San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum

Noted architect Daniel Libeskind is still celebrated around the world for his angular take on both form and function.

Libeskind continues to receive commissions and builds buildings and creates space across the Americas, as well as in Europe and Asia.

I have had the opportunity to be in spaces he has designed in Berlin, Toronto, Denver, and now San Francisco.

And to a project, I have to say, the Boards and individuals who hire him must really like the language he speaks, for his work doesn’t match any aspiration for a successful space.

Just the other day I spent some time at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. A renovated space just off Market Street in the now trendy and popular Yerba Buena Gardens, this behometh of a building offers a jarring contrast upon approach, a witty appeal in the canyon of the main level, and then a series of perplexing statements in the main gallery entryway and public area.

The existing building obtained by the CJM was a 19th century power station for the city of San Francisco. Destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, it was rebuild on site in classical form under the design of noted architect Willis Polk. Unused and virtually abandoned for years, it was reclaimed for the CJM project, and Libeskind was hired in 1998 to create the new space.

What’s interesting here, among other things, is that this commission was Libeskind’s first in North America, before his additions to the Royal Art Museum in Toronto, the Denver Art Museum, and even his role in the 9/11 Towers at the World Trade Center.

Yet it was completed only in 2008, after each of the other museum additions, as well as the opening of his Jewish Museum Berlin, the signature piece in his portfolio.

In visiting several of Libeskind’s spaces, you immediately see the severity of his lines, the deliberateness of his angles, and the harshness of corners that seem to materialize out of nowhere. In plan, these exteriors must be tantalizing, for in execution, they are cold and off-putting, literally creating distance between people and the building itself.

The CJM space, while it doesn’t have as many dangerous corners and post-construction safety notices as in Libeskind’s other domestic works, still manages to confound with perhaps the most counter-intuitive central atrium of any museum intended to attract, hold, and move people.

The CJM has two levels. The main level has a large gift shop in one of Libeskind’s cubes, as well as some smaller gallery space buried in corners behind the primary stairwell, off and away from the ticket region. There’s also a very large but underutilized entryway, which recognizes the industrial history of this space, but when facing east seems little more than a post-modernist interpretation of the original building.

Ascending the main stairs, modern as well, stark in white, with handrails along one side which serve the dual purpose of keeping both children and adults away from the pointy corner walls, ascending the main stairs delivers you to a landing which provides at least three choices.

Choice #1, immediately to the right, offers an exceedingly large and bright gallery space, directly above the gift shop, and in the extension of Libeskind’s slashing cube. This space is deceptively large, incorporates creative use of perception and distance to present identical windows as different in size, and serves as a way station on a journey through the museum.

Choice #2 is further ahead on the landing, and offers a perch above the main floor, a view down and across the old industrial space, above fellow museumgoers who are still entering the building. Yet this space is contained by the corner in which it was placed, and requires entering and exiting in the same manner. It is also at this space that the two aspects of this building come together, the old and the new. At at this space is the visual confluence of the Jewish symbolism that Libeskind follows as the design theme, the linkage of the Hebrew words 'chai' and 'yud' to celebrate life, and this building. Or so he says.

Choice #3 presents a large freight elevator, stark in appearance, unusual in it’s placement, right past a turn towards the primary gallery space, and central to the grand area that should be where you are when you are standing at this point. Among the many design issues with the building, the placement of this important yet best hidden item is the most perplexing. There’s no getting around this. You have to step right around this service elevator to enter the primary gallery space. Why there’s no false wall to mask the elevator, let alone an elevator in another space, since it was added for this project, is quite perplexing.

Beyond these three choices, at least with regard to the problems with this building, is that this landing, this confluence, this core of the building, is actually a choke point, forcing people to step aside, step back, or in some way actively work to avoid moving into one another as they attempt to proceed. So coming up stairs, you may be forced to wait for other ahead to clear. Moving from any of the three choice points mentioned above, you might similarly have to dance around others, or just wait for them to move. And making matters even worse, there’s a series of sharp turns to enter the primary gallery space, boards to read just behind one of the sharp turns, and here’s the most confounding point of this all, jutting walls closing off this space, so that in addition to the turns, the confluence, and the volume, are angular white walls coming down at you, restricting your entry, as some sort of post-industrial sentry designed to thwart entry, as opposed to invite thought and wonder. It’s a bit much, and the breathlessness of the last sentence really is intended to convey as much. Really.

This space, which all must traverse in order to enter the main gallery, is a travesty, and a sorry excuse for a grand promenade for what should be a remarkable building.

How someone can take an open space virtually the size of a football field, and manage to contain a central area for movement down to the size of an airport restroom, defies logic.

That, after all, is the brilliance of Daniel Libeskind. Reducer of architecture, confounder of design.