Something about Berlin brings out the best in Daniel Libeskind. It is here that he had his greatest triumph with the opening, in 2001, of the Jewish Museum Berlin, a building with cuts and slashes that make brutality palpable. On the audio tour, Libeskind says that some people will be nauseated by the museum's angles. But that's OK. If his way of talking about the symbolism of his buildings can seem overwrought (he is happy to offer almost any meaning until he finds one that sticks), in Berlin the architecture itself speaks volumes.
But the same architectural style–and Libeskind definitely has a style–hasn't always transferred well to other times and places. Take the Crystals shopping mall at CityCenter in Las Vegas, where his angles are used as mere window dressing–high-end architecture for high-end shoppers. (Rockwell Group was brought in to design the interiors, lest the severity of the building leave visitors queasy.) But why does a shopping mall in Vegas have the same cuts and slashes Libeskind said were meant to evoke the traumatic history of German Jewry? In the meantime, the architect still claims his master plan for the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York is the one that has been realized–but you need only look at the WTC website to see how much was altered.
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