Conflict and Harmony Together in One Design

Making great architecture is a delicate operation. It requires the ability to fuse social, contextual and structural realities into a convincing whole. It requires a clear voice and an uncensored imagination. With all of that, it is not surprising that architects often see the needs of bureaucrats and money-conscious developers as the kiss of death.

Which is why the design of the Jewish Museum San Francisco, unveiled this month, is an anomaly of sorts. Rather than try to smooth over the forces that shape a modern metropolis, it seeks to express them in architectural form. Embedded in the brick shell of a former power substation, the museum’s exuberantly twisted forms evoke a world where conflict and debate need not suffocate the creative imagination. Instead, they can liberate the soul.

Designed by Berlin-based Daniel Libeskind with Gordon Chong & Partners, the new museum will be the latest addition to San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center cultural district, a mix of housing, commercial interests and art institutions launched by ambitious city planners in the flush ‘60s. The museum will occupy a landmark Beaux-Arts building designed by Willis Polk in 1907 at the district’s northern edge. Flanked by the existing St. Patrick’s Church on the west and the future Mexican Museum on the east, it will frame a small plaza that, along with a pedestrian lane just to the west, will form an important link between the cultural district and the city’s traditional center to the north.

But the site came with a list of formidable conditions. The museum turns its back to the city center, facing across the plaza to the south. The pedestrian corridor has no natural connection to the plaza, while the 36-story Four Seasons Hotel, now under construction, rises just behind it to the north. The hotel, in particular, posed a problem. Libeskind had initially hoped to create a free-standing structure that would be accessible from all sides, which would have encroached on the hotel lot. But by the time museum officials made their proposal to the hotel’s developers, construction was too far along to accommodate that plan. Instead, as part of its negotiations with the city agency that owns both sites, the developers agreed to turn over a narrow three-story space that is literally notched out of the back of the hotel’s base.

Libeskind’s scheme not only solves this myriad of complex urban problems, it fuses them into a work of art. Seen from the plaza, the museum will look remarkably stoic, with its restored brick facade punctured by an arched doorway and a repetitive row of windows. But from other vantage points, you can see new forms that burst free of the historic brick frame and spill onto the surrounding site. A gallery--housed in a distorted cube--rears up precariously at one end of the building, making room for the only path from the plaza to the pedestrian corridor. The back of the museum snaps into the strip of hotel property like a mismatched Lego block. At roof level, the rectangular volume of another gallery crashes up as if searching for air.

Libeskind’s decision to preserve the building’s original shell and deform it to fit its new urban context is a powerful strategy. It loads the museum with multiple meanings. The desire to conform to existing conditions and rebel against them can be read as a metaphor for the Jewish struggle with issues of identity and assimilation. The fractured shell also evokes the violence that often marks the act of creation. For his part, Libeskind claims the building suggests the need to fully immerse ourselves in the messiness of everyday life. “No one can survive isolated from the culture that surrounds them,” he says.

How Libeskind resolves these tensions won’t fully hit you until you enter the building. He has located the main lobby at the back of the first floor, creating a vast, 30-foot-high public hall that runs the length of the facade and conceptually extends the plaza into the building. Anchored by a small cafe, the hall will be a powerful social and aesthetic space. All of the power station’s key architectural features have been preserved--institutional tiled columns, elegant wooden trusses and pitched skylights. Up above, the bridge-like volume of part of the core gallery seems to fly across the space, anchored at each end by the sculptural forms of the museum shop and a conference hall. Depending on your mood and angle of view, old and new are locked in a wild embrace or in a life-and-death struggle.

From the entrance, visitors will pass under the bridge to the main lobby and begin one of a series of architectural “narratives” that loop and weave through the interior. A grand staircase leads to the core gallery, while a broad ramp leads down into the temporary-exhibitions gallery, which is lodged in the hotel slot. Eventually you are led across the bridge to more galleries before dropping back down to the public lobby.

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The final effect is a building that expresses conflict and harmony in equal measure. While the sequence through the galleries is virtually seamless, their interiors again evoke the limits that shaped the museum. The temporary-exhibitions gallery, for instance, is conventional, while the core gallery is all sharp, jagged angles. Internal terraces are cut out of the upper portion, allowing you to see into the entry hall and visually linking past and present. Large skylights, modeled after Jewish letters, are carved out of the core gallery, opening up views to the sky as if to relieve some of the pressures of the cramped site. The idea is to liberate the mind, and in the process to foster an environment dedicated to cultural freedom.

Libeskind has now designed three buildings with Jewish themes, as well as a range of other works. The other two were completed last year, the Felix Nussbaum Museum in Osnabruck, Germany, and the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the latter a genuine masterpiece. And many architects have quietly questioned whether Libeskind now runs the risk of being labeled someone who can only design “Jewish” spaces.

That’s a crude kind of prejudice. Many artists have repeatedly mined a central theme in their work and produced a wealth of ideas--Richard Serra’s lifelong obsession with massive steel plates, for instance. Libeskind could just as easily design an airport as a museum. But there is no question that the Jewish experience resonates with him. As a Polish-born Jew whose parents fled the Nazis and the Soviets, he is intimately aware of 20th century Jewish history, and each of the three museums touches on very different aspects of that history. If the Berlin building, say, wrestles with issues of tragedy and salvation, the San Francisco museum seeks to understand how a culture lives in the present.

“The sparks of God’s light, in their deepest exile that we call evil, yearn for liberation,” wrote Jewish theologian Martin Buber. Those words may well sum up Libeskind’s strategy here. The building suggests a process of awakening to the world around you, rather than an isolated act of creation. It tells us that the often difficult conflicts that define urban life are fraught with latent potential.