Museum without exit.

Daniel Libeskind's design for a new museum devoted to artist Felix Nussbaum evokes a history of disconnection.

Daniel Libeskind has strenuously refuted the view, expressed by German city architects and planners, that he is an architect who specialises in 'Jewish' buildings. However, exactly half a century after the end of the war it is understandable that Germany's press have paid more attention to his Jewish department extension to the Berlin Museum, which is still under construction, than his other German projects. Daniel Libeskind is so successful in dealing with Jewish German themes because his architecture is able to translate a lost history and the discontinuity of Jewish German culture into concrete forms for a public, which, in spite of publicised facts and figures, has never felt physically touched by its recent past.

Osnabruck held an open competition for the design of a museum to house the paintings of Felix Nussbaum but also invited Daniel Libeskind and Giorgio Grassi to submit designs. Libeskind's first-prize winning entry, announced last year, further explores themes of lost history, gaps in German history, forgotten fates and names. At an estimated cost of DM 13 million, building will start in spring 1996 and be completed in 1997, probably before the Berlin Museum extension.

Felix Nussbaum, born in Osnabruck in 1904, studied painting in Hamburg and Berlin where he met his future partner, the Warsaw born painter Felka Platek. During 1932, while in Rome as guest student at the German Academy's Villa Massimo, his Berlin studio was burnt down with the loss of 150 paintings. In 1933 the Academy was closed and Felix and Felka began an insecure life constantly on the move between Italy and France, finally ending up in Belgium. Continuing to paint in temporary accommodation, storing and then transporting finished canvasses from Felix's parent's house in Cologne to Belgium, the couple were also obliged to continually apply for extensions of their visas to remain in Brussels. In 1940, when the Germans marched into Belgium, Felix was taken prisoner but managed to escape and return to Brussels where the couple were listed in the city's Jewish Register. Until 1944, when they were arrested and transported to Auschwitz, the couple were hidden by friends and later lived in a mansard-roof while still managing to paint in a cellar. There is evidence that they met in Auschwitz, but they did not survive and in January 1946 their names were removed from the Brussels Register of Foreign Residents.

Libeskind calls his Nussbaum Museum 'Museum Without Exit'. It is the history of a life, a destiny irrevocably linked with a time in world history, but its intention is to be neither a memorial nor sentimental. The juxtaposition of artefacts, buildings and landscapes from different times, influencing and in relationship to each other, is meant to reveal new connections and lay open forgotten histories. As well as providing a gallery for surviving paintings, the site plan encompasses both the existing Schlikker'sche Villa, previously the 1933 Nazi Party Headquarters but which now houses a Folk Art collection, and Osnabruck's separate Cultural History Museum in a unified scheme. The site is intersected by the Nussbaum Pathway, with its Missing Pictures Gallery, linking the villa with the new gallery, crossing a Garden of the Future and continuing beyond the site boundary to cross a meridian line to Auschwitz.

Libeskind is always aware of invisible lines of influence. Places to which Nussbaum fled or was transported are made physically real and featured on the site; routes to and from Bordeaux, Paris, St Cyprien, Rome, Turin, Hamburg, Berlin and Brussels. Around the volumes and between the ways grow wild and cultivated gardens, an Ecological Woodland, Dream Garden and an open Platz.

Libeskind describes these parts as '... connecting and composing an integral structure while at the same time exposing a permanent horizon of disconnection which paradoxically links significant places to the town; substantial points of history to spatial memory.' The Nussbaum Pathway - partly a compressed space lit by triangular skylights, through which the visitor both experiences actual components of the scheme and traces of former Jewish life in Osnabruck, such as the synagogue destroyed by arson - is the main connecting thread. Like Felix Nussbaum's own work the museum and its setting stand for a spiritual resistance of art in the face of oppression.