if you wanna sing out...

this was an idea posited by Daniel Libeskind, designer of the Jewish Museum in Berlin and, most recently, the World Trade Center memorial in NYC. he spoke this past Friday at a lecture at the Free Library, promoting his new book, Breaking Ground: Adventures in Life and Architecture. Son of Holocaust survivors, Libeskind was born in Poland, grew up in the Bronx, and became an accomplished musician by age 12. The Jewish museum isn't like any museum in Philadelphia. Instead, the architect purposely designed it like a scar in the landscape, drawing attention to what the Holocaust did to Germany, particularly in the Germans lack of acknowledgement of it for several decades after World War II.

I've always wanted to hear Libeskind speak. When I first learned about the Jewish Museum during my days at Bryn Mawr, I was really intrigued by this architect. Instead of using the "form follows function" school of thinking, Libeskind used his buildings to express something very profound about their environment. He sees architecture not as one building totally separate from the space its occupies, but rather as a part of a whole, like a sentence within a composition, or a movement within a symphony. I am impressed by his boldness of expression. Sure, architecture expresses history- we see it in the residences of Society Hill and the existing marble step in front of some of these houses, used for the elite to dismount their carriages. But how many people would be as bold as Libeskind? How many people would use architecture specifically to draw attention to that which hadn't been spoken about or largely ignored? In the case of the Jewish museum, Libeskind's work does exactly this.