Contemporary Jewish Museum

A leap of faith paid off when the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco opened in June. A fledgling institution with 400 square meters of borrowed exhibition space had taken responsibility for a historic city landmark and, in 1998, given Daniel Libeskind a free hand to transform it. At that time the architect had barely completed one building - Felix Nussbaum Haus in Osnabrück, Germany - and this was his first American commission. The client’s gamble was doubly bold since it had just broken off an engagement with the iconoclastic Peter Eisenman, and San Francisco was still deeply suspicious of adventurous architecture. But the Contemporary Jewish Museum board was impressed by Libeskind’s spirit and vision and, though the program was later scaled back (from 11,000 to 6,300 square meters) and construction delayed, the essentials of his design were realized. A dynamic director, Connie Wolf, realized her dream to “create a new kind of landmark, where old and new are always in conversation, and where the boundaries between art and history, past and future, museum and civic space, begin to blur”.
A century ago, San Francisco made a rapid recovery from a devastating earthquake and fire, recreating itself in Beaux-Arts style, as an examplar of the City Beautiful. Willis Polk rebuilt the Jessie Street Power Substation as a refined brick block with classical moldings of white terracotta; a utilitarian structure dressed up as a civic ornament. When the surrounding area was leveled in the 1970s to create the Yerba Buena Conference and Arts Center, the substation - now decommissioned and designated as a landmark - was assigned a cultural role. Contemporary Jewish Museum valued the symbolism of breathing new life into a building that once generated power for the whole city, while creating a virtual bridge between the commercial axis of Market Street and museums by Fumihiko Maki and Mario Botta.
For Libeskind, the son of Polish Holocaust survivors, this...

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