photo:   J.K. Lenartowicz)


By choosing the corridor to the right, we come to an apparent dead-end, gradually narrowing as it proceeds. It is the result of the rising floor and falling ceiling, of which we might not be conscious, but we do feel cornered and oppressed. Finally, we lean against a wall. Breathless.

We can feel the metal door at the ending wall of the passage. Opening it, we enter a tower (in the Museum guide called the Holocaust Tower). It's dark inside. Bare reinforced concrete walls set under various angles upon a trapezoid layout create an acoustic environment in which every smallest noise or word spoken by a single visitor is multiplied. This creates an acoustic background unavoidably associated with whispers or noise of anxious crowd, the noise of nervous incomprehensible conversations. The anxiety is intensified as the only visible source of light is located at the top of the tower; we sense it rather than see it lighting the chamber (► Fig. 5).




Fig. 5.   The Only Way Out
The Jewish Museum Berlin, arch. Daniel Libeskind, 2000.
The interior of the Tower of Holocaust.
(Photo:   J.K. Lenartowicz)


When our eyes get used to the darkness, we can see a ladder, but it starts way above our heads, where we cannot reach it. It is unattainable. It somehow signals the way out and the hope, but it remains inaccessible. In a relatively simple way the feeling of threat, uncertainty and imprisonment has been created (of course, the visitors know the way they entered the tower, but the door has slammed and they are not sure whether they can open it from the inside). Here, we have to do with the archetypal experience of the labyrinth and cave.

By returning to the crossing of the three passages, we can choose one of the paths to the light: either walk up the straight staircase leading to higher floors, or walk straight on, taking the horizontal path to the garden.


Inaccessible Garden Evoking Anxiety and Uncertainty

The garden by E.T.A. Hoffman is one of "Hoffman's Stories", a fairytale situation, which – by throwing the visitor off balance – imposes a very specific experience in a simple way. In order to enter the garden, we have to leave the Museum building. After we do, we enter a depression (more than 3 metres below the level of the ground around the Museum) on the level of the dungeons. In its floor there are enormous over ten-metre-high posts with olive trees growing in pots on their tops. The greenery in this garden is inaccessible. By turning our heads up, we perhaps dream of finding ourselves in the Garden of Eden. The one we are walking in is all concrete and stone. In reality, it is a labyrinth in the biological way as it affects our sense of balance. It is not only the inaccessibility of the trees and the fear of losing our way that is unnerving. The concrete posts deviate from the vertical plane by 10o-12o, so does the floor from the horizontal. The post-pots are located perpendicularly to the floor. Walking over inclined plane is not comfortable and being in the forest of inclining trunks resembles the situation of being on a ship sailing over rough sea (► Fig. 6).




Fig. 6.   Uncertainty
The Jewish Museum Berlin, arch. Daniel Libeskind, 2000.
E.T.A. Hoffman's Garden.
(Photo:   J.K. Lenartowicz)


Although the masts do remain in the standard, "normal" relation to the deck, we sense that the entire ship is tilting. After several minutes we automatically reset our perceptual mechanism. In spite of all anxiety caused by the lack of stability, which has been geometrically transformed in relation to constant parameters resulting from the force of gravitation, the powerful influence of the surroundings makes us treat the figures of other visitors in the garden as weirdly stooped, deviated from normality. This again evokes the feeling of uncertainty. We are in a journey, whose aim remains unattainable and our survival is uncertain. The reference to history, to the enforced flight from the everyday life, to emigration in search of a new homeland, is obvious.


Liberation

On our way back from the garden, we can go up along the third corridor. It is also a very slightly ascending plane. This makes it look longer and higher from one end and shorter and lower from the other. Thus, the figures of the people on the other end may seem respectively smaller or bigger. Inside, the building also cheats our sense of scale. We walk up the steps towards heaven (the German name for this type of single-flight staircase is no other but Himmeltreppe). The metaphysical desire to go up is stressed by the fact that the upper floors of the building are lit more brightly than the bottom of the stairs (► Fig. 7).




Fig. 7.   The Hope for Liberation
The Jewish Museum Berlin, arch. Daniel Libeskind, 2000.
Himmeltreppe – the stairs to higher floors of the building.
(Photo:   J.K. Lenartowicz)


4.     Summary

Fundamentally, works of architecture are not well suited to represent events. However, as the author has tried to prove, architecture has potential abilities to evoke and recall visions, including the visions of the past tragic events. The typology of possible cases has been presented. It seems that in the last category – the laboratory – architecture approaches and explores its limits, by imposing the role of the substitute witness upon the visitor. The proposed term laboratory may have a much deeper meaning. Don Fowler noticed that what the cathedral was for the 14th century, the railway station for the 19th century and the office block for the 20th century, the laboratory is for the 21st century. This means that the laboratory embodies, both in its manifesto and technology, the spirit and culture of our century and it attracts the greatest intellectual and economical resources of our society. This remark may have been made in relation to research laboratories in the common sense of the phrase, but it is symptomatic. Experimental research, especially the one related to human life, will play greater and greater role in science. The experiment with the viewer, or the user of architecture, where there is the direct transmission of experience working outside of the intellectual consciousness and engaging a wide spectrum of sensual body experiences, is more and more present in architecture today. In Libeskind’s building we deal with a masterpiece of architectural art. It is a "pure architecture", for its own sake 18). Established criteria allow us to assess such unique works. The criteria, generally approved by various researchers, refer to sensual, physiological reactions of our organism 19). We participate in an experience rare in architecture – the unnerving pins and needles, the Nabokovian shivers down our spine 20), which prove that the work of art has gone straight and deep into our heart. But at the same time or perhaps even earlier, Libeskind's Museum interacts with us and influences us; if we surrender to this influence, for a short moment and within the right proportions, we can identify with the people threatened with a holocaust, which has been the central thesis of this paper.



Notes:
  1. 1. Brigadeführer-SS and Police General Jürgen Stroop titled his luxuriously published report on the action of the demolition of the Warsaw Ghetto The Jewish housing district in Warsaw no longer exists! He wrote, "I decided to destroy the entire Jewish housing district by burning all the buildings." Responsible for building and housing affairs, Obergruppenführer-SS Heinz Kammler made sure that all ruins be blown-up, finally, on 15th of May 1943, turning the former ghetto into a flat brick and stone desert. [J Heydecker and J. Leeb, Bilanz der Tausend Jahre. Die Geschichte des III. Reiches in Spiegel des Nürnberger Prozesses. München: Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, 1975, translation mine, JKL.]   (powrót)

  2. 2. The historical irony is that the inclining pylon supporting the bronze sculpture group in the Monument of the Ghetto Heroes consists of stones collected by artist, Arno Breker, for the unrealized monument of the Nazi victory.   (powrót)

  3. 3. Design submitted for the competition in 1958.   (powrót)

  4. 4. Norbert Elias, The Germans. Columbia UP, 1996.   (powrót)

  5. 5. Design awarded in the 1993 competition; currently under construction.   (powrót)

  6. 6. Information based on the Museum of Jewish Heritage leaflet. New York: NY, 2003   (powrót)

  7. 7. Certain existing places are more the result of coincidence than purposeful action; e.g. the space between two dome layers in the Cathedral in Florence or St. Peter's in Rome.   (powrót)

  8. 8. James Ingo Freed as the leading architect from Pei, Cobb, Freed & Partners. The Museum was erected between 1993-94.   (powrót)

  9. 9. Acc. to Ralph Appelbaum, Lotus international, No. 93, 1997, p. 78.   (powrót)

  10. 10. The design for the Jewish Department of the Berlin Museum, completed for the competition in 1989, was awarded the first prize. The work on the design, which was eventually called the Jewish Museum, was completed in 1993. The work lasted for a long time. The building was opened to the public in the last phase of its construction; officially, it was opened in September 2001.   (powrót)

  11. 11. It is worth noticing that the precursor of the inaccessible void symbolizing absence was Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, who in his design for the underground cemetery in Chaux, introduced a spherical space illuminated from above and into which the underground galleries of the catacombs opened (18th/19th c.).   (powrót)

  12. 12. Maria Janion, "To, co trwa". [That, which lasts]. A speech delivered on February 3, 2000 in the Royal Castle in Warsaw upon presenting Tadeusz Ró¿ewicz with the Grand Prix of the Polish Foundation for Culture. In: Do Europy – tak, ale z naszymi umar³ymi. Wydawnictwo Sic!, Warsaw 2000.   (powrót)

  13. 13. Several essays may be mentioned, among them: D. Libeskind, "Between the lines." In: Noever, P. (ed.) Architecture in Transition. Between Deconstruction and New Modernism. Munich: Prestel, 1991; Daniel Libeskind 1987-1996. El Croquis, 80, Madrid 1996.   (powrót)

  14. 14. We are dealing here with a case of architecture parlante, "talking architecture", the favourite means of architectural expression in the 18th c. The idea of pavilion, whose layout is based on the drawing of a six-pointed Star of David, was also used by the Polish architect, Jerzy Buszkiewicz, in his memorial in the death camp in Chelmno by the River Ner (together with the sculptor Józef Stasiñski)   (powrót) (1958).

  15. 15. Libeskind himself says that a building "is not a form, image or text, but about the experience which is not to be simulated" (speech delivered while receiving German architectural award Deutsche Architekturpreis in 1999).   (powrót)

  16. 16. Libeskind expresses his anxiety towards the results of the contest for Alexanderplatz in Berlin, where in the awarded design there is a clear departure from the experiment and contemporary materials towards an attempt to "use a thousand-years-old materials to build granite solidity", which would reflect the image bureaucrats hold of a city. This deceptively innocent turn in thinking may give a beginning to very dangerous events, as history has shown us. (D. Libeskind, "Die Banalität der Ordnung." In: Gert Kähler (ed.) Einfach schwierig. Eine deutsche Architekturdebatte. Ausgewählte Beiträge 1993-1995. Braunschweig/Wiesbaden: Vieweg, 1995, p. 37.   (powrót)

  17. 17. Nan Ellin (ed). Architecture of Fear. New York, N.Y.: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997.   (powrót)

  18. 18. The complex is meant to be visited as a space, before the function of a museum is introduced. Witold Rybczynski, in his essay "But Is It Art?" (In: Looking around. A Journey Trough Architecture. New York, N.Y.: Penguin Books, 1995, p. 187), reminds us that in November 1989 the critic Paul Goldberger praised the president of the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts in Columbus, Ohio, the building of which was designed by Peter Eisenman and Richard Trott, for taking a difficult decision of not hanging any paintings in the galleries for several months after the Center has been opened, so that the space in the building could be fully appreciated by the public. This guaranteed that the Museum and not the works of art presented in it would become the main point of interest. The building was to suffice for an exhibition. This gave rise to a question what is a museum of art worth without art? The obvious answer is that architecture itself is an art (too). Libeskind's Museum in Berlin is a similar story. It was open to the public already in the late stages of its construction – as a pure space. It was visited as such by almost half a million people.   (powrót)

  19. 19. Vladimir Nabokov writes, for example, "Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science" (V. Nabokov, Lectures on Literature. ed. Fredson Bowers, New York: Harcourt, 1980, p. 64).   (powrót)

  20. 20. Robert Cumming, "What Makes a masterpiece", a lecture delivered on May 10, 1995 in the Municipal Museum in Münster.   (powrót)




Published in English in Kultura Wspolczesna (Contemporary Culture), nr 4 (38), 63-83, Warszawa 2003,
in the volume entitled "Memory of the Shoah Contemporary Representations",
edited by Anna Zeidler-Janiszewska.



Krzysztof Lenartowicz
(Photo: Jan Zych) 		Krzysztof Lenartowicz, Born in Vilna in 1944. Licenced architect. Professor at the Faculty of Architecture, Cracow University of Technology, Cracow, Poland. Own architectural practice in partnership (STUDIO ARCHI 5, Ltd.) in Cracow since 1989.

Projects and buildings: completion of parish church in Jaworzno (1971-1980); parish church in Wilkasy (1984-); restoration of historical monuments (e.g. Nurnberger Haus in Cracow, 1994); office buildings (e.g. Municipal Transport Company in Cracow, 1993); residential buildings in the Cracow region; health care buildings; interiors.

Numerous prizes and mentions in Polish and international architectural competitions, e.g. honourable mention at TANU Headquarters in Dar-Es-Salaam international competition (co-author, 1972); 1st prize at the 1st Biennial of Architecture Cracow '85 competition for project of new use of ancient gas works in Cracow (co-author, 1985); 1st prize in competition for new programme and redevelopment strategy of former Municipal Streetcar and Bus Depot in Cracow (co-author, 1999); 3rd prize in the "Best Building of the Year 1999" competition of the Building Design Chamber for modernisation and extension of the ancient Jewish Hospital in Cracow (co-author, 1992-1999).

Winner of the first and/or the second prizes at several graphic sign competitions.

Academic teacher at Cracow University of Technology since 1973: Head of the Department of Industrial Architecture Design; head of Environmental Design Studio. Lecturer at University of Tennessee / School of Architecture / European Studies Program in Cracow (1989-1993). Supervisor of student groups taking part in International Students Urban Design Seminars held in Nancy (1988); Strassbourg (1989); Trier (1989); and Warsaw (1993). Visiting Professor at Fachhochschule Münster, Germany (1994-1997).

Published:

  • On Architectural Psychology (in Polish, 1992);
  • Some psychological aspects of restructuring industrial plants (1995);
  • Dictionary of Architectural Psychology (in Polish, 1997);
  • Sketches from the Road (2002).

Studies (for example):

  • Some rehabilitation problems of post-industrial areas – Cracow Soda Works (formerly SOLVAY) (co-author 1991-92);
  • Landscape study for the Sanctuary of Divine Mercy in Cracow (1998).

Exhibitions:

  • Symbol of the Nordic Council Competition, Stockholm 1971;
  • Polnische Architekturzeichnungen der Gegenwart. AEDES Gallery, Berlin 1989;
  • Sketches from the Road, "Stara Polana" Gallery, Zakopane, Poland 2002.

Married to architect Zofia Brzykczyk-Lenartowicz. The couple have one son, ¦wiatos³aw, an art historian at the National Museum in Cracow, and one grandaughter, Olga.

klenart@usk.pk.edu.pl





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