In the mean time I found this about the Jewish Museum: He uses metric here. The are of the museum is 10 000 m^2, a nice hard value (see below).
Han Between the Lines The Jewish Museum By Daniel Libeskind The discussion concerning a Jewish Museum in Berlin unfolded over almost a quarter of a century. Many eminent Holocaust survivors and experts from different fields discussed this issue, focusing on implications of building a Jewish Museum in Berlin. The conclusions reached were formulated in a brief for the competition held in 1988-1989. When I was invited by the Berlin Senate in 1988 to participate in this competition, I felt that the program was not one I had to research and that the building was not one I had to invent; rather it was one to which I was connected from the beginning, having lost most of my family in the Holocaust, and having been born only a *few hundred kilometers* east of Berlin, in Lodz, Poland. Three basic ideas formed the foundation for the Jewish Museum design: first, the impossibility of understanding the history of Berlin without understanding the enormous intellectual, economic and cultural contribution made by its Jewish citizens; second the necessity to integrate the meaning of the Holocaust, both physically and spiritually, into the consciousness and memory of the city of Berlin; third, that only through acknowledging and incorporating this erasure and void of Berlin's Jewish life can the history of Berlin and Europe have a human future. The official name of the project is "Jewish Museum", but I have chosen to call it "Between the lines." I call it that because it is a project about two lines of thinking and organization, and about relationship. One is a straight line, but broken into many fragments; the other is a tortuous line but continuing indefinitely. The site is the new-old center of Berlin on Lindenstrasse, next to the distinguished Kollegienhaus, the former Baroqe Prussian courthouse. As a counterpart to this actual, visible site, I felt that there was an invisible matrix of connections - a set of relations between German and Jewish figures. Even though the competition was held before the wall came down, I felt that the one binding feature crossing the East-West divide was the relationship of Germans to Jews. Certain people, ordinary workers, writers, composers, artists, scientists, and poets formed the link between Jewish traditions and German culture. I found this connection, and from their Berlin addresses I plotted an irrational matrix that would yield a reference to the emblematics of a compressed and distorted star: the yellow star so frequently worn on this very site. This is the first aspect of the project. I was always interested in the music of Sch�nberg, and in particular that of his period in Berlin. His greatest work, the opera "Moses and Aron," remained unfinished: for an imported structural reason, the logic of the libretto could not be completed by the musical score. At the end of the opera, Moses does not sing. Rather, he simply declares "o word, thou word," addressing the absence; one can understand the opera as a "text," since when there is no more singing, the missing word uttered by Moses, the call for the Work, the call for the Deed, is understood clearly. I sought to complete Sch�nberg's opera achitecturally, and that is the second aspect of this project. The project's third aspect is my interest in the names of those persons who were deported from Berlin during the fatal years of the Holocaust. I requested and received from Bonn two very large volumes, together called the "Gedenkbuch." They are extremely impressive because all they contain are names: just lists and lists of names, dates of birth, dates of deportion, and presumed places where those named were murdered. I looked for the names of Berliners, and where they had died - in Riga, in the Lodz ghetto, in the concentration camps. The fourth aspect of the project is formed by Walter Benjamin's "One Way Street." This aspect is incorporated into the continuous sequence of 60 sections along the zig-zag, each of which represents one of the "Stations of the Star" described in Walter Benjamin's text. To summarise this four-fold structure: Its first aspect is the invisible, and irrationally connected star that shines with an absent light stemming from specific locations. Its second is the cut-off of act 2 of "Moses and Aron" that culminates in the non-musical fulfilment of the word. Its third is the ever-present dimension of the deported and missing Berliners. Its fourth is Walter Benjamin's urban apocalypse along the "One Way Street." To turn to specifics: the building measures *more than 10,000 square meters*. The entrance is through the Baroque Old Building, and then by stair into a dramatic entry-Void that descends beneath the existing building foundations, criss-crosses underground, and materializes as an independent building on the outside. The existing building is tied to the extention underground, preserving the contradictory autonomy of both the old building and the new building on the surface, while binding the two together in depth of time and space. There are three underground "roads" that programmatically have three seperate stories. The first and longest road leads to the main stairs, to the continuation of Berlin's history, to the exhibition spaces in the Jewish Museum. The second road leads outdoors to the E.T.A. Hoffmann Garden and represents the exile and emigration of Jews from Germany. The third road leads to a dead end - the Holocaust Void. Cutting through the form of the Jewish Museum is a Void, a straight line whose impenetrability forms the central focus around which the exhibitions are organized. In order to cross from one museum-space to the other, the visitors traverse sixty bridges opening into the Void-space: the embodiment of absence. The work is conceived as a museum for all Berliners, and for all citizens of the world, not only those presently living, but those of the future as well, who may find their heritage and hope in this particular place. With its special emphasis on the Jewish dimension of Berlin's history, this building gives voice to a common fate, to the contradictions of the ordered and disordered, the chosen and not chosen, the vocal and the silent. I believe that my project links architecture to questions now relevant for all humanity. To this end, I have sought to create a new architecture for a time marked by an understanding of history, a new understanding of museums, and a new sense of the relationship between program and architectural space. Therefore this museum is not only a response to a particular program, but an emblem of hope. Berlin, November 1998 ----- Original Message ----- From: kilopascal To: U.S. Metric Association Sent: Saturday, 2003-03-01 18:50 Subject: [USMA:24991] Libeskind 2003-03-01 Check out USMA24986. If you click on the plans, you will see they are in feet and inches. These plans are for a renovation of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto. <snip>
