Conceptual diagrams in creative architectural practice: the case of Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum

摘要

Our study of the design process of Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin shows how a generic representation of a design situation in the form of a diagram facilitated conceptual exploration, which resulted in an alignment of conceptual and spatial configurations. Libeskind used the star diagram in different contexts to draw together a wide range of ideas and to create a network of meaningful associations among otherwise unrelated ideas pertaining to Jewish and German history. Each use of the diagram or parts of its perceptual features retained enough of its original formal configuration as well as semantic content to create a family of ideas, which, in turn, facilitated comparisons between explorations. We have argued that Libeskind's final manipulation, unfolding the star into a series of crisscrossing lines, led him to align his enriched conceptualisation of Jewish-German history with the zigzag spatial configuration of the building and to add the highly evocative voids.