New space

The building across from the monumental Jewish Museum Berlin has hardly stood out, hidden behind shrubs and a wall. Flowers and other little goods were sold there until early May 2010, when the one-time market began its transformation into a new and modern space.

The Berlin city senate was responsible for approving the appropriation of the building for cultural purposes.

"An academy, archive and library will be established in the new building, the realization of an academic program that will take up questions of integration, immigration and tensions among the Jewish and Islamic communities," said Börries von Notz, managing director of the Jewish Museum.



A former industrial hall

Von Notz added that he's thrilled to be able to invite Daniel Libeskind back to design the annex, following Libeskind's much-publicized and admired original design for the museum, completed in 2001. The museum owes part of its fame to its unusual, zigzag structure.

But the renovations of the annex will take a less dramatic form.

"We won't disguise or obscure the original factory building. Instead, its general appearance will remain intact, at least as far as that's possible. But we're placing a new, insulated building within it. So it's a house with a house system, and in the end, only the newly built components will be heated," project head Jochen Klein explained.

The structure's new components involve three wooden cubes placed against each other that seem to grow out of the industrial hall's floor. The architect had already used variations on a crooked cube in the museum's "Garden of Exile" and in its glass courtyard. So Libeskind oriented himself consciously on his own architectural idiom to bind the academy with existing museum complexes.

According to the blueprint, one of the cubes will cut through the side of the existing industrial hall to form the visitors' entryway to the Academy of the Jewish Museum.



To recall and preserve

The museum's Garden of Exile stands symbolically for all who fled in exile during the Nazi period. Many of these people left part of their estates to the Jewish Museum, including tokens that told their stories and revealed their experiences.

Many such bequests made their way to Germany in wooden boxes, a fact Daniel Libeskind used to orient himself in his designs, explained Jochen Klein. The cubes symbolize what was passed on and will be preserved in the new academy.

"We are planning to create a space where scholarship generally can take place, and we will implement a program to invite guest scholars. As fellows of the museum, they will be able to devote themselves for six to nine months to studying a certain topic, and our first project will be a study on the migration history of Russian-Germans in the 1990s," von Nolz explained.

Guest scholars will also have the chance to take a break and enjoy the 900 square meters (about 10,000 square feet) of freestanding space separating the auditorium and the library, which will showcase a "Garden of the Diaspora" designed by Berlin architecture studio Atelier de Balto. Across four plateaus, the garden will feature plants native to countries where German-Jews have sought refuge.

The renovation costs a total of 11 million euros ($15.9 million), with 60 percent covered by federal tax money and 40 percent coming from private donors. One major contributor is Eric F. Ross, an American businessman born in 1919 in Dortmund, Germany as Erich Rosenberg.

The opening of the academy, which will bear Ross' name, is planned for summer 2012.

Author: Silke Bartlick / gsw
Editor: Kate Bowen