Beyond Libeskind.

Beyond the Wall 26.36 [degrees] is the characteristically cryptic title of Daniel Libeskind's current presentation at the Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam. Referring perhaps to the largely opaque public wall of the Institute and to the historic role of the Berlin Wall, Beyond the Wall 26.36 [degrees] deconstructs the conventional notion of walls as fixed, orthogonal barriers. It is characteristic of Libeskind to include figures or instrumental readings as rather hermetic clues to his total work; 26.36 [degrees] refers to the sharpest angle in his long-awaited Jewish Museum. His is certainly an architecture of geometry and words, of both datums and data.

A thorough exhibition and a dynamic installation Beyond the Wall 26.36 [degrees] is a provocative success. It is simultaneously a retrospective and a taste of things to come. Into the Institute's boxlike space, Libeskind has inserted a tilting planar contraption which has unexpected sculptural presence. This is revealed to the strolling visitor as a ribbon of steel plate folded about itself to create both an outer circuit of promenade from which this principal object is viewed - and several inner chambers with particular characteristics of enclosure and interpenetration. Occasionally spanning the open floor as a kind of bridge-wing, Libeskind's installation is both extreme and intimate.

Large drawings and photographs are set against the walls, while smaller composite forms about the periphery act as bases for extraordinarily complex models, mostly of proposals for Berlin where Libeskind is currently based. Within a splayed tunnel, lined with spindly early drawings and a mysterious model-grotto, is an inner labyrinth. This reveals the crucial role of Cecil Balmond (of Ove Arup & Partners) with an aerial slide show and many artefacts to explain his and Libeskind's proposed extension to the Victoria & Albert Museum (AR July 1996). The installation terminates in a partially eroded cul-de-sac housing Libeskind's Felix Nussbaum Museum - the so-called Museum without Exit (AR February 1996) - now under construction in Osnabruck, Germany.

The Dutch architect H. P. Berlage used to call for eenheid in veelheid ('oneness in manyness'). With tens of thousands of screws pinning this steel carapace together, it is surely emblematic of Libeskind to make a single defining surface - the steel wall - be realised and animated by very many tiny details. This is literally a world view, a sense of things big and small, akin to the fractal tiles of the V & A's skin (Balmond calls them a 'mathematical mosaic'), which is intellectual and now physical (albeit not particularly comfortable.) This is a strenuously intellectual landscape, a mindscape where you see several sides of the same thing or, to use Gerard Manley Hopkins' spiritual term, an 'inscape'.

In fact, Beyond the Wall 26.36 [degrees] is not unlike a dummy-run for the V & A extension, with similar spiral geometries and fascinating interconnections. If the realised building retains these qualities and it will be without the height limitations of the space at the NAi - then London will have a memorable and athletic work of architecture. Libeskind's world splays, shears, bends, hovers, flies, opens up and represent. If Paul Klee famously spoke of taking a line for a walk in order to draw, then Libeskind takes the world on an expedition, a world which is characterised by its endless restlessness. (So is an ordinary bench, allowing mortals to rest, utterly impossible?)