(De)constructing memory – Architecture’s wunderkind Daniel Libeskind reveals the dreams behind his awe-inspiring creations
“To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history but to articulate it.” – Daniel Libeskind
When Daniel Libeskind received the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2001, an honour reserved for those whose work promotes international understanding and peace, it was the first time this award had been given to an architect and a building – the Jewish Museum Berlin. This monument, a self-contained and autonomous object, withdrawn and defensive, creates an imaginary world – a memory scenario able to redesign the history of the site. Absence was constructed and intensified; to Libeskind “heightened memory comes from an encounter of the unexpected.”
His architecture deals with suspense, unpredictability and chaos. The assumption is that space can create intensified emotional experiences through dramatic formal manoeuvres and unconventional configurations. Libeskind collects facts and mythologies from the social and historical context, adds his interpretation and drives, and then transforms it all into a physical structure. “My work is about preconstruction as well as construction… It’s about everything before the building, all of the history of the site.” In an architectural accumulation, his spaces surpass function in order to become psychological and provoke emotional and mental reactions.
All previous notions from a place or historical event are challenged. Architecture, Libeskind explains, “is a cultural discipline. It’s not just technical issues. It’s a humanistic discipline grounded in history and tradition, and these histories and traditions have to be vital parts of design.” His influences come in an array of formats; writing, reading, and listening. Many of his fundamental architectural tenets are a result of his early career.
Born in Lodz, Poland, on May 12, 1946, a year after World War II ended, Libeskind’s childhood was propelled by music. At a very early age he demonstrated extraordinary instrumental talent, appearing live on Polish television playing the accordion. When he was eleven, the family moved to Tel Aviv, Israel. His exceptional piano playing earned him the America-Israel Cultural Foundation scholarship that enabled him to move to the United States in 1959. The family settled in a one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx and, as he recalls, the skyline of New York became “the substance of the American dream”.
Libeskind continued to study music and to perform; however, craving a different kind of creative and intellectual exploration, he enrolled in the Bronx High School of Science. Architecture seemed like a natural progression – a field that ‘combines so many interests. Mathematics, painting, arts. It’s about people, space’. After receiving an architectural degree from Cooper Union in 1970, he began his quest to provide architecture with added value. “I studied architecture in New York. So, really I was very moved, like everyone else, to try to contribute something that has resonance and profundity.”
Meaning was not an empty goal. Libeskind’s previous close encounters with music and performance allowed him to explore new ways of engaging his buildings’ occupants. He pursued these ambitions through a postgraduate degree in History and Theory of Architecture at Essex University, England. There he spent many years teaching and developing his ideas further.
Jesse Reiser, one of today’s most adventurous young architects, studied with Libeskind for three years. He describes him as an “encyclopaedic individual”. Rather than enforcing his own design preferences, “his most important teaching was to instill a certain sense of intellectual independence.” Libeskind’s interest in the theoretical practice of architecture explains not only his conceptual investigations but also the progression of his career. “My life has developed in a reverse order… It started with contemplation, reflection and theorising, and not with active public work. Only now am I fully occupied and work all around the world. This is good because theory is turning into practice and not practice into theory.”
It was during his teaching experience that Libeskind produced two sets of drawings which reflect upon the nature of architectural space. The first, entitled Micromegas (1979) explored the interaction between architecture and music, whereas Chamber Works (1983) became an alternative blueprint for existentialist architecture. “This work in search of architecture has discovered no permanent structure, no constant form, and no universal type. I have realised that the result of this journey in search of the ‘essentials’ undermines, in the end, the very premise of their existence. Architecture is neither on the inside nor the outside. It is not a given nor a physical fact. It has no history and it does not follow fate. What emerges in differentiated experience is architecture as an index of the relationship between what was and what will be.” These investigations demonstrate Libeskind’s earliest belief in the drawing format as architecture; similar to music notation, lines and geometry constitute the ‘language’ of design.
After teaching architecture for close to twenty years, Libeskind transformed from teacher, philosopher and artist into a builder. A 1987 exhibition in Berlin, of Micromegas and Chamber Works, prompted city officials to commission him to design a housing project. Though the project was abandoned, his German contacts encouraged him to enter the competition for the Jewish Museum. His ideas and his reputation as a thinker and academic were sufficient to win.
“I felt that this was not a program I had to invent or a building I had to research, rather one in which I was implicated from the beginning, having lost most of my family in the Holocaust.”
The Museum creates a profound version of the event: it translates meaning into a sequence of intense spatio-psychological experiences. The entrance is through the Baroque Kollegienhaus, an 18th century former Prussian courthouse, and then into a dramatic entry Void by a stair, which descends under the existing building foundations. Three underground roads narrate three separate stories. “The first and longest road leads to the main stair, to the continuation of Berlin’s history, and to the exhibition spaces in the Jewish Museum.
The second road leads outdoors to the E.T.A. Hoffmann Garden and represents the exile and emigration of Jews from Germany. The third axis leads to the dead end – the Holocaust Void.” Cutting through the form of the Jewish Museum is a spatial straight line whose impenetrability forms the central focus around which the exhibitions are organised. In order to cross from one space of the Museum to the other, the visitors traverse sixty bridges which open into the Void space, the embodiment of absence.
The shape of the building alludes to “a compressed and distorted” Star of David. The cut windows across the façade follow imaginary lines between the homes of the Jewish and non-Jewish people who lived around the site. Every detail reveals the connection between Jewish and German cultures. Ultimately, the structure emanates a “light of hope despite the fact it deals with an irreversible catastrophe, it gives people a different aspect of what they know about the Holocaust.”
“I believe that this project joins architecture to questions that are now relevant to all humanity. To this end, I have sought to create a new Architecture for a time which would reflect an understanding of history, a new understanding of Museums and a new realisation of the relationship between program and architectural space. Therefore this Museum is not only a response to a particular program, but an emblem of Hope.”
Libeskind’s talent resides in his ability to translate meaning into architecture. As Paul Goldberger, the New Yorker architecture critic, notes: “Libeskind’s greatest gift is for interweaving simple, commemorative concepts and abstract architectural ideas – there is no one alive who does this better.”
Libeskind’s conceptual audacity and employment of history pushed architecture farther. In 1996, he won the competition to extend the Victoria and Albert Museum in London – The Spiral. The design’s daring features go beyond traditional architectural qualities and embody a new awareness of the central role of contemporary museology, technology, arts and crafts. “The Spiral is not monocentric. It opens along different trajectories. It opens the museum to different views, and to different spaces.”
His experimentations were acclaimed and questioned. Mark Jones, director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, admired his ability to create a “complete integration between the interior and the exterior… Every piece of his surprising, visually compelling puzzle seems somehow to relate to the difficult meaning of the site.”
Conversely, William Rees-Mogg, former editor of The Times, denounced the proposed building, as “a disaster for the Victoria and Albert in particular and for civilisation in general.” Rees-Mogg and other critics insisted that Libeskind’s design simply does not fit with the Victorian buildings that currently make up the museum. Although the project currently remains inactive, the design allowed the architect to demonstrate his capability to reconstruct memory.
To Libeskind, if the function of memory is hopeful then architecture ought to react accordingly. One must “respond with some feeling. Not only a tragedy but a hope of what you are building in symbolic ways… one must have a moment of insecurity and risk to produce a project or else it’s just a product.” His aptitude to deconstruct an emotional memory of a past experience and reconstruct with hope and encouragement is why he was chosen to participate in one of the most difficult architectural projects in the world to date.
The rebuilding of the World Trade Center site in New York City is unlike any other Libeskind has completed yet. Both in scale and complexity, the master plan also proposes a program consisting of memorials, a museum, retail space, and a transit hub in addition to a 1776 feet tower (160m taller than the Empire State Building). Libeskind’s experience with the Jewish Museum Berlin allowed him to approach the multifarious program monumentally but without pretension or empty theatricality.
“When I first began this project, New Yorkers were divided as to whether to keep the site of the World Trade Center empty or to fill the site completely and build upon it. I meditated many days on this seemingly impossible dichotomy. To acknowledge the terrible deaths which occurred on this site, while looking to the future with hope, seemed like two moments which could not be joined. I sought to find a solution which would bring these seemingly contradictory viewpoints into an unexpected unity. So, I went to look at the site, to stand within it, to see people walking around it, to feel its power and to listen to its voices. And this is what I heard, felt and saw.”
Libeskind’s life-long quest to create an architecture provoked by memory is a result of his multifaceted career in the arts. His vast range of projects around the world, physical and conceptual, has proved Libeskind’s successful ability to translate his teachings and ideas into a work of tremendous significance. The necessity to create a built environment conscious of new world conditions resonates in his work.
“Enhanced energy efficiency does not conflict with a beautiful form of architecture. However, a great and sustainable building should not have engrained in its aesthetics the statement: Here we are saving energy. Great architecture will still be about human dreams, human aspirations. But technology can help us to get there. New technology gives us incredible opportunities. It is not a barrier to great architecture, nor is it the expression of great architecture. I see it as an enabler.”
His trademark solutions break down the most straightforward architectural elements; reconstructed as ‘slashing forms’ and ‘off-kilter geometries’ creating spaces laden with powerful metaphorical messages; concurrent with the sensitivity for sustainable architecture.
To Libeskind, “Life – it is not just a series of calculations and a sum total of statistics, it’s about experience, it’s about participation, it is something more complex and more interesting than what is obvious.”
by Elana Tenenbaum
From the Glass Archive – Issue Five – Dreams