From the architect. Daniel Libeskind's Military History Museum opens today in Dresden. “I wanted to create a bold interruption, a fundamental dislocation, to penetrate the historic arsenal …” – Daniel Libeskind, 2011
“It was not my intention to preserve the museum’s facade and just add an invisible extension in the back. I wanted to create a bold interruption, a fundamental dislocation, to penetrate the historic arsenal and create a new experience. The architecture will engage the public in the deepest issue of how organized violence and how military history and the fate of the city are intertwined.”—Daniel Libeskind
decade after Daniel Libeskind’s iconic Jewish Museum opened in Berlin another Libeskind-designed German museum will open – Dresden’s Military History Museum. The projects are more alike than they appear.
Both juxtapose aggressively avant-garde design and decidedly pre-modernist structures. Both demand a renewed emotional and intellectual focus on history. Both attempt to make sense of the seemingly senseless – of war, violence, destruction and hatred. Says Libeskind, “The destruction of Europe and European cities by the Nazis is part of the story of the destruction of Dresden. One cannot separate the Shoah and the museums that deal with memories from the history of Germany and Dresden.”
Libeskind’s extension to Dresden’s Military History Museum dramatically interrupts the building's symmetry, its massive, five-story 200-ton wedge of glass, concrete and steel slicing through the center of the 135-year-old original structure. The new façade’s openness and transparency pushes through the opacity and rigidity of the existing building just as German democracy pushed aside the country’s authoritarian past.
The museum’s redesign creates the setting for a reconsideration of that past in a city annihilated by allied bombing at the end of WWII. Inside the wedge a 99 foot viewing platform provides breathtaking views of the city as it is today while the wedge itself points in the opposite direction, toward the source of the bombs, creating a dramatic space for reflection. Says Libeskind, “Dresden is a city that has been fundamentally altered. The events of the past are not just a footnote; they are central to the transformation of the city today.” Inside, in the original, columned part of the building, German’s military history is presented in chronological order. But now it is complemented, in the new wide-open spaces of the five-story wedge, by a new thematic consideration of the societal forces and human impulses that create a culture of violence.