Building with feeling

Behaviour shapes the meaning. Space planning is less about building than it is reshaping the behaviour that the space affords. Any spaces, building and environment will influence how we feel and behave, so called environmental psychology. For instance, bright area for a study environment can reduce the sleepiness, soft colour of wall design can calm our feeling, increase the amount of dustbin at outdoor can improve the cleanliness of environment and etc. Environmental influences may involve with our senses. Bright lighting in a specific area, sitting on a comfortable unit in cinema, entering to a coffee shop. These environment influences will trigger our emotions and feelings in a direct or indirect way.

Jewish Museum, Berlin

One of the interesting example I found out which fully represents how a space planning of a building can influence the building occupants’ feeling and emotion once they entered. Jewish Museum at Berlin by Daniel Libeskind. This building presents and incorporates the social and cultural history Post-war Germany, exposing the damaging effects of the Holocaust. Unlike with the typical museum, Jewish Museum is not functioning as a means of educating, or acting in any informative role. It then suggests that the act of the museum being built, gave rise to the active commemoration of the Jewish History, invigorating a new light into the demonstration of its History.

Daniel Libeskind want to express feelings of absence, emptiness, and invisibility as the expressions of disappearance of Jewish culture. He use architectural element as a medium to provide visitors an experience of effects of Holocaust on both the Jewish culture and the city of Berlin. There is no formal entrance to this extension separate building. Visitors have to enter from the original Baroque museum in an underground corridor in order to enter the Jewish Museum. There are three routes and only one of them is leading to the continuous path which is the gallery. Libeskind make use of the dark and narrow corridor to create the sense of losing direction to visitors.

We might misinterpret that the spaces in this building might be wide and has bright interior design as this is a museum. However, the interior spaces are totally different from the building exterior form. Libeskind’s design leads people through gallery, empty spaces, and dead ends. The interior is composed of reinforced concrete which create the sense of cold and old. Visitors may get into dead ends where only a silver of light can be seen. This is to allow them to experience what the Jewish people during WW2 felt where feel like never escape.

66' tall void & Garden of Exile

One of the most emotional spaces in the building is a 66’ tall void that run through the entire building. This space is surrounding with cold concrete wall where there is a small amount of light from slit at top. There ground is covered by coarse iron faces as a symbol of those lost during the Holocaust. Visitors once again feel lost and confused when step into the Garden of Exile where 49 tall concrete pillars that built in slanted way.

Techniques of Libeskind use to create the fear and terror experience including the use of making visitors come to a dead end, walking between a narrow and dark corridor, creating the feeling lost in between tall concrete blocks, and walking on the course iron faces. This is how Daniel Libeskind translate human experience into an architectural composition. Juxtapose architectural element against spaces is an essential rule in order to design a space with emotion and let visitors receive the message that we wish to spread out after they experienced it.