Who designed the Jewish Museum in Berlin?

Who designed the Jewish Museum in Berlin? Daniel Libeskind designed the museum’s new building.

Libeskind won an international competition in 1989 for an extension to Berlin’s existing city museum. His design became a sharply angled, zigzag structure whose form evokes fractured history rather than a neutral museum container. The building was completed in 1999 and opened to the public in 2001.

Its galleries are organized around voids, underground routes, and three conceptual axes associated with continuity, exile, and the Holocaust. The Holocaust Tower is an unheated, largely empty concrete space, while the Garden of Exile places visitors among pillars arranged on a sloping surface. These spaces make absence, disorientation, and rupture part of the visitor’s experience.

A common mix-up is treating the entire museum complex as a single new building. It also includes the historic Kollegienhaus, a Baroque building constructed in 1735. Libeskind designed the modern extension and later additions, including the glass courtyard roof and the academy, but not the original historic building.