This article was originally posted on DenverPost.com on March 2, 2003.
New York – Literally overnight, Daniel Libeskind became the
architect of the moment. He catapulted into the international spotlight with his selection
Wednesday evening as the lead designer for the reconstruction of
the World Trade Center site.
The undertaking, because of its enormous scale and symbolism, is
the most important architectural project of this era and one of the
most important since World War II.
Libeskind, a Polish immigrant who did not even win his first
building commission until he was 42, has created a jarring,
multifaceted plan for ground zero, which makes dramatic use of
light and shadow.
It features a sunken memorial park and a spiraling series of
buildings culminating with a soaring 1,776-foot tower, which would
make New York City home to the world’s tallest structure for the
10th time in its history.
“It is up there with the Seagrams Building (in Midtown Manhattan)
and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, because it is something that
will serve to reorient all architecture,” said Michael J. Lewis,
an architectural historian at Williams College in Williamstown,
Mass.
“It’s one of those buildings that is signaling a big change in art
and culture. The way the Vietnam memorial went beyond art, this
thing is going to go beyond architecture.”
Libeskind’s ascent to the pinnacle of the architectural world is
hardly an accident. His peers and other experts credit him with
uncommon intelligence and vision and describe him as someone who
can instinctively discern the key, sometimes competing needs of a
project and expressively respond to them in his designs.
Perhaps most important of all, he is an extraordinary communicator
who can describe his often complex ideas in simple, eloquent terms
and speak with passion.
Charles Gwathmey of Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects of New
York City, a member of one of the seven worldwide teams of
architects that submitted a competing design for the World Trade
Center site, recalls being enthralled by the way Libeskind
presented his plan.
“I was mesmerized, to tell you the truth,” he said, “sitting
there watching him. It was very compelling.”
It also doesn’t hurt that the 56-year-old architect comes off as a
genuinely caring person, said Lewis Sharp, director of the Denver
Art Museum, which commissioned Libeskind in 2000 to design a $62.5
million addition.
“The first thing almost always when he sees me,” Sharp said, “he
will ask how Susan (the director’s wife) is and how my family is
and knows those personal things and has that personal interest in a
friend and a colleague.”
All these qualities immediately set Libeskind (pronounced LEE-
buh-skinned) apart from the 40 other architects hoping to land
Denver’s museum project, Sharp said, and they clearly helped in New
York City as well.
Despite Libeskind’s extraordinary skills, his success is still
something of a surprise, considering that in 1989 he had yet to be
responsible for a single constructed building.
And even now, just three of his projects have been completed – the
Jewish Museum in Berlin, the Felix Nussbaum Museum in Osnabruck,
Germany, and the Imperial War Museum of the North in Manchester,
England.
Construction on the Denver Art Museum’s addition is scheduled to
begin this year and finish in 2006. It will be Libeskind’s first
North American building to reach completion.
In 1989, Libeskind was still what Sharp calls a “theoretical
architect.” He had taught architecture for 16 years, sometimes
submitting designs for competitions, more to get his ideas seen
than with any real thought to winning.
But everything changed that year, when unexpectedly he was picked
to design the Jewish Museum, a commission that led him and his wife
and business partner, Nina, to move from Milan, Italy, where he was
teaching, to Berlin. (They plan to relocate to New York City once
their daughter, the youngest of three children, finishes eighth
grade.) After many delays, the museum was finished in 1999 and opened in
September 2001 to considerable acclaim.
“It is a deconstructed, riven Star of David, full of slashing
windows and sharp angles, twisting corridors and tilting floors,
rough cement and tall, cold empty voids, that bring to a visitor
the dizziness and horror of absence, loss, dislocation and
loneliness,” wrote New York Times reporter Steven Erlanger.
Libeskind works in a style that is often described as
“deconstructivist,” which means that he breaks up the traditional
rectangular box shape of most buildings and reassembles it in
radical new ways that he hopes reflect the purpose or meaning of
each project.
This style, which worked so well for the somber, zinc-clad Jewish
Museum, provided him the perfect lead-up to the World Trade Center
project, which will rise on the ruins of one of the worst tragedies
in American history.
Libeskind’s approach offers a timely alternative to the often
frivolous, lighthearted and narcissistic architectural mainstream
of the 1980s and ’90s, which was rendered obsolete by the events of
Sept. 11, said Lewis, the architectural critic.
The journey that led Libeskind to a podium at a packed news
conference on Thursday began more than 40 years earlier, when he
first was awed by the skyline of New York City from the deck of the
S.S. Constitution as a 13-year-old immigrant from Poland.
His parents, both Jews, were arrested by Soviet officials when the
Red Army invaded Poland in 1939, and they spent part of the war in
Russian prison camps.
Libeskind, who thinks of himself as a New Yorker, grew up in the
Bronx, attended high school there and earned his undergraduate
degree in architecture from New York’s Cooper Union in 1970, five
years after he became an American citizen.
“I saw the World Trade Center being built,” he said, “and it was
such an inspiring and controversial and wonderful moment for
students of architecture to see those buildings being built.”
If the New York commission has clearly made Libeskind the world’s
most talked-about architect, many people in the profession are not
yet ready to anoint him the most important.
That title, by general consensus, has been held by Frank Gehry
since the 1997 opening of the radically new Guggenheim Bilbao
museum in Spain and the excitement that surrounded it.
“I think Bilbao changed the perceptions of museums,” said
Gwathmey, the New York architect. “No matter what your
predisposition is, visiting it and experiencing it was a very
compelling and uplifting and mind-changing moment for everybody. I
think it is a great building.
“The Jewish Museum in Berlin or war museum he (Libeskind) did in
England or the Denver Art Museum – none of them in their way are as
significant as a point in time and as a transformation as Bilbao
was.
“And I’m not sure this (World Trade Center) is going to be.”
Paul Goldberger, architectural critic for The New Yorker, said it
is a matter of waiting to see how the World Trade Center project
turns out.
“Remember,” he said, “the effect of Bilbao didn’t begin until it
was built. So, let’s see if this actually makes its way through the
process and gets built in a strong and good way.”
Libeskind seems to understand the challenges he is up against in
earning his peers’ ultimate respect and in realizing the World
Trade Center project, and he said Thursday he is ready to face
them.
“In a moment of this sort,” he said, “you realize you’re
humbled. You realize the responsibility. It’s not just the glitter
of the announcement. It’s what it really means.
“It’s the total commitment for the next 10 to 15 years to stay
true to the design, navigate through all the waters of compromise
and yet come out with a design that is a worthy building.”
When it comes to style, the eyeglasses have it
Catching almost as much attention as Daniel Libeskind’s
architectural designs is his fashion sense, particularly his
ever-changing but always hip, European-looking eyeglasses.
At Thursday’s news conference in New York City, the graying,
5-foot- 4-inch architect was wearing a pair of glasses with heavy,
wide black frames and his usual all-black apparel.
His glasses and those of some of the other architects competing for
the World Trade Center commission even led to a New York Times
story in February on architects and their glasses.
“They change almost every time I see him,” said Lewis Sharp,
director of the Denver Art Museum, who has worked with Libeskind
since 2000 on the design of the institution’s planned addition.
“They’re sometimes pretty radically different. It’s been the last
seven or eight months that it seems to be the heavier black
frames.”
