In 1987, the Berlin government organized an anonymous competition for an expansion to the original Jewish Museum Berlin that opened in 1933.  The program wished to bring a Jewish presence back to Berlin after WWII.  In 1988, Daniel Libeskind was chosen as the winner among several other internationally renowned architects; his design was the only project that implemented a radical, formal design as a conceptually expressive tool to represent the Jewish lifestyle before, during, and after the Holocaust.Photography: Mal BoothThe original Jewish Museum Berlin was established in 1933, but it wasn’t open very long before it was closed during Nazi rule in 1938.  Unfortunately, the museum remained vacant until 1975 when a Jewish cultural group vowed to reopen the museum attempting to bring a Jewish presence back to Berlin.  It wouldn’t be until 2001 when Libeskind’s addition to the Jewish Museum Berlin finally opened (completed in 1999) that the museum would finally establish a Jewish presence embedded culturally and socially in Berlin.Photography: Cyrus PenarroyoFor Libeskind, the extension to the Jewish Museum was much more than a competition/commission; it was about establishing and securing an identity within Berlin, which was lost during WWII.  Conceptually, Libeskind wanted to express feelings of absence, emptiness, and invisibility – expressions of the disappearance of the Jewish Culture...