Wonders & blunders with Philip Watts

My wonder is Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish museum in Berlin, which opened in 2001. It’s the one piece of architecture that has been built in the past 20 to 30 years that moves you when you are in it. It really tweaks the emotions. For example, there’s a room inside it that is architecturally aggressive and makes you feel what it was like to be in a gas chamber.

Then in the garden there are a lot of concrete pillars that you can’t see out from behind and make you feel small – like a Jew in Nazi Germany surrounded by the kind of architecture that they deployed.

My blunder is the Parkhill Estate in Sheffield, designed by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith and inspired by Le Corbusier’s Unité d'Habitation. I’d like to say that I liked it because it was oppressive and brutalist, but in fact it is just rubbish. It’s a giant, vulgar prison and is generally an appalling place for people to live in.

I daresay it might have a great view from the top, but it’s really an example of ruthlessly stupid town planning.

Wonder

Libeskind’s radical, zigzag design for the Jewish Museum in Berlin earned the nickname “Blitz” and some liken its shape to a warped Star of David. In his research for the project, Libeskind read the Gedenkbuch, or Memorial Book, which lists all the Jews murdered in the Holocaust, and submitted his proposal in the same form.

Blunder

Urban Splash is involved in a multimillion-pound refurbishment of Sheffield’s Park Hill Estate. Completed in 1961, it was opened by Roy Hattersley, then chair of housing at the city council. Despite being the largest listed building in Europe, it nonetheless came 12th on Channel 4’s Demolition programme.