The Museum, the Street, and the Virtual Landscape of Berlin.

Abstract

This paper investigates the tension between form and society inherent in the "architecture of memory." Taking up the debate between Jacques Derrida and Daniel Libeskind on the latter's Jewish Museum in Berlin, it identifies a fundamental incompatibility between a structure's memorializing function and the construction of memory. To the extent that this tension finds expression in form, it extends to the condition of possibility for architecture as such, necessitating a re-examination of the relation between the built and the unbuilt, design and politics.