Born:
1946, Łódź, Poland
Education: Cooper Union, New York (1970); School of
Comparative Studies at the University of Essex, England (1972)
Practice: Established his studio in Berlin (1989);
moved the practice to New York after winning the World Trade Center site
competition (2003); also opened studio in Milan with focus on product and
industrial design (2012)
Projects: Złota 44, Apartment Tower, Warsaw,
Poland (2013); Military History Museum,
Dresden, Germany (2011); Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada, (2007); Denver
Art Museum, Denver, Colorado (2006); Memory
Foundations World Trade Center Master Plan (project, 2002); Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre,
City University of Hong Kong (2001); Imperial War Museum North,
Manchester, England (2001); Jewish Museum Berlin
(1999); Felix Nussbaum Museum, Osnabrueck, Germany (1998)
Books: Counterpoint: Daniel
Libeskind (Monacelli, 2008), Breaking Ground (Riverhead, 2004), Daniel Libeskind: The Space of Encounter (Universe, 2001), Jewish Museum Berlin (1999), Daniel Libeskind: Radix-Matrix (1997), Daniel Libeskind: Countersign (Rizzoli, 1992), Daniel Libeskind: Between Zero and Infinity (Rizzoli, 1981)
Teaching: Harvard University, Yale University,
University of Pennsylvania; since 2007, a visiting professor at the Leuphana
University Lüneburg in Lüneburg, Germany
Awards: Gold
medal for Architecture at the National Arts Club (2007), Hiroshima Art Prize
(2001), Goethe Medal (2000)
It has been over a decade since the
Twin Towers were destroyed and almost as long since you first presented your
winning World Trade Center master plan. There was an unprecedented attention then
– in late 2002 – by the mass media to all of the finalists. It was a very hopeful moment for architecture. Your winning
project, although much altered by numerous politicians, planners, and
architects, is finally getting built. How do you think the world of
architecture has changed in the last decade?
I think architecture changed
fundamentally. Now, not only in New York City and America, but just about
everywhere, you no longer can build even small projects without public
participation. People now want to know what is being built. Why is it this way?
What is the meaning of this and that? Who is building it? Is it sustainable?
The question of how to fill the void in the middle of New York is very
important to people. And their interest is not just technical but cultural. It
is no longer satisfactory to rely on decisions made in closed corporate
boardrooms. The public now wants to participate in the process of building our
environment.
How would you describe your own experience
in the last decade – going from mostly paper
architect to a busy practitioner with dozens of projects all over the world?
Well, I opened my office in 1989
when I won the Jewish Museum competition in Berlin, and then worked on the Felix Nussbaum Museum, which was my
first building, finished in 1998. The Imperial War Museum in Manchester was
finished in 2001. So I was not really a paper architect. But certainly winning
the World Trade Center competition in early 2003
– such a complex
urban project – totally transformed my practice and
lead to more large-scale projects globally. I am interested in working on all
kinds of projects – from museums to shopping malls to
residences. My studio in Berlin had about 25 people, and now here in New York,
our main office has about 80, and in Milan and Zurich about 20 at each
location. But if I wanted to, I could have expanded the office tenfold or more.
There is so much work! There is so much pressure! But it is not about quantity.
It is about quality and about knowing every person who works with me. I want to
be involved in everything.
When you were asked to describe an
evolution in your work, you said: “I am doing the same project. It is all the
same project.” You said that you never start with a blank piece of paper – it
is rather a continuation. Could you elaborate?
Of course, you have to start with a
new wonder and new encounters with a new place, new people, and so on, but it
is never a tabula rasa. Architecture is not just about materials. It is about
an idea, a spirit, about culture. And that is an ongoing quest which is
reflected in drawings, writings, and buildings. Architecture is a world. It is
not a building. I just finished a series of drawings – Sonnets in Babylon – that are not instrumental for my building projects. They
are explorations such as my early projects – Micromegas or Chamberworks
drawings. They are sources for architectural thinking.
Could you tell me a bit about your
early projects, the Micromegas and Chamberworks
drawings? They are architectural meditations, right? But are they pure
abstractions or is there a narrative, and do you see them as a sort of DNA for
your current projects?
Well, a meditation is a passive term
but they are really transformations of the world the way we know it. These
drawings have a quality of detachment from an immediate task but they are also
a source for transformations.
Is there a particular narrative?
Well, these drawings are drifting in
no man’s land between reality and dreams, the world of the unknown.
Do you ever go back to these
drawings in search of ideas?
Sure.
And what do you see there?
Well, I don’t look at these drawings
as if they were a crystal ball to figure out a new plan. But the drawings
themselves speak up. They are in a way instruments for thinking. They unravel,
project, and show new directions.
You did Micromegas drawings in 1979,
years after you were a student at Cooper Union in the late 1960s. Did you start
producing these sorts of drawings while still at school?
Yes, actually, when I was at school,
I refused to do real kind of projects.
It’s not like Cooper Union forces
students to do real projects...
You are right, they don’t. But even
within the school there are theoretical projects for buildings. I chose a very
different approach. I worked on collages, non-utilitarian architectural
fragments very early on. Then I developed this approach when I was a young
professor at Cranbrook Academy.
Were these drawings your side
project?
No, they were my central project!
Wasn’t being professor your day job?
I was artist-in-residence and could
have stayed there for life, but did not feel it was the right thing to do. So
working on drawings was my primary job. But even later on, when I became a
professor at Harvard and other schools, I never used drawings as an escape.
So there is a real continuity of
drawing, starting from your student years to the present. Many of your projects
tend to escape order, yet they are not chaotic. You said: “You can’t plan
chaos, but you can gather its traces.” Your architecture is about gathering
traces. There are traces of statistics, symbols, narratives, legends, dreams,
myths... Could you give examples of such origins and ideas for some of your
more recent projects, such as the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto?
In the case of Toronto, I was
inspired by the Museum’s collection. Among other things, it has crystals, which
I saw in person. And you know, when I was looking at my own drawings during the
competition I wondered if something like that could be built. And frankly, I
think you should start your project with a dream, something radical and that
may not seem possible. But if you look at the building today it is very close
to my original drawings.
Let’s take two examples of your work – the Military Museum in Dresden and Denver Art Museum.
One is a radical reconstruction of a neoclassical building in a city that was
almost erased from history and now rebuilt. The other is a building from
scratch in downtown Denver. How did you approach these two problematically very
different projects, which have very similar visual features?
These buildings are very different.
They may share something in common simply because of me, the architect. The
programs are very different. The Denver project is an addition to a building by
Gio Ponti. We had to add new spaces for the Museum’s collection, as well as new
social spaces. I called my addition “Two lines going for a walk,” a kind of
intertwining of a prismatic topography of the Rocky Mountains. It is a dramatic
interpretation of the mountains, the valleys, nature, and the city itself
against beautiful Colorado sky. The Dresden Museum presents a vector, rising
from the ground. It cuts through two historic walls to create a disorder in
contrast to the original building’s order. This new, inserted structure rises
out of the building’s envelope and provides a space for reflection, as well as
a particular view of the city, which is the view of three points from which
Dresden was destroyed. So the intentions and approaches are very different in
these projects.
Often your entire composition
employs expressive angular forms and some of your elevations, such as in the
Jewish Museum in Berlin, look like abstract paintings. What is the origin of
your particular stylistic language – diagonals,
triangulation, sharp corners, crossed lines, zigzags, and so on?
If I could answer this question, I
would become my own critic. I can only say that, for example, in the movies I
don’t like when views are dissolved. I like frames cut. Certain forms speak to
me. I have a certain language of communication. Why do we recognize certain
music or writing? I don’t know why, but we can distinguish particular realities
that communicate to us. I lean toward forms that lead to a point and that try
to make a point.
It is fascinating that such
violent-looking geometry can be reasoned so poetically... I was looking at your
Micromegas drawings, trying to break the code, to find an origin or a
narrative... But then it occurred to me that it is a pure abstraction, just
like a painting by Kandinsky.
Well, it is one analogy.
Architecture is not a new field and its sources are deep. Whether it is
Kandinsky, Uccello, Leonardo... I might get inspired by a particular poem from
Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson that suddenly pops into my head for no reason at
all.
Once I was writing an essay. When it
was nearly complete, I happened to be at a bookstore where I picked up a book entirely
by chance. When I opened it randomly, I spotted a phrase, which pointed to a
hint on how to conclude my story…
In my field, I cannot be very
arbitrary. It is not a total chaos. You have to look at the linkage of things
that you learn. You have to follow the signs that are meant only for you.
For you, architecture is a story.
Your projects tell stories about a place, about the fate of a person.
Storytelling is something that is encouraged in your family, right? I read that
when you dine with your wife and kids you never discuss work or school, but
every meal is a storytelling meal. What kind of stories are these?
These are all kinds of stories –
ancient, religious... What’s important is to understand your own role in these
stories. You have to realize that every story you tell, you are not just a
teller. You might find yourself in it. There is a world in each story. Stories
transform as they are told. And it is important to see positive in each story.
You work simultaneously on a number
of projects. Do you develop a particular story or narrative for every project,
or are you recycling certain ideas developed earlier?
It is the opposite. I don’t come up
with stories. It is the stories that develop me. The site, the program, the
people – they have the stories. I just have to listen. You can’t make up
stories. That would be meaningless.
Should every building have a story?
Sure. If there is no story then it
is just a hunk of metal, glass, and concrete, nothing else. There is no future
there. Every building, every city should have a story – a story about lives,
about people. Otherwise a building is an object, an abstraction...
In various interviews you’ve said
that buildings are not just about technical issues and about fetishizing
technical gadgets – they are not just about aesthetic pursuits, but about
telling stories. They transport us somewhere new, somewhere else. You strive to
create spaces that never existed and never experienced. You don’t like
neutrality, and do like expressive and emotional spaces. What else?
We all see unique visions. We need
to ask all kinds of questions: Who are we? Where are we going? These are the
central questions for anyone to ask about themselves and their particular place
in the world. I see the world as something open. It has a mystery that will
never be solved by any science. Architecture is very crucial to understanding
many things because it provides space to see the sky, to see the street, to see
others as they enter through the door...
Before turning to practice, you were
a teacher, a researcher, and a theoretician. Do you still get involved in
theoretical research? If you had time between projects, what would you draw or
what would you want to imagine or dream about?
I never thought of myself as a
researcher or a theoretician. When I was younger – drawing all day long and
teaching – I thought I was doing architecture. Others thought – this guy is not
doing architecture. Why isn’t he in an office, working on buildings? But I was
absolutely convinced that I was the one who was practicing architecture.
Because I believe that architecture is multiform, and just working on a
building is not what I think architecture is about. Even building a whole city
is not exhausting the possibilities of what architecture can be. So doing
architecture to me means following many paths. And I never set myself a goal.
The goal is unknown. I only know the path that I am taking.
What’s your dream, Mr. Architect?
To continue the paths and maintain
the naïveté of the beginner who wants to listen to the world. You know, too
soon people become experts at knowing how to do things. So you are expected to
do what you know – again and again. But I want to be free. I want to find
architecture that would emancipate people; that would promote truth, beauty,
and justice.
You believe that architecture should
mirror the complexity of our modern lives and our intellectual desires. You
just mentioned that you don’t set goals because of your desire to remain free.
But you follow a particular path therefore you must have a goal, right? What do
you think is the goal of an architect and how do you see your own goal?
Architects do not work for themselves. We
respond to various tasks. We respond to what cities and people need and want.
And my goal... it is in a clutter of the unknown... The goal is to stay on the
path of exploring architecture.
