DANIEL LIBESKIND

Daniel Libeskind, one of the greatest representatives of contemporary architecture and laureate of the Jan Kaplický Lifetime Achievement Award, welcomed us in Berlin home. With a smile on his face and filled with positive energy, he shared with us the harrowing stories that often precede the realization of his unusual buildings, and also talked about his married life.

You were born in Poland. What meaning do your Polish roots have for you?

You can never shed your origins. I am Polish and will never forget that I am. I grew up in Poland, my parents survived the Holocaust, and I experienced communism as a young child in the fifties. I spoke Polish and left the country when I was eleven. I think that it was a very formative influence – I got to know Stalinism, but also the beauty of industrial Łódź. The city had grown almost entirely out of nothing to become the second largest in Poland. Years later, I discovered that I’d found the right profession. You see, I grew up with my parents in a homeless shelter.

As a child, did you feel a certain tide of optimism following the war?

I wouldn’t say that it was a general optimism. It was more like hope, which I felt within the family. Communism was on the rise in Poland at the time, and as Jews we lived in a very complicated antisemitic environment after the war.

You played the accordion as a boy. How did that come to be and how did it influence you?

That’s a very interesting story. From a young age I’d wanted to play the piano, but my parents refused to buy me one. So one day they brought me a “piano in a suitcase.” I participated in various competitions and was very good at it. One time, at a competition when I was already in the United States, I found myself among kids who played more typical musical instruments. Nobody had an accordion. I was quite exotic for them.

And what of your musical career has remained in your architecture? Naturally a lot. The accordion is often associated with gypsies; it’s something of a traveling instrument. What’s interesting about it is that it’s the only instrument into which you essentially project the entire orchestra. It’s an instrument full of life. Playing it requires complete physical activity, which basically goes against the standard quality of classical music, but that’s mainly what I played on it –classical music. And it taught me a lot of things. Playing on something different, but in a classical spirit. My architecture is similar in this sense.

How did you and your parents get to the United States?

We had a visa to go to Israel, so fortunately it wasn’t that complicated to leave Poland in 1957. But we didn’t last long there. My father had just one sister who survived the Holocaust, and she lived in New York. So we went there.

It must have been quite a culture shock to come from communist Poland to a free and such advanced country. It was a great shock. You couldn’t even imagine it. We were some of the last immigrants to come to the United States by ship, and just the view of the Statue of Liberty in New York is something I will never forget. My mother woke me up around five in the morning, and we went on deck to watch that amazing panorama. All of a sudden, we were standing before the gates of a new world full of possibilities. It was fascinating.

But it was probably very difficult to take advantage of those possibilities. Yes, it was difficult. We lived in the Bronx, and my parents had to work hard in a factory. We started with absolutely nothing, like all immigrants.

When did you first take an interest in architecture?

1 A sketch for the Jewish Museum in Berlin illustrates the concept of sharp, broken shapes inspired by the Star of David. 2 The urban design for Ground Zero in New York is a complex reflection on this tragedy-stricken place in the heart of Manhattan. 3 According to Libeskind, the final form of Ground Zero is almost identical to his initial intent.

I’d always been interested in art. I was always painting and drawing something. I wanted to go to Cooper Union, and I could choose between studying art or architecture. I wanted to be an artist more, but then my mother said that if I became an artist I’d always be poor and wouldn’t be able to afford even a pencil. In the end, I listened to her advice and went to study architecture. I realized that it was the best decision. I could do art but still be in immediate contact with the everyday world.

That was in the late sixties, which for architecture was a period full of changes. Modernism was being subjected to critique, and postmodernism was beginning to emerge. How did you see it all? At the time, you were being taught by, among others, members of the famous New York Five, who helped to shape postmodernism.

They were wonderful teachers. Sure, they criticized late modernism, but they all rediscovered the real pioneers of 1920s modernity, mainly Le Corbusier. At the time, many immigrants from the Bauhaus taught at Cooper Union. Hannes Beckmann, for instance, taught color theory using Wassily Kandinsky’s original notes. I essentially had a European education combined with the latest tendencies of the architects of The New York Five, who sought change and rejected above all the boring corporate architecture that had been the main subject of late modernism. They wanted to raise us as rebels who would follow their own path. And with me I guess they succeeded.

At school, you also got to know the architect John Hejduk, who was from Czechoslovakia. What was he like?

Even then, he still considered himself Czechoslovak. He had a very strong relationship with central Europe. But we never talked about it much. It was a given, and we had no need to emphasize it.

What did your projects from that time look like?

It’s strange, but I went through school without designing any buildings.

I rebelled and wanted to do theoretical architecture. If you don’t have clients, money, or other opportunities, why design buildings? Drafting a hypothetical town hall or residential building is actually a joke. So I was tolerated when I did various abstract studies and speculative architecture on paper. It was an exploration of entirely new themes and of the essence of our discipline as such. I worked with what I myself call “pure architectural ideas.” These included drawings – which I later exhibited at the New York MoMA – in which I deconstructed the classical concept of, for instance, columns, façades, or windows. I produced something like hieroglyphic records – designs that could not be realized but that at the same time stimulated some kind of debate about architecture. And that is essentially how I worked for a long time in my life. I didn’t get my first real project until the late 1980s.

You also studied the history and theory of architecture. What specifically were you interested in?

Yes, that’s true. That was in the UK at the University of Essex, where I met another amazing Czech, Dalibor Veselý, who wrote a whole series of fantastic treatises on architecture. At the time, I discovered the entirely new world of the history of architecture, I began to study and read a lot – not just about architecture but also about history and philosophy. I learned that architecture was not just a formal system but that it had a much greater depth. Those were entirely fundamental questions regarding the essence of architecture, which I began to ask myself at the time.

The 1980s also saw the emergence of the new architectural phenomenon of deconstructivism. Your work is often included in this category. But how do you see it?

From the beginning, I believed that it wasn’t the right label. I find it to be an academically constructed term that didn’t accurately reflect the essence of this work. In view of the fact that architecture is primarily about construction, it is relatively misleading to use this term. At the time, I was teaching at London’s Architectural Association, which is where I first met Jan Kaplický.

The first competition you won was still before the fall of the Berlin Wall, for the Jewish Museum in Berlin...

It was my first competition ever, and right away I won it. Before that I’d never even considered applying to such a competition. People thought of me more as an academic and a paper architect, but for me drawing was a classical tool for reaching new possibilities and new solutions.

Talking about your life like this, it’s become clear that your career has to a significant degree been defined more by architectural theory and teaching than by practice. Had you not won the competition for the Jewish Museum in Berlin, do you think that you would have become an academic and not a practicing architect?

My wife says so, adding that we would have continued to have a beautiful life. I was in Milan at the time, where I had started my own school of architecture. We had a few students who were capable of paying me for lessons at my home. It was like in the Middle Ages, but it helped me earn a living. I wanted to create an entirely alternative way of teaching architecture. At the same time, the Getty Foundation had chosen me for a grant to do my own research. That meant you get a beachfront home in Los Angeles and enough money for travel and research. It was a dream. But in the meantime I learned that I had won the competition for the Jewish Museum, which changed everything and sent me in a completely different direction. That’s when I began real architecture. But there was a problem in that many politicians saw my design as just a means of gaining visibility. They weren’t interested in actually building it. Even our acquaintances discouraged us from doing it. Everybody said it was a crazy idea to try to realize something like that. And after a while I learned from television that the parliament had stopped the project because of the financial situation and problems associated with the country’s reunification. I had won the competition even before the fall of the wall, in March 1989. After that, the world changed. And with it, the preferences of the official authorities. There was debate whether Berlin even needed a Jewish Museum. It was talked about everywhere – television, radio, newspapers. We discussed it with many experts and politicians. And in the end, after several months, the government changed its position and gave the project the green light.

You probably felt a sense of satisfaction. Not entirely. The process of the building’s creation was very complicated, and this is just when it all started. Some highlyplaced people were constantly proclaiming that the building would be finished over their dead bodies.

Was it because of the design or because of the museum’s subject?

Because of the design, of course, which many people found completely unacceptable. The original idea had been to establish the Jewish Museum in an old Baroque building. So you can probably imagine what my design did to conservative society.

When you won the competition, you had to completely change your living and working rhythm.

Yes, down to the foundations. At the time, I asked my wife whether she would be my working partner as well and help me with the project. She answered that she had never in her life been in an architectural office, to which I responded that I hadn’t either. And so we started with the two of us. Then people began to ask me whether I needed some young and experienced architects who might help me with it. But I stood my ground. I wanted to work only with architects who had never built anything. Because I wanted to do something that had never been done before. I wasn’t looking for people who knew how to do windows. I wanted collaborators who would do them completely differently.

It must have been one long and never-ending experiment. You didn’t complete the building until 2001, when an unfortunate event happened that nevertheless later brought you another large project.

Yes, the museum was opened in 2001. It’s quite an interesting story. The opening ceremony was to be exactly on September 11, 2001, which is the day when the attack on the twin towers took place. My whole family was in Berlin, looking forward to the opening ceremony, but naturally it didn’t happen that day because of this terrible tragedy. A few years later, however, the project to replace the twin towers became my own. Is that not an irony of fate? But that’s not the end of it. When I was at the Venice Biennale in 2002, I received a phone call asking whether I would like to be on the jury to choose a new project for Ground Zero. Of course I accepted; it was a great honor. But because of other working obligations, in the end I couldn’t make it to a jury meeting in time and had to resign. I called them and told them that I truly felt bad that I couldn’t make it. And even though I was only two hours late, they had to remove me from the jury. As I was getting ready to hang up the phone, the voice on the other end added, “If you can’t be on the jury, maybe you could enter the competition.” And that’s what I did.

How difficult was it to design and build a skyscraper like Ground Zero?

Ground Zero is not just a skyscraper. It’s a master plan for an entire neighborhood measuring sixteen acres in size, which has an immense population density. Above all, we had to think about how to design such a place to be environmental and how it would function for people so that they would want to come and have a look. And I think we succeeded. Today, it’s the most visited place in the United States. It’s a comprehensive work of art, like a great poem or dance performance. The actual construction of the skyscraper is the final touch.

You have said that your projects always have great difficulty getting realized. Why is that?

Yes. One of them was the museum for the painter Felix Nussbaum, also in Germany. I won the competition, but already at the first press conference the mayor came to me, shook my hand, and told me that I would never build it there. It was like with the Jewish Museum. People were not ready for this type of architecture. In the end, the museum became my first realized building. There followed other competitions in which I was successful. By the way, most of them were anonymous. I think that if the jury had known that the selected designs were from an architect who had never realized a building, I probably wouldn’t have won.

What fundamental ideas were behind those revolutionary designs?

I wanted architecture to make the past present. The result was a completely new concept in which architecture is combined with light to create an unprecedented atmosphere and experience of space. When I won the competition for the Jewish Museum, Germany’s Bauwelt magazine published a long article with numerous expert opinions, and they all agreed that such architecture could never be built. I think that sometimes it is a good idea not to do such expert analyses, or at least not to read them. My only limitation today is that I have so much information and knowledge in my head that, with each new project, I would like to get rid of it so that I could start over completely fresh.

Your projects are very complicated and always begin with a relatively distinctive sketch. How much does their design change doing the process of drafting and realization?

I shall here use a phrase formulated by the Italian Renaissance architect Brunelleschi. If you as an architect put everything into a project, then it is a great project even if it is realized in a truncated and altered form. Although projects are changed quite a bit during the process, they should retain their original fundamental idea. I think that Ground Zero is a perfect example. It was an enormous project involving thousands of people. But even so, the result is essentially the same as my first sketch.

Is one motif in your architecture disharmony, which reflects the complicated nature of our entire world? Definitely. One cannot reflect the world without seeing it as it is. You cannot build a Jewish Museum while forgetting the horrors of the Holocaust.

Many of your projects relate to human suffering. How do you view this fact within the context of today’s era, which is again tending towards military conflicts, dictatorships, and limitations on civic freedoms?

It is very important to remember such things. It’s not just about the Jews, but about war in general. When I work, I think about how we can preserve these terrible memories and our memory in support of democracy. We are currently seeing the rise of Neo-Nazism, racism, autocracies, antisemitism, and other negative social phenomena all around the world. But I still believe that we should not underestimate the strength of architecture and public space in this relation. Architecture is something that you can’t simply ban or erase from a computer. Monuments remind us of these things by their real presence; they are a part of our everyday lives in cities. In this way, architecture is one of the most powerful forms of art. Similar buildings can do much more and have a greater impact on people. They can educate them more than all political speeches combined.

You also design objects. Is that something you have wanted to do since the beginning, or did it somehow happen on its own? You’ve also collaborated with the Czech brand Lasvit. What was that like?

It happened on its own. But it’s no easy thing to design a chair. Frank Lloyd Wright once said that creating a chair is more complicated than designing an entire house. And I think he was right. But I really enjoy it, especially because of the time. Large architectural projects take years to realize. A chair or a teapot can be designed and realized much faster. Lasvit was a wonderful project. I really enjoyed myself because I have long been a fan of Bohemian glass. We had some at home while still in Poland.

What do you think about the future of architecture? What will it be like? How do you view the emerging generation of architects? What advice would you give them?

Students have to be more radical. Today everybody is primarily interested in success, especially financial success, but they forget about true ideals and fundamental ideas. Young people in general are captives of the dictates of technology and want everything really quickly. But I am very optimistic on the general level. I think that the young generation will find its path.

Do you still have a large dream that you would like to fulfill? To build a certain building type that you haven’t built yet?

I always think about how I’d like to design an airport, because I travel a lot and we don’t have many good airports in the world. I would like to do an airport completely differently than is usual. For instance, some kind of wooden cabin that would be closer to our human scale. I also recently did several smaller family homes, which I hadn’t done much of before. In Connecticut, I designed a house for an artistically-inclined couple. Once they gave me and my wife Nina the keys so we could spend a few days there. And while we were there, my wife asked why I hadn’t designed such a house for us. One day, perhaps.

Libeskind’s expansion of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), known as the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, is located on one of downtown Toronto’s most important intersections. The largest museum in Canada, the ROM attracts more than a million visitors a year. Five intersecting volumes bring to mind the crystals from the museum’s mineralogy collection.

Studio Weil

For this artist’s studio and gallery in Port d’Andratx on Mallorca, Libeskind collaborated very closely with the client, painter and sculptor Barbara Weil. Together they created a geometrically dynamic building perforated by abstractly conceived openings that reflected not just the surrounding landscape but Weil’s art as well.

Felix Nussbaum Haus

Daniel Libeskind’s first completed project is located in the German town of Osnabrück and was built to house a collection of works by the painter Felix Nussbaum, who was born in the town but died in Auschwitz in 1944. Already in this early design, Libeskind applied his typical formal vocabulary of sharp, angled forms.

Military History Museum

THE 18.36.54 HOUSE

Daniel Libeskind has realized only a limited number of residential buildings during his career. One of them is this house in Connecticut, which has been designed as a single surface bent in space. Its name comes from its number of planes (18), points (36), and lines (54), and its spiraling ribbon creates and defines the living space.

The main motif of the Military History Museum in Dresden is the distinctive contrast between the historical armory and the expressively conceived metal, glass, and concrete shapes that radically transect the original building. With more than 10,000 m2 of exhibition space, the museum is one of the largest cultural institutions in Germany. Its iconic form has made it an important national monument that has revitalized the surrounding public space.

Denver Art Museum Jewish Museum

Libeskind’s addition to the Denver Art Museum, the Frederic C. Hamilton Building, was his first realized project in the United States. The building, set against the majestic backdrop of the Rocky Mountains, consists of a row of geometric volumes inspired by the mountains’ peaks, valleys, and ridges, and by the dynamic form of the nearby original museum building by Italian designer Gio Ponti.

Daniel Libeskind’s best known work is the Jewish Museum in Berlin, completed in 2001 after more than a decade of political negotiations and technological challenges. With this building, Libeskind created a new archetype of a democratic museum that speaks to visitors not just through its exhibitions but also through its evocative architecture symbolizing the suffering of the Jewish people.

1 Architect Karel Hubáček, designer Otakar Binar, and structural engineer Zdeněk Patrman joined forces in the 1960s to design and realize what is perhaps the best example of Czechoslovak postwar architecture. The Ještěd television and lookout tower with a hotel/ restaurant is a first-rate example of a total work of art in which architecture is harmoniously wed with design, visual art, and the landscape. 2 The iconic main gate at the Pilsen brewery recalls the fame and success of the city’s lager, which is known around the world as Pilsner Urquell. The internationally beloved beverage has been brewed in Pilsen since 1842. 3 Since its completion in 1996, the Dancing House on Prague’s Rašín Embankment has been a symbol for the great changes that took place in Czech politics and culture in the early 1990s. The building, which was financed by the Dutch insurance company Nationale-Nederlanden, was made possible not just by its author Frank Gehry but also by architect Vlado Milunić and President Václav Havel. 4 The Hotel Thermal in the spa town of Karlovy Vary is considered an exceptional example of 1960s Czechoslovak architecture. Its architects, the husband-and-wife team of Vladimír Machonin and Věra Machoninová, designed it as a center for the International Film Festival that would communicate with the city. 5 The world-renowned villa designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for Grete and Fritz Tugendhat is a prime achievement of modernist architecture.