Berlin Enchantment

WORLDWIDE STAR-CHITECTURE: Earlier this year, when I was passing through town during the Toronto Film Festival, hordes were gathered outside the festival venues, high on the worldly aura of the cinematic and eager to catch a glimpse of Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling and the like. My celebrity sighting mission was much more specific and doable: I had to see, for myself, in real time/real space, the architectural phenomenon of the Ontario Art Museum, renovated by Toronto-raised Frank Gehry in 2008, and turned into a wonderfully wild—though subtle by some of his standards—cockeyed post-post-Modernist rethink, or refresher, of a stately old structure.

Destination architecture allure can be habit-forming, and worth the effort, a lesson I relearned last month when in Berlin for my more-or-less annual trek to the fine off-season jazz festival there. On a day off, there was no resisting the temptation to hop on a train for a couple of hours to visit the newly-completely renovation of the old Dresden Museum of Military History, a hulking, formerly formal 19th century structure into which a massive metal-sheathed wedge has been thrust by big-thinking architect Daniel Libeskind. It appears as if an alien spaceship—call it the spaceship of pacifism—has landed smack dab in the middle of the antique edifice.

It’s a startling and senses-awakening sight to behold, especially seen “offline,” up close and personal and concrete. The drama continues when you head up the elevator and walk out into the “wedge,” a space called the Dresden “Blick” (“view”). The irony is not lost on us that the material and design itself is a paradox, a shear, diaphanous sheath of metal that allows transparency and inspiring views of the outside, but also a hard metal cage signifying oppression and aggression on whatever scale you’d like to consider.