Studio Libeskind, led by Jewish architect Daniel Libeskind, has released renderings of a 2.5-story building for a Jewish Museum in Lisbon. The project, called Tikvah, consists of a 41,645-square-foot structure created in collaboration with local architect Miguel Saraiva, to be built in Lisbon’s Belém area along the Tagus River.

Libeskind has designed a number of similar museums, including the Jewish Museum in Berlin, San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum, and Copenhagen’s Danish Jewish Museum, as well as Holocaust memorials in the Netherlands and Canada. Many, like the Lisbon design, feature angled walls.

The establishment of a Jewish museum in Lisbon is to promote Portuguese Jewish life and its contributions to the history of Lisbon and beyond, said Architectural Record magazine, which published the renderings in its April 2021 issue. Lisbon’s Jewish community originated in the early 1800s, 300 years after the Edict of Expulsion and almost a century after the Inquisition, with Sephardic Jews mainly from Gibraltar and Morocco settling there.

 

Libeskind: closer to home

Closer to home, Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life congregation has chosen Daniel Libeskind to design a new building for the site where 11 Jews were gunned down on Oct. 27, 2018, in the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history.

Tree of Life expects to retain the 1952 concrete building with modern stained-glass windows, where the main sanctuary is located. The rest of the building likely will be torn down and a new space built to house the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, a small space dedicated to the study of hatred, and a place of remembrance for the 11 Jews killed when a white nationalist spewing anti-Jewish anti-immigrant sentiments entered the building and began firing.