Daniel Libeskind

The Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre

 Berlin museum
 Denver art museum

ACADEMY OF ARCHITECTURE , DADAR, MUMBAI, INDIA

T.Y.B.ARCH
The Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre
 Philosophy

 Achitecture tells a story about the world, our desires and dreams.
Architecture, and the buildings, are much more than a place, they are
destinations meant to evoke emotion and to make you think about the world
we all live in.

 Buildings and urban projects are crafted with perceptible human energy and
that they speak to the larger cultural community in which they are built.
 Desconstructivism

 It is characterized by ideas of fragmentation, an interest in manipulating ideas

of structures surface or skin, non-rectilinear shapes which serve to distort
and dislocate some of the elements of architecture, such as structure and
envelope.
 Deconstructing is to deform a rationally structured space so that the
elements within that space are forced into new relationships". It features a lot
of chopping up, layering, and fragmenting.
 The theory of deconstruction from Derrida's work argues that
deconstruction "is not a style or 'attitude' but rather a mode of questioning
through and about the technologies, formal devices, social institutions, and
founding metaphors of representation". It is very much history as well as
theory.
 New York architect Daniel Libeskind has completed a media centre for the
City University of Hong Kong.
 An elegant, low-tech design placed at the service of high-tech invention. This
nine-story crystalline building is designed to accommodate a range of flexible
environments for research and experimentation.
 The Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre houses laboratories, theatres, and
classrooms for the school's departments of computer engineering and media
technology.
 Like much of Libeskind's body of work, the centre's faceted volume shoots
upward into a sharp point.
 Glazed segments wrap around the building's exterior while intersecting bands
of lighting slice through the ceilings of the interior.
 Asymmetrical windows are cut into the walls of lecture halls, classrooms and
computer labs allowing for natural light to fill even the inner-most rooms of
the Center.
 Construction
•Structure is geometrically sophisticated and irregular shape.

• The highly unusual crystal-shaped building is home to the School of Creative

Media

• Structure is made up of steel and concrete with ceramic tile cladding.

• Some Chinese culture can also be seen inside the building.
• More than 50% of the major building elements are modular and standardised
designs including beams, columns, walls, slabs, doors, toilet cubicles, building
envelope, and mechanical and electrical components.

• Internal activity spaces have been designed specifically to encourage

collaboration through openness and connectivity.
• Crystalline design creating an extraordinary range of spaces, light and material,
which creating an inspiring environment for research and creativity
Berlin museum

Competition: 1989
Completion: 1999
Opening: 2001
Client: Stiftung Juedisches Museum Berlin
INTRODUCTION
The jewish museum (judisches museum berlin) completed in 1999 and opened in
2001 is one of the largest Jewish Museums in Europe. In three buildings, two of
which are new additions specifically built for the museum by architect Daniel
Libeskind two millennia of German-Jewish history are on display in the
permanent exhibition as well as in various changing exhibitions.

STAR represents Jewish history and culture throughout the history of Berlin and its
absence in the present-day city.
ZIG-ZAG LINE represents the atrocities done on Jewish
 Concept
The new design was based on three concepts that formed the museum’s
foundation :-
• First the impossibility of understanding the history of Berlin without
understanding the enormous intellectual, economic and cultural contribution
made by the Jewish citizens of Berlin.
• Second, the necessity to integrate physically and spiritually the meaning of
the Holocaust into the consciousness and memory of the city of Berlin.
• Third that only through the acknowledgement and incorporation of this
erasure and void of Jewish life in Berlin, can the history of Berlin and
Europe have a human future.
Numerous numbers of trajectories betweentwo points (AB), representing the individual
biographicaltrajectories of citizens of Berlin, which Libeskind refers to as
Histories.

DESIGN EVOLUTION
 Design
The Jewish Museum essentially consists of two buildings –
• a baroque old building (that formerly housed the Berlin Museum).
• a new deconstructivist-style building by Libeskind

The two buildings have no visible connection above ground and the new one is
accessible only via an underground passage from the old building.

The Jewish Museum is clad chiefly with titanium-covered zinc which will oxidize and
turn bluish as it weathers.

No entry from new

building
Façade

The division of neither levels nor rooms

being apparent to the observer.

Windows – primarily narrow slits –

follows a precise matrix.

Daniel Libeskind plotted the addresses

of prominent Jewish and German
citizens on a map of pre-war Berlin and
joined the points to form an "irrational
and invisible matrix“

Untreated alloy of titanium and zinc

- In the basement, visitors first encounter three intersecting, slanting corridors named the
“Axes.”
- The basement further divided into three areas with different meanings.
The three axes symbolize three paths of Jewish life in Germany :-
• Continuity in German history (permanent museum)
• Emigration from Germany (leads to the garden of exile)
• The Holocaust (the dead end)

- The first axis ends at a long staircase that leads to the permanent exhibition.

Main museum Staircase

 HOLOCAUST EMIGRATION
All three of the underground axes intersect, CONTINUITY
symbolizing the connection between the three
realities of Jewish life in Germany.

THE AXES : CONTINUITY ,EMIGRATION AND HOLOCAUST

 Void
The Museum's Voids refer to "that which can never be
exhibited when it comes to Jewish Berlin history: humanity
reduced to ashes."

Five cavernous Voids run vertically through the New

Building.

They have walls of bare concrete, are not heated or air-

conditioned and are largely without artificial light, quite
separate from the rest of the building
 The garden of exile

• The second axis connects the Museum proper to The Garden of Exile, whose foundation is
tilted.

• The Garden of Exile is reached after leaving the axes. Forty-nine concrete stela rise out of the
square plot. The whole garden is on a 12° gradient and disorients visitors, giving them a sense
of the total instability and lack of orientation experienced by those driven out of Germany.

• Russian willow oak grows on top of the pillars symbolizing hope.

 The holocaust
- The third axis leads from the Museum to the Holocaust
Tower, a 79 foot (24 m) tall empty silo. The bare concrete
Tower is neither heated nor cooled, and its only light
comes from a small slit in its roof.
- The “ axis to holocaust" is a dead end .
- It becomes even narrower and darker and ends at the
Holocaust Tower..
- The concrete tower is 24 meters high and neither
heated nor insulated.
- Tower commemorates the numerous Jewish victims of
mass murder. Noises from the outside world are
clearly audible
Lit by narrow
slit

Faces indicating the

sufferers of the
concentration camp.
 Plan showing different accessible areas

In the museum different plans are shown where different activity zones are placed
For the visitors and the workers.
For example :- circulation, Exhibition shapes, voids, administrative space, library,
mechanical space.
DENVER ART MUSEUM
-- DENVER, USA.
 COMPLETED :- 2006.

 ACTUAL NAME :- FREDERIC C. HAMILTON BUILDING.

 TOTAL AREA :- 1,46,000 Sq. Ft.

 COMPLETED IN ASSOCIATION WITH DAVIS PARTNESRSHIP.

Old Museum, now known as North building. New Museum building. Constructed right in front of
Was completed in 1971. Designed by Italian architect the old one across the road.
Gio Ponti
 IT IS A KIND OF CITY HUB, TYING
TOGETHER DOWNTOWN, THE CIVIC
CENTER, AND FORMING A STRONG
CONNECTION TO THE GOLDEN TRIANGLE
NEIGHBORHOOD.(the new modern society in
contrast to the old Denver areas.) THE PROJECT IS
NOT DESIGNED AS A STAND ALONE
BUILDING, BUT AS PART OF A COMPOSITION
OF PUBLIC SPACES, MONUMENTS AND
GATEWAYS IN THIS DEVELOPING PART OF
THE CITY.

 MATERIALS USED IN CONSTRUCTION ARE

MAJORLY GLASS AND TITANIUM. (9000 panels
of Titanium have been used).
 DESIGN PHILOSOPHY
 THE MUSEUM IS AT A SITE WHICH IS
CLOSE TO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS.

 DANIEL LIBESKIND HAS DERIVED THIS

FORM CONSISTING SHARP GEOMETRIC
VOLUMES BY GETTING INSPIRED BY THE
PEAKS AND VALLEYS OF THE MAJESTIC
ROCKY MOUNTAINS.

 HE WANTED DIFFERENT FUNCTIONS

OF A PUBLIC SPACE TO COME TOGETHER
AND FORM A SINGLE VOLUME.

Sharp angles of the

Geometric Volumes
are seen at the exteriors
as well as in the
interiors.
INITIAL SKETCH BY DANIEL LIBESKIND
SHOWING THE RELATION OF AN URBAN
SURROUNDING AND SHARP ANGLES OF
HIS DESIGN.
PLAN S
SECTION