:
Figure. The building of the new Jewish Museum in Berlin, designed in 1989 by Polish-born architect Daniel Libeskind, attracted over 150 000 visitors even before the museum's exhibits were ready for public display. Clad in a titanium-zinc alloy and connected by subterranean axes, its complex, disorienting structure is partly based on a pattern made by connecting the dots on a map of Jewish settlement in Berlin. Although the museum represents two millennia of Jewish history, its empty spaces, maze-like passages and bare concrete Holocaust tower speak most eloquently of 20th-century events. “Few buildings have evoked the unspeakable with as much clarity,” wrote the Los Angeles Times when the building was completed in 1999. Such are the complications of history that the museum's long-awaited official opening in September 2001 was delayed for a few days out of respect for the victims of the terrorist attacks on the United States. — CMAJ Photo by: Jewish Museum Berlin