Daniel Libeskind

Architect

• Born: May 12, 1946
• Place of Birth: Łódź, Poland

POLISH-BORN ARCHITECT

In a series of visionary designs for urban public spaces in Europe and the United States, architectural theorist Libeskind emerged as one of the most innovative and controversial architects of the new century. His idiosyncratic vision manipulates spaces and voids, which is a challenge to traditional perceptions of public buildings.

AREA OF ACHIEVEMENT: Architecture and design

Early Life

The early life of Daniel Libeskind was shaped by the Holocaust. His parents, native Poles, met and married in exile; both had been arrested in Russia fleeing Adolf Hitler’s occupation of Poland. After the war, they returned to Libeskind’s father’s hometown of Łódź—but little remained of his family, most of whom had been deported to concentration camps where they had died. Determined to give Libeskind and his older sister the gift of music, the parents, despite the hardships of life in postwar Poland, gave their son an accordion (they feared securing a piano might provoke anti-Semitic resentment). The boy proved remarkably adept at the keyboard work. When he was eleven, his parents immigrated to Tel Aviv, Israel, where Libeskind began piano lessons. Two years later, in 1959, he won a scholarship that enabled him to study in New York, and the family moved to the Bronx. The family became citizens in 1965.

Even as Libeskind wavered in his commitment to piano (for him, it lacked intellectual satisfaction), while enrolled at the Bronx High School of Science, he discovered a love of the abstract conceptual world of mathematics. Before he had graduated from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Arts, he had decided to study architecture, an endeavor he saw as at once musical and mathematical, creative and intellectual. He graduated in 1970, and then, in 1972, he completed a master’s degree in architectural theory from Essex University in Colchester, England. Unable to thrive in the competitive environment of architectural firms, Libeskind returned to the university where, over the next twenty years, he held numerous academic appointments (notably a seven-year stint in the 1980s as the director of Cranbrook Academy of Art, outside Detroit, and endowed chairs at the University of Toronto and at the University of Pennsylvania). In passionate discourse in classrooms and in provocative publications, Libeskind established a reputation as one of the foremost theorists on the relationship between abstract concepts and their execution into public spaces.

Life’s Work

In 1988, on the strength of that reputation, Libeskind, although he had never designed a building, was invited to submit a design for a museum commemorating the history of the Jewish presence in Berlin, Germany. His proposal, a complex design based on a reconception of the Star of David, won the competition. Although disputes over the purpose of the building would delay its opening for more than a decade, the Jewish Museum garnered Libeskind international praise for the startling design that captured both the dignity of the Jewish people and the horrors of the Holocaust. Most notable were rooms alongside the museum’s main exhibition rooms. Called the Voids, the empty, unheated rooms illustrated the concept of absence and gave visitors a chance to reflect on the millions murdered during the Nazi regime. In 2001, on the strength of the Berlin design, Libeskind became the first architect to win the Hiroshima Art Prize, given annually to an artist whose vision best embodies the concepts of peace and of tolerance. Suddenly thrust into the spotlight, Libeskind received over the next several years commissions to design other public buildings, including the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, England (2002), the Danish Jewish Museum in Copenhagen (2004), the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco (2008), and, perhaps most significant, the Felix Nussbaum Haus in Osnabrück, Germany (1998), a museum that exhibited the paintings of a German Jewish artist whose stark canvases were created while he was in hiding from the Nazis in Belgium before his arrest and subsequent murder in Auschwitz.

The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York City’s World Trade Center deeply affected Libeskind. He cherished the memory of arriving in New York City from Israel and seeing the Manhattan skyline. As an architectural student at Cooper Union, he had watched, mesmerized, as the twin towers were completed. Initially asked to help judge submissions for designs for a public memorial at the sixteen acres known as Ground Zero, Libeskind submitted his own ambitious concept for a site. The design was typical of Libeskind—ambitious, intellectual, uncompromising—a juxtaposition of a massive skyscraper, meditation gardens, and a museum, a theater, and office spaces. In February 2003, amid much controversy (the blue-ribbon panel chose a different design but New York’s governor, George Pataki, on behalf of the victims, overturned the recommendation), Libeskind’s design was announced as the winner. He would serve as master site coordinator.

That began years of acrimonious negotiations among rival architects, politicians, real estate developers, media, victim advocacy groups from 9/11, city-resident advocates, transit authorities, civil engineers, bankers, and financiers, each with a vision for what had become the most hallowed site in postwar American history. During the process, Libeskind, charismatic and articulate, became a celebrity even as his grand design was significantly modified. Since then, Studio Daniel Libeskind has become a much-sought-after firm, completing award-winning commissioned works, including the Military History Museum in Dresden, Germany; residential developments in Singapore, Copenhagen, and Warsaw; and performing arts centers in Dublin, Toronto, and Boston.

Libeskind has also designed sculptures. His 1997 Garden of Love and Fire in the Netherlands was restored in 2017. The Life Electric sculpture in Italy is dedicated to Alessandro Volta.

Significance

Although in comparison to other architects and urban designers of his generation, Libeskind has completed relatively few commissions, the striking sweep of his vision and the intellectual challenge of his designs position his work among the most exciting expressions of deconstructionism (a term the maverick Libeskind dismisses as too limiting). It means that he takes traditional shapes and reconfigures them into jarring formations that are then juxtaposed against more conservative forms. Dismissed by critics as a quixotic theoretician whose designs are overprogrammed and impractical, Libeskind conceptualizes structures—with tilted hallways, interlocking box shapes, zigzagging rooms, elaborate staircases, and sliced towers—that offer a visceral impact and that are engaging, even to those without the architectural background to appreciate his theoretical daring. His edifices, always imposing, even monumental, possess an ethical and moral gravitas, a vision that argues that public buildings bear the responsibility of the abstract ideas that inform them.

Bibliography

Fixsen, Anna. "Newsmaker: Daniel Libeskind." Architectural Record. BNP Media, 19 Feb. 2016. Web. 31 Mar. 2016.

Frearson, Amy. "National September 11 Memorial Museum Completed in New York." Dezeen. Dezeen Limited, 14 May 2014. Web. 31 Mar. 2016.

"Garden of Love and Fire." Studio Libeskind, libeskind.com/work/garden-of-love-and-fire/. Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.

Goldberger, Paul. Counterpoint: Daniel Libeskind. New York: Springer/Birkhäuser Basil, 2008. Print.

Libeskind, Daniel. Breaking Ground: An Immigrant’s Journey from Poland to Ground Zero. New York: Penguin/Riverhead Trade, 2005. Print.

Libeskind, Daniel, Jeffrey Kipnis, and Anthony Vidler. The Space of Encounter. New York: Universe, 2001. Print.

Mairs, Jessica. "Architecture Should Not Be Conforming Says Daniel Libeskind." Dezeen. Dezeen Limited, 19 Nov. 2015. Web. 31 Mar. 2016.

Rodiek, Thorsten. Daniel Libeskind. Berlin: Wasmuth, 2001. Print.

Wolf, Connie, et al. Daniel Libeskind and the Contemporary Jewish Museum: New Jewish Architecture from Berlin to San Francisco. New York: Rizzoli, 2008. Print.