Customer Reviews

Daniel Libeskind

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This is a very good documentation of an extraordinary and important museum. The building itself is a critical intervention in the German cultural landscape and in the history and art history of that country. It could and should change the way we think about art museums and about the connections between art and history. Daniel Liebeskind is the architect of the Jewish Musuem in Berlin, and there, too, he is reimagining the museum building as a physical and psychic intervention. Felix Nussbaum was a German artist of the late 1920s and 1930s, before being murdered at Auschwitz. He was a figurative painter who did some very profound and moving self-portraits, which captured the pervasive fear of a Jewish artist living in hiding from the Nazis. The Nussbaum Museum in Osnabruck is a difficult building for a difficult art; it is also difficult to describe, even in photographs. This book does an admirable job, and is lavishly illustrated. The text is informative but somewhat uncritical, and some floorplans would have been a great help. But at the same time, Liebeskind's own diagrams and drawings are included, and these are works of Deconstructivist architecture in and of themselves. This building should be as widely know and regarded as Frank Gehrey's Guggenheim in Bilbao.

Master salesman Libeskind knows too well that difference sells. Difference is a long way from quality. The museum is a poor attempt to project Libeskind's INTERPRETATION of Nussbaum's work into a built form. But Libeskind was going to build jarring, sharp forms regardless of whether the project was the Nussbaum House or a Church or a gas station. The justification of the forms are clouded in pretentious rhetoric and careless arguments masquerading as philosophical truths. One need look no further that the structure itself to see that it is drab, that the lighting is without interest, and that the rhetoric is already dated and faintly amusing. Now can we please move on to an architecture of reality???

I personally say liberskind in person at a lecture of his and was astonished by the magnitude and precision of his works, the ideas and making of his buildings give great testament to an awesome architect, BUY IT!! great buy full of information