Formz free wedge8/30/2023 ![]() But in the other full-height rear gallery, rockets and bombs rain down on a series of massive concrete shelters. The one led to the other, as it did with America’s space program. Libeskind’s design allows for some telling moments: For instance, one full-height space at the rear of the wedge contains a V-2 missile and above it, a Soviet-era Soyuz capsule. The descriptions, presented in both German and English, make clear the cost of conflict. This is far from being a museum that glorifies war or the instruments of death and destruction. The Nazi era, represented in both chronological and thematic displays, is dealt with as dispassionately as the other periods-including the postwar Allied occupation and the emergence of rival armies for East and West Germany. ![]() A freestanding structure at the front of the first floor becomes a mini-Libeskind building in itself and displays exhibits about the horrific effects of war on ordinary people. They are arranged to include subjects such as military fashion, military toys, technology, and shelter. While the existing museum presents chronological displays-from 1300 to 1914, 1914 to 1945, and 1945 to today-the new wedge contains thematic exhibitions. The separation of the wedge from the rectangular plan of the existing building is further reinforced by curatorial fiat. Within the resulting wedge, dark gray concrete floors and ceilings contrast with the lighter, restored old interior. Inside, angled walls of concrete follow the thrust of the arrow’s path. The bombs destroyed the city in the shape of a wedge with a 40-degree angle at the tip-the same geometry as the Libeskind addition.Īt the rear of the building, the twin barbs of the arrowhead are solid beneath the latticework skin to contain gallery space. The arrow points to the southwest, the direction from which the bombers came in 1945. The front section-the tip of the arrow-is empty, though it contains an 82-foot-high observation deck within it that looks out over the rebuilt city. Rather, the new section is grafted to the old, the steel structure lightly clasping the iron-and-sandstone mother ship with a certain amount of internal reconstruction providing wider-span spaces. The architectural sleight-of-hand is not quite a case of cutting a pie-shaped slice out of the old and then filling in the gap. Libeskind has skillfully handled his angled incision, even to the extent of chopping through existing windows, which are neatly finished around the wedge’s perforated aluminum skin. ![]() In Dresden, it’s clear enough that the building is sundered by some huge weapon. Consider his 2001 Imperial War Museum in Manchester, England: Its three “shards” were conceived as simplified fragments of a shattered globe that the casual visitor is unlikely to pick up on at a glance. This simple concept-you could see it as an arrow, a missile, a crashed plane, a knife or sword, the prow of a warship-is an uncharacteristically direct choice of symbolism by Libeskind, who is sometimes inclined to over-intellectualize in his search for form. A new five-story concrete-and-steel wedge now forces its way at an angle from the back through to the front, bursting through the roofline and disrupting the serene symmetry of the original Neo-Renaissance building. Not content with merely extending an imposing 1876 former arsenal that was converted into a museum of military history in 1897, Libeskind has sliced through the structure. Yet in this long-gestating project that he won in a competition in 2001, he has gone much further. As with that building and the larger Jewish Museum in Berlin (designed before the Nussbaum museum but completed later, in 2001), in Dresden, Libeskind once again adds to an existing building. Seeing the place reminded me of my visit to Libeskind’s very first completed project, the tiny Felix Nussbaum Haus art museum of 1998 in Osnabrück, another city largely flattened in the war and freighted with another charged context: Nussbaum, a Jewish artist, had perished at Auschwitz.
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