Daniel Libeskind (born May 12, 1946) is a Polish–American architect, artist, professor, andset designer. Libeskind founded Studio Daniel Libeskind in 1989 with his wife, Nina, and is its principal design architect.[1]
He is known for the design and completion of theJewish Museum in Berlin, Germany, that opened in 2001. On February 27, 2003, Libeskind received further international attention after he won the competition to be the master plan architect for thereconstruction of theWorld Trade Center site inLower Manhattan.[2]
Born inŁódź, Poland, Libeskind was the second child of Dora and Nachman Libeskind, both Polish Jews andHolocaust survivors. As a young child, Libeskind learned to play theaccordion and quickly became avirtuoso, performing onPolish television in 1953. He won aAmerica Israel Cultural Foundation scholarship in 1959 and played alongside a youngItzhak Perlman. Libeskind lived in Poland for 11 years and says "I can still speak, read and write Polish."[5]
In 1957, the Libeskinds moved to Kibbutz Gvat, Israel and then to Tel Aviv before moving to New York in 1959.[6] In his autobiography,Breaking Ground: An Immigrant's Journey from Poland to Ground Zero, Libeskind spoke of how the kibbutz experience influenced his concern for green architecture.[7]
In the summer of 1959, his family moved to New York City on one of the last immigrant boats to the United States. In New York, Libeskind lived in theAmalgamated Housing Cooperative in the northwestBronx, a union-sponsored, middle-income cooperative development. He attendedthe Bronx High School of Science. Theprint shop where his father worked was on Stone Street inLower Manhattan, and he watched the original World Trade Center being built in the 1960s.[8] Libeskind became a United States citizen in 1965.[9]
Libeskind began his career as an architectural theorist and professor, holding positions at various institutions around the world. From 1978 to 1985, Libeskind was the director of the Architecture Department atCranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.[12] His practical architectural career began in Milan in the late 1980s, where he submitted to architectural competitions and also founded and directed Architecture Intermundium, Institute for Architecture & Urbanism.
Libeskind completed his first building at the age of 52, with the opening of theFelix Nussbaum Haus in Osnabrück, Germany in 1998.[13] Prior to this, critics had dismissed his designs as "unbuildable or unduly assertive".[14] In 1987, Libeskind won his first design competition for housing in West Berlin, but theBerlin Wall fell shortly thereafter and the project was cancelled. Libeskind won the first four project competitions he entered including the Jewish Museum Berlin in 1989, which became the first museum dedicated to the Holocaust in WWII and opened to the public in 2001 with international acclaim.[15] This was his first major international success and was one of the first building modifications designed afterreunification. A glass courtyard was designed by Libeskind and added in 2007. The Academy of the Jewish Museum Berlin also designed by Libeskind was completed in 2012.
Libeskind was selected by theLower Manhattan Development Corporation to oversee the rebuilding of theWorld Trade Center,[16] which was destroyed in theSeptember 11, 2001 attacks. The concept for the site, which he titledMemory Foundations, was well-received upon its presentation to the public in 2003, although it was ultimately changed significantly before its execution.[17] He was the first architect to win the Hiroshima Art Prize, awarded to an artist whose work promotes international understanding and peace. Many of his projects look at the deep cultural connections between memory and architecture.[18]
Studio Daniel Libeskind is headquartered two blocks south of theWorld Trade Center site in New York. He has designed numerous cultural and commercial institutions, museums, concert halls, convention centers, universities, residences, hotels, and shopping centers. The studio's most recent completed projects include theMO Museum in Vilnius, Lithuania; Zlota 44, a high-rise residential tower in Warsaw, Poland; the Ogden Centre for Fundamental Physics atDurham University in Durham, England; theNational Holocaust Monument in Ottawa, Canada; and Corals at Keppel Bay in Singapore, adjacent to the studio's previous completed projectReflections at Keppel Bay.
In addition to his architectural projects, Libeskind has worked with a number of international design firms to develop objects, furniture, and industrial fixtures for interiors of buildings. He has been commissioned to work with design companies such as Fiam,[19]Artemide,[20]Jacuzzi,[21] TreP-Tre-Piu,[22] Oliviari,[23] Sawaya & Moroni,[24] Poltrona Frau,[25] Swarovski,[26] and others.[27]
Libeskind's design projects also include sculpture. Several sculptures built in the early 1990s were based on the explorations of his Micromegas and Chamberworks drawings series that he did in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Polderland Garden of Love and Fire in Almere, Netherlands is a permanent installation completed in 1997 and restored on October 4, 2017.[28] Later in his career, Libeskind designed theLife Electric sculpture that was completed in 2015 on Lake Como, Italy. This sculpture is dedicated to the physicistAlessandro Volta.
Daniel Libeskind was the Head of the Architecture Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan from 1978 to 1985. He produced exhibitions, several essays and books, suites of drawings, and large-scale explorations like the three machines (Reading Machine, Writing Machine and Memory Machine).[30] The machines, produced with his Cranbrook graduate students during the 1984-85 academic year, called theThree Lessons in Architecture were displayed at the Venice Biennale in 1985. Libeskind and the group won a Stone Lion award for the work.[31]
Libeskind has taught at several universities, including theUniversity of Kentucky,Yale University, UCLA, Harvard, the University of London, and theUniversity of Pennsylvania.[9] He continues to teach students at various universities including the Catholic University of America.[32]
His work is inscribed within the loosely-defined style ofdeconstructivistm.[33] While much of Libeskind's work has been well-received, it has also been the subject of often severe criticism.[34] Critics charge that it reflects a limited architectural vocabulary of jagged edges, sharp angles and tortured geometries,[35] that can fall into cliche, and that it ignores location and context.[36] In 2008Los Angeles Times criticChristopher Hawthorne wrote: "Anyone looking for signs that Daniel Libeskind's work might deepen profoundly over time, or shift in some surprising direction, has mostly been doing so in vain."[37]Nicolai Ouroussoff stated inThe New York Times in 2006: "His worst buildings, like a 2002 war museum in England suggesting the shards of a fractured globe, can seem like a caricature of his own aesthetic."[35] In the UK magazineBuilding Design,Owen Hatherley wrote of Libeskind's students' union forLondon Metropolitan University: "All of its vaulting, aggressive gestures were designed to 'put London Met on the map', and to give an image of fearless modernity with, however, little of consequence."[38] William JR Curtis inArchitectural Review called his Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre "a pile-up of Libeskindian clichés without sense, form or meaning" and wrote that his Hyundai Development Corporation Headquarters delivered "a trite and noisy corporate message".[36]
In response, Libeskind says that he ignores critics: "How can I read them? I have more important things to read."[39]
Interior at Crystals at CityCenter, Las Vegas, Nevada, US
Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, California, US
PWC tower, CityLife, Milan, Italy
CityLife Residences, Milan, Italy
Ogden Centre for Fundamental Physics at Durham University, Durham, England
National Holocaust Monument, Ottawa, Canada
Vanke Pavilion, Expo 2015, Milan, Italy
Imperial War Museum North, Trafford, Manchester, England
The following projects are listed on the Studio 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.
First recipient ofhonorary degree of Doctor of Fine Art fromUniversity of Ulster in recognition of his outstanding services to global architecture and design (2009)[50]
MIPIM award in Best Urban Regeneration Project for KoBogen (2014)
FIABCI Prix d'Excellence Award, Residential for Reflections at Keppel Bay (2013)
European Museum Academy Prize for the Military History Museum (2013)
Libeskind has lived, among other places, in New York City, Toronto, Michigan, Italy, Germany, and Los Angeles.[52] He is both a U.S. and Israeli citizen.[53]
Nina and Daniel Libeskind have three children: Lev, Noam, and Rachel.[54]
In the Unlikeliest of Places: How Nachman Libeskind Survived the Nazis, Gulags, and Soviet Communism (2014) Annette Libeskind Berkovits; foreword by Daniel Libeskind (ISBN978-1-77112-0661)
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