The Frozen Music of Daniel Libeskind

“I find myself drawn to explore what I call the void – the presence of an

overwhelming emptiness created when a community is wiped out, or individual

freedom is stamped out; when the continuity of life is so brutally disrupted that the

structure of life is forever torqued and transformed.” (Libeskind 12) These are the

words of Daniel Libeskind, the architect of the dramatic Jewish Museum in Berlin and

the master architect of the Ground Zero to be erected in New York. His designs

speak of global tragedies and monstrous forces – but in a personal way, appealing to

the senses of the visitor. The drama behind Libeskind’s projects and the message

they carry have earned worldwide recognition for the architect. I am not an exception

in this case – I adore the ability of this architect to bring philosophy into construction,

to take an abstract idea, a feeling or a memory and communicate it through

architecture.

As Mary Lynne Vellinga tells in her article “Architect Draws Notice,” "Libeskind

belongs to a group of about two dozen architects worldwide, many of them

European, who have achieved star status.” He also belongs to a group of modern

architects known as deconstructivists – a movement in Postmodern architecture that

is characterised by ideas of fragmentation and apparent non-Euclidean geometry,

which serve to distort and dislocate some of the elements of architecture, such as

structure and envelope. The group also includes such architects as Zaha Hadid and

Frank O’Gehry.

Daniel Libeskind was born in 1946 – just after the Second World War, - in

Lodz, Poland. His parents were among the few Polish Jews who survived the

Holocaust, while most of his extended family had been murdered. When Daniel was

eleven, the Libeskinds immigrated to Israel; at thirteen, he came to New York.

Libeskind became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1965. He was

expected to become a professional musician and played accordion with great

success. However, Libeskind’s obsession with drawing led him to architecture.

Young Daniel spent days drawing complicated mind twisting graphical pictures. He

thought of becoming an artist but his mother, a practical woman, advised him to

pursue architecture. Libeskind recollects his mother’s words in his autobiographical

book “Breaking Ground: Adventures in Life and Architecture”: “And then she said

something that should gladden the heart of every architect: “You can always do art in

architecture, but you can’t do architecture in art. You get two fish with the same

hook” (Libeskind 12). He entered the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science

and Art in New York City where he came under the influence of the architect and

teacher John Hejduk. He holds a professional architectural degree from the Cooper

Union. He received a postgraduate degree in History and Theory of Architecture at

the School of Comparative Studies at Essex University (England) in 1972. Since

1989, Libeskind has lived in Berlin with his wife Nina and their three children.

The works of Daniel Libeskind include museums, concert halls,

universities, hotels, housing, residential buildings, convention centers, shopping

centers, and other cultural and commercial institutions. Libeskind also designs

opera sets and maintains an object design studio. His projects can be seen all over

the world: from his well-known Jewish Museum in Berlin, Germany to the

Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, United Kingdom. He currently has works

being constructed: the Frederic C. Hamilton Building of the Denver Art Museum, the

Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, an expansion project of the Royal Ontario Museum, the

Barbara Weil Gallery Building in Spain, and many others. In addition to his extensive

list of architectural achievements, Daniel Libeskind had taught and lectured at many
universities throughout the world. He has held positions such as the Frank O’Gehry

Chair at the Univerity of Toronto, Professor at the Hochschule fuer Gestaltung,

Karlsruhe, Germany, the Cret Chair at the University of Pennsylvania as well as the

Louis Kahn Chair at Yale University. He has also received many awards. They

include, for example, the 2001 Hiroshima Art Prize – “an award given to an artist

whose work promotes international understanding and peace, never before given to

an architect” (“Daniel Libeskind”); the 1999 Deutsche Architekturpreis; and the 2000

Goethe Medallion. In 1996 Libeskind received both the American Academy of Arts

and Letters Award for Architecture and the Berlin Cultural Prize. He also received a

number of Honorary Doctorates from colleges, such as Humboldt Universitaet,

Berlin, the College of Arts and Humanities, Essex University, England, the University

of Edinburgh, DePaul University and most recently, the University of Toronto.

Jewish Museum Berlin is one of the architect’s best known projects. It was

titled “Between the Lines” – a reference to two linear shapes which form its structure

and evoke a vision of a deconstructed Star of David. The “Line of Connectedness,”

expressed in the window design cutting through the zinc plating of the exterior,

symbolizes the cultural exchange between Jews and non-Jews and the ways in

which they influenced each other. The “Line of the Voids” is a series of empty rooms,

which runs a straight but disrupted line through the building. These empty rooms

represent the cultural gaps left in Germany after the Holocaust. The lines of the

design were created from connecting different spots on the map of Berlin – the

addresses of German Jews taken from a telephone book. The building has no

access of any kind from the street. The entrance is located in an adjacent building,

the museum of German history, through a staircase and tunnel embedded in a

concrete tower that goes through all the floors of the German museum. This
symbolizes that German and Jewish histories are inseparable, violent and secret.

The staircase leads to an underground site, composed of three hallways: The Axis of

Death leading to a concrete tower that has been left empty, called The Holocaust

Tower; The Axis of Exile, which leads to an exterior square courtyard - The Garden of

Exile – composed of concrete columns and tilted in one of its corners; and The Axis

of Continuity that goes through the other two hallways, representing the permanence

of Jews in Germany in spite of the Holocaust and the Exile. This axis leads to a

staircase, which in turn leads to the main building. The entrance to the museum is

intentionally made difficult and long to instill in the visitor the feeling of challenge and

hardship that is distinctive of Jewish history.

Daniel Libeskind was appointed as master plan architect for the Ground Zero

site in New York City, after winning the World Trade Center design competition in

February 2003. The core of Libeskinds’ master plan is the WTC memorial,

surrounded by five large office buildings arranged in an ascending spiral. The tallest

building is the 1776 foot Freedom Tower, designed by David Childs. Santiago

Calatrava is to design a transit station. The project also includes a museum by the

architectural firm Snøhetta and a cultural complex being designed by Frank Gehry,

as well as various parks and public spaces. Libeskind attributes his inspiration for the

project to the so called slurry wall that had kept the Hudson River out of the base of

the original WTC tower and had been exposed in the explosion. When visiting the

site, he was impressed and touched by the fact that even though the towers

collapsed, the wall kept standing. The master plan leaves portions of the slurry wall

exposed as a symbol of the strength and endurance of American democracy.

Another concept in Libeskind’s design is the “Wedge of Light” – the idea to leave the

northeast corner of the site open in order for the light around the September
autumnal equinox to hit the footprints of the Twin Towers. The master plan for the

Ground Zero has changed greatly since the competition but this project put Daniel

Libeskind in the spotlight of modern architecture and provided him with numerous

commissions on which he is currently working.

There is a certain kind of drama in Libeskind’s projects, as if his buildings

stand as witnesses to global tragedies. We haven’t seen what exactly happened but

from the “torqued,” sharpened, impossible shapes we get an alarming feeling.

Libeskind himself ties this unique character of his buildings to his own life: “As an

immigrant, whose youth often felt displaced, I’ve sought to create a different

architecture, one that reflects an understanding of history after world catastrophes”

(Libeskind 12). So he does. The projects of Daniel Libeskind are full of meaning and

philosophy that define the form. Like Gaudi’s animalistic fantasies, the buildings

carry their own messages, they - “contrary to popular thought – are not inanimate

objects. They live and breathe, and like humans have an outside and an inside, a

body and a soul” (Libeskind 12).

I am fascinated by the life and work of Daniel Libeskind. He is one of the few

“visionary” architects who finally succeeded in fulfilling his visions into life – a task

much more difficult for architects than, for example, artists or musicians. An

architectural vision takes a lot of money to come alive. Many skeptics considered his

architecture, with its bold shapes and angles, an impossible task to built, or even if

built, an unusable structure. It is, perhaps, one of the main reasons why Libeskind

had his first project built only when he turned fifty-two. Daniel Libeskind has an

amazing life story – from an immigrant family to becoming one of the greatest

modern architects in the world. The life he led, the places he lived, the people he met

all contribute to his designs: “There are many worlds in my head, and I bring all of
them to the projects I work on” (Libeskind 7). Although it took so many years to come

true, the work of Daniel Libeskind proves that “architecture is and remains the

ethical, the true, the good and the beautiful, no matter what those who know the

price of everything and the value of nothing may say” (Libeskind).

Works Cited

Libeskind, Daniel. Breaking Ground: Adventures in Life and Architecture. Penguin

Group, 2004.

Mary Lynne Vellinga. “Architect Draws Notice.” The Sacramento Bee 16 Jan. 2006:

A1, A16.

Jencks, Charles. The New Paradigm in Architecture. New Haven and London: Yale

Univeristy Press, 2002. 242-249.

“Daniel Libeskind, B.Arch. M.A.” Daniel Libeskind. < http://daniel-

libeskind.com/daniel/index.html>

Libeskind, Daniel. “Proof of Things Invisible.” Daniel Libeskind. <http://daniel-

libeskind.com/words/index.html?ID=14>