Architecture is a communicative art. All too often, however, architecture is seen as mute. Buildings are understood as disposable consumer items whose sole fate is to disappear with their use. In our day, the only distinction people make between architecture and building is that buildings are utilitarian and architecture is a monument belonging in a cemetery. I am determined to get away from this oversimplified view of architecture's tradition; to overcome the dichotomy of extremes. The alternative between the so-called neutral boxes and the decadence of expensive facades is untenable. When I began to work on the competition for the Imperial War Museum North, I was deeply challenged by the notion of creating a place that was at once intimate and civic. A place in which the story of the significance, sacrifice, tragedy and destiny of conflict can come alive.
What could inform a museum of conflict and of war? Clearly, this is not a museum of peace, but a museum of the permanent struggle to attain it. As I thought about the content of the Imperial War Museum, my mind was occupied by a number of images: Churchill speaking of conflict as one of the dimensions of world stability; Goya's painting of Saturn eating his own children; allied forces defeating tyranny; my own memory of breaking the glass on Stalin's portrait when I was in the third grade during the Polish uprising of 1956; and the unimaginable hole where the World Trade Center used to stand.
Every person living today has been consciously or unconsciously affected by conflict. It is sobering to recall the incomprehensible amount of blood pouring through the victorious pages of the Iliad, along with Homer's premonition that, ultimately, fatality dooms winners. This dimension of war - ever present in conflict yet never wholly visible in space - should be made manifest in the experience of the museum.
My aim was to create a building that was not only intelligently programmed for the events which were to take place in it, but one that moved the soul of the visitor towards a sometimes unexpected realisation. Conflict is not simply a story with a happy or unhappy ending, but an ongoing momentum that structures one's understanding of the future in relation to the past.
In order to touch the emotions of the visitor, I designed a building that is emblematic of the earth shattered by conflict. As the visitor moves through this splintered globe with its fragmented curvatures, there is a feeling of vulnerability. Normally, there is a feeling of detachment from the exhibitions, but here there is a fusion of the instability of space with the permanent time of reflection. This was my aim: to create a continuity of experience across the discontinuity of interpretation. The space of the building produces an oscillation between the artifice of the exhibition and the materiality that it contains. Each visitor is sensitised by the topos, just as footsteps and the eye become guides treading through a history that dawns only in retrospect. The building physically articulates the ambiguous tensions of the attempt to construct and reconstruct an illusive world order.
The startling and stark subject matter of the museum is addressed not only by the exhibitions, but by an emotive and visceral relationship to the building. The interplay between known proportion and the unknown disproportion, between an anticipated roof and an unanticipated wall, eliminates the space in which Medusa's face shows itself. The danger of being turned into stone by simply becoming a voyeur gives way to the unique spatiality of the exhibition. The architectural topography of the building allows gravity to act on the body and on the consciousness of the visitor in order to vitalise one's awareness. The experience of architecture together with exhibition is choreographed through a series of precise and discrete movements, each of which is connected to the unfolding adventure.
It is important to realise that a museum that is to depict the ongoing implication of past conflicts into present-day fears must still be a place that has dignity, elegance and magnetism - qualities offering the visitor unique sensations, ones not to be confused with negativity or simulation. A museum whose shards penetrate the psyche also creates a potential for wholeness, which every conflict promises by withholding it.
The building's completion depends upon the visitors' participation and interest, be it in having a cup of coffee, buying a book, perusing the landscape, viewing the panorama of the city or being engaged in the timeline of history. These programmatic activities are given three-dimensional depth, not in neutral containers, but in functional and emblematic spaces, each of which has a density, materiality, temperature, acoustic quality, atmosphere and gravity that are not fully accessible to the abstraction of words but, rather, to concretely embodied experience. Whatever that experience might be for each individual, the museum has the simplicity in construction and the complexity in architecture that parallels the simplicity of news images and the complexity of modern warfare.
An architecture that is strong yet open, precise yet subtle, serious yet fun, is a contribution to public discourse. I hope that this building will enable the Imperial War Museum North to accomplish its mission of inspiring, involving and educating its audiences.
Daniel Libeskind's first permanent building in the UK, the Imperial War Museum North, Manchester (0161 836 4000), opens on 5 July 2002. He will give this year's BBC Proms lecture on 21 July, 5pm, at the Lecture Theatre, Victoria & Albert Museum, London SW1 (020 7589 8212)
