A tale of two museums.

The new museums in Berlin (p40) and Edinburgh (p54), though in some ways similar in programme, are opposite in both approaches to housing their collections and relationships to city. And they could not be more different in sensibility and strategy: the German one idealist, abstracted and metaphorical, the Scottish one phenomenal, tectonic and material. Their contrasts are discussed opposite.

It is hard to think of two museums more dissimilar than the jewish one by Daniel Libeskind in Berlin (p40) and the Scottish one by Benson + Forsyth in Edinburgh (p54). Yet they do have some things in common: they are both intended to explain a people; they are both additions to existing institutions and are both restrained, at least in height, by planning. And as repositories for the works of a whole culture, they are intended to contain far more artefacts and three-dimensional objects than works which need to be displayed on walls.

Differences are very great. The Berlin building is in a rather messy area of the inner city, scattered with Baroque fragments and some of the not entirely unsuccessful efforts of the Internationale Bauausstellung of the '80s (AR April 1987). The district is now in part being changed again by the powers of unification and a new degree of prosperity (AR January 1999). The Edinburgh site was an anomaly, quite a small corner in the traditional central academic enclave left empty by bureaucratic indecision and indifference. While the Berlin museum could zigzag into its small park, the Edinburgh one had to fill its site tight as a carpenter's dowel. It grows out of the old substance of city from the bedrock, and is defined by the lines of the Flodden Wall(1) and the old street fronts. In contrast, the Berlin building (as Michael Spens remarks on p40) seems to have been hurled onto its site from the heavens and, with its plan derived from an abstracted Star of David, it is just as much an object building as its Baroque parent next door:(2) the old one celebrates the historic power of the Prussian state, the new is redolent of the force of suffering and our knowledge of it.

The most important differences of all are in the stories the two buildings have to tell. Scotland's is a tale of considerable achievement, particularly in the last three centuries, and it can be told in a more or less conventional way, starting in a basement devoted to prehistory and ending up with our own times at the top. But, for all the often great success of Jews in German culture, it was imperative that the Jewish building should speak of the dreadful events of the Nazi period: hence Libeskind's brilliant strip of voids which runs straight through the plan figure, emphasizing absence and division, and his Holocaust Void in its separate dark and icy tower.

Engaging with the city

Both museums endeavour to engage with their cities in imaginative and creative ways. Yet they do so in quite different fashions. Libeskind's building is concerned with ideas, even to the extent of becoming extremely difficult. It is hard for instance to understand how the lines of windows incised into the exterior really can help most people interpret the impact of Jews on Berlin's structure and culture as the architect intends them to do. Perhaps the slashes on the body of the building are a metaphor of the violence with which the Jews were treated (though I have not yet heard this advanced yet, it will surely be the way in which many will regard the elevations in future). In fact, Libeskind is said to have drawn connections between key points of Jewish cultural activity on fragments of maps of Berlin, and then raised them from horizontal to vertical to form the elevations. Only he knows the significance of the nodes and lines he has charted and, so far, he has not vouchsafed detailed explanation of the places and events to which they refer. Internally, the map-walls give no more insight into historical and spatial relationships than they do outside, for they do not help particularly in understanding the parts of the city of which they are abstractions. You might expect to gaze over the relevant part of Berlin through the windows that allude to it, but this is not always easy, as lines and nodes are often above your head or below your feet. To say the least, curators have been given an interesting challenge by the spaces that result. Certainly, many of the objects that will be shown are three dimensional and will not necessarily be hung on the slashed walls, but glare from the slashes is always going to be a problem with any arrangement, and the jagged pattern must continue to dominate the volumes unless it is actually obscured.

In Edinburgh, each opening has a specific purpose. All frame vistas that clearly emphasize aspects of history, from the Castle (the bastion of the Scottish state) to the dome of the University (symbolic of the nation's traditional emphasis on education). Lovingly, the building has been honed to its contents, a strategy which clearly has huge benefits in showing every piece to greatest advantage in a complex interwoven narrative, but which has concomitant difficulties. For instance, the very progression from dark prehistoric basement to the luminous contemporary upper floor has been described as positivist: a mechanism for forcing us to believe in a single progressive narrative. But in fact, there are so many routes: up, down and sideways, that visitors can compose their own stories. Another argument against such tight correlation between building and contents as Benson + Forsyth have made is that the collections will grow, and interpretations of them will certainly change. But, for all the close fit, there is in fact a good deal of opportunity for change in the design of the place, and the Scottish system includes other museums which can house items no longer needed in the place that tells the national story.

Time and direction

Libeskind's building sets out to offer choice of route: indeed, as soon as you have descended to the lower level, three paths present themselves: to the Holocaust Tower, to the Hoffmann Garden, or to the stair which leads to the galleries. But in many ways, the building is far more dirigent than the Scottish one. The stair is as compelling a device as can be found anywhere in a modern building, reminiscent in its relentless upward progression of many staircases produced by authoritarian regimes (though it is of course of more modest scale). Presumably it is a metaphor for time and perhaps power. (Once you start this metaphor business, you can go anywhere - if he wants us to have his own interpretation, Libeskind will have to write a manual, but that's not the point in a Decon world, and his rather vague references to the influences of Arnold Schonberg and Walter Benjamin explain little.) On gallery floors, the Berlin building offers far fewer route alternatives than the Edinburgh one: basically, you are required to progress along the long thin plan in one direction or the other with a few short cuts allowed here and there. Moments when routes pass the voids are indeed dramatic, but you are of course prevented from entering them on the upper floors (and can only go into three at ground level) - another instance of rigorous determination to make us see the building in a particular way.

Both buildings are post-modern in the best sense. Their differences are between the ideal and the phenomenal, the metaphorical and literal.(3) Between the production of the isolated artist, determined to make what is almost his first building tell his multiple stories no matter what its content, and the responsive and thoughtful approach of mature architects, so confident in their handling of materials, light and space that they can tenderly afford to allow the exhibits to speak, and yet make a building of great power and complexity. Both museums have been created with passion and commitment. Perhaps their differences are inevitable because of the history of their subjects, but they offer the most dramatic illustration possible of extremes of architectural approach to one of the most important building types of our time.

1 Built as the city's southern wall after the Scots defeat at the Battle of Flodden (1513).

2 Such is the power of the new building, its message and its rejection of its parent that one critic has described the old building as 'alien, late-Baroque architecture'. See Schneider, Bernhard, Daniel Libeskind: Jewish Museum Berlin, Prestel, Munich etc, 1999, p51.

3 The differences between the two buildings over time will be interesting. In a few years' time, the Edinburgh one will presumably look roughly as it does now, maybe with a few streaks. Libeskind hopes that the Berlin one will have changed from shining silver to dull grey in various degrees of darkness as the zinc oxidizes.