| Daniel Libeskind | |
|---|---|
Daniel Libeskind in front of his extension to the Denver Art Museum. |
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| Born | May 12, 1946 Łódź, Poland |
| Nationality | American |
| Work | |
| Practice | Studio Daniel Libeskind |
| Buildings |
Imperial War Museum North Contemporary Jewish Museum Royal Ontario Museum (expansion) |
Daniel Libeskind, (born May 12, 1946 in Lodz, Poland) is an American architect, artist, and set designer of Polish-Jewish descent. Libeskind founded Studio Daniel Libeskind in 1989 with his wife, Nina, and is its principal design architect.[1] His buildings include the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Germany, the extension to the Denver Art Museum in the United States, the Grand Canal Theatre in Dublin, the Imperial War Museum North in Salford Quays, England, the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada, the Felix Nussbaum Haus in Osnabrück, Germany, the Danish Jewish Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark, and the Wohl Centre at the Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel.[2] His portfolio also includes several residential projects. Libeskind's work has been exhibited in major museums and galleries around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Bauhaus Archives, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Centre Pompidou.[3] On February 27, 2003, Libeskind won the competition to be the master plan architect for the reconstruction of the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan.[4]
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Born in Łódź, Poland on May 12, 1946, Libeskind was the second child of Dora and Nachman Libeskind, both Polish Jews and Holocaust survivors.
As a young child, Libeskind learned to play the accordion and quickly became a virtuoso, performing on Polish television in 1953. He won a prestigious America Israel Cultural Foundation scholarship in 1959 and played alongside a young Itzhak Perlman.[5] That summer, the Libeskinds moved to New York City on one of the last immigrant boats to the United States.
In New York, Libeskind lived in the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative in the northwest Bronx, a union-sponsored, middle-income cooperative development. He attended the Bronx High School of Science. The print shop where his father worked was on Stone Street in lower Manhattan, and Libeskind watched the original World Trade Center being built in the 1960s.[6]
Libeskind became a United States citizen in 1965.[7] In 1970, he received his professional architectural degree from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art; he received a postgraduate degree in History and Theory of Architecture at the School of Comparative Studies at Essex University in 1972.
In 1968, Libeskind briefly worked as an apprentice to architect Richard Meier. In 1972, he was hired to work at Peter Eisenman's New York Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, but he quit almost immediately.[8]
Daniel Libeskind met Nina Lewis, his future wife and business partner, at the Bundist-run Camp Hemshekh in upstate New York in 1966. They married a few years later and, instead of a traditional honeymoon, traveled across the United States visiting Frank Lloyd Wright buildings on a Cooper Union fellowship.[9]
Since then, Libeskind has lived, among other places, in New York, Toronto, Michigan, Italy, Germany, and Los Angeles,[9] and has taught at numerous universities across the world, including the University of Kentucky, Yale University, and the University of Pennsylvania.[7] Since 2007, Libeskind is visiting professor at the Leuphana University Lueneburg, Germany. He is both a U.S. and Israeli citizen[10].
Nina and Daniel Libeskind have three children, Lev, Noam and Rachel.[11]
Though he had been an architectural theorist and professor for many years, Libeskind completed his first building at the age of 52, with the opening of the Felix Nussbaum Haus in 1998.[12] Prior to this, critics had dismissed his designs as "unbuildable or unduly assertive."[13] The first design competition that Libeskind won was in 1987 for housing in West Berlin, but soon thereafter the Berlin Wall fell and the project was canceled. Libeskind won the first four projects he entered into competition for.
The Jewish Museum Berlin, completed in 1999, was Libeskind's first major international success and was one of the first buildings designed after reunification. Libeskind has also designed cultural and commercial institutions, museums, concert halls, convention centers, universities, residences, hotels, and shopping centers. Critics often describe Libeskind's work as deconstructivist.[14]
Libeskind is perhaps most famous for being selected by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to oversee the rebuilding of the World Trade Center, which was destroyed in the September 11, 2001 attacks. He titled his concept for the site Memory Foundations.
Studio Daniel Libeskind, headquartered two blocks south of the World Trade Center site in New York, is currently working on over 40 projects across the world. The studio's most recent completed projects include the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, California, The Ascent at Roebling's Bridge in Covington, Kentucky, and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Ontario.
In addition to his architectural projects, Libeskind also designs opera sets for productions such as the Norwegian National Theatre's The Architect in 1998 and Saarländisches Staatstheater's Tristan und Isolde in 2001. He also designed the sets and costumes for Intolleranza by Luigi Nono and for a production of Messiaen's Saint Francis of Assisi by Deutsche Oper Berlin. He has also written free verse prose, included in his book Fishing from the Pavement.[15]
The following projects are listed on the Studio Daniel Libeskind website. The first date is the competition, commission, or first presentation date. The second is the completion date or the estimated date of completion.
He decided to become one of the representatives of past, wanting to show to the world the horror of his history while integrating into these exhibitions a new hope, a will to make better tomorrow than yesterday, to understand the past, and to assimilate it. He does not want to make architecture meaningless which contents itself with its harmonious forms, he prefers to give a strong message, and he wants to cause an impact on the visitors. According to him, human existence is broken with so much violence so the structure of the life remains forever twisted and upset. We find this state of mind in the way he designs its buildings with deconstructivist shapes. Many critics say that he is a deconstructivist, but Libeskind likes to thinks that he is a contemporary architect and that he works with his time.
He opposes to Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius in their idea that buildings must be neutral. He does not want to surround himself with neutral buildings; he prefers to face the history complexity and disorder of the reality. He wants to feel in the building a soul, a memory, a sense. At the beginning of every project, he tries to perceive the " essence of the site " He wants to create buildings, which respect and reflect the story of the place, the location, or the story of the building, which were here before; he wants his building to spread emotion to the people who will run over it. The emotions he wants to arouse have to testify a past, history, an understanding and a respect of what bring us here. He says that his memorials are not for the dead but for the living.
A. Jewish Museum in Berlin
In 1989, Daniel Libeskind wins the competition of the Jewish museum of Berlin, The architecture of the museum embodies the History and the Memory of the Jewish culture. This building is full of symbolism The building shapes a deconstructed Star of David, and looks like, seen by plane, a flash of lighting, which symbolizes the violence undergone by the Jewish people This violence is also translated by the sculptural character of the building and its restricted opening to the outside world through its loophole(. Indeed, facades present long oblique openings, admitting only very slender beams of light, which marks the building like scars. The Public is placed in situation of destabilization, and meditation provoked by the sensations that generate on us the architecture of the museum. The visitor is exposed to a "violent" shock, which makes him become aware of the past. This violence is in the employed forms too. - The omnipresence of broken lines - The conditions into which the visitor is plunged - Low ceilings, not vertical walls, the artificial light. The museum contains 6 empty spaces crossing the museum on all its height what Libeskind will call the “Voids”, to symbolize the absence in the German history of the people who disappeared during the Shoah.
B- Ground Zero
Libeskind is most famous for being selected by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to oversee the rebuilding of the World Trade Center As all his constructions are very subjective for the Ground Zero project, he felt a personal link with these buildings, he had assisted their construction, his brother had worked on it, and his father worked near the tours towers. So he considers that he knows well how to rebuild it. He wants to put a memorial in the center of the project always in the idea to respect history (and to continue its work of memory). He wants the buildings that will rise on this place to wear the testimony of this tragedy.
He wants to create a symbolic building, which would reflect the hope, and the will of a city to rebuild itself. So he developed its project of the Freedom Tower 1776-foot tower sending back to the date of independence of the United States, overhung by an arrow of 82 meters that will make reference to the flame of the Statue of Liberty. The Wedge of Light is a triangular plaza. He positioned the buildings and the plaza in such a way that there would be a special lighting effect every 11th September morning coinciding with the time the first plane hit the world trade center and the second tower collapsed. During that time there would be no shadow on the plaza which is very difficult because of the height of the buildings in New York.