Jewish Museum

So our last full day in BErlin today and it was a busy one.

I'd had a great evening last night at the closing concert for Transmediale and CTM. I'd missed out on a ticket, but Marcus the programme director for Transmediale, who I had first met last year very kindly arranged a guest ticket for me. Absolutely wonderful hospitality. The concert itself was a performance of Lumiere by Robert Henke and both the music and the laser show were amazing. It was a fitting end to a great week of festival events.

So today we took the students to the Bauhaus Archiv. As the permanent exhibition space is not large the trip is often made by what is on in the second room and this year we were incredibly lucky in that it was an exhibition of Herman Bayer's commercial graphics from 1928 - 1938. Pretty much the best thing they could have had on for our design students. It's astonishing to think that some of the work was nearly ninety years old and still looked so contemporary.

After that we had a break for lunch then headed to the Jewish museum for the afternoon. An extraordinary building designed by Daniel Libeskind. While the first part is filled with harrowing personal stories of the treatment of Jewish families in the build up to and during the second world war the rest of the building is a celebration of Jewish culture and heritage in Europe. It's full of astonishing spaces including the voids designed by Libeskind to represent the void of Jewish culture throughout Europe after the second world war. This room is one of them, It is filled with the artwork Shalekhet (fallen leaves) by Menashe Kadishman, there are over ten thousand individual steel faces on the floor and they are dedicated to the innocent victims of war and violence. A powerful space in an equally powerful museum.