Building stories

Daniel Libeskind is a self-proclaimed Jewish architect

By SHULA KOPF
Libeskind alongside a model of his Freedom Tower521 (photo credit: REUTERS)
Libeskind alongside a model of his Freedom Tower521
(photo credit: REUTERS)
Celebrity architect Daniel Libeskind learned only late in life that his paternal grandfather had been a magid, a story teller, who had plied his trade from shtetl to shtetl in Poland. This bit of family lore dovetailed with Libeskind’s view of architecture; for he, too, is a story teller. For Libeskind, a building is never just a building.
“I’ve always thought that architecture should tell a story because if a building doesn’t tell a story, it’s a nothing,” Libeskind tells The Jerusalem Report during a recent visit to Israel. “Every building should tell you the deeper story of why it’s there.”
Libeskind, 67, catapulted just 14 years ago to the stratosphere of a handful of anointed architects with his bold sculptural designs that showcase sharp angular forms, slanted walls and sloping floors. Before then, he had spent his career as a professor who postulated avant-garde theories.
Libeskind is a self-proclaimed Jewish architect; and, by that, he doesn’t mean his ethnic affiliation. He is referring instead to his Jewish sensibilities, the cultural values he traces to his parents’ Hasidic wisdom, and how it informs his approach to architecture.
“I am a very Jewish architect,” he states as a matter of fact. “I reject the non-Jewish way of looking at architecture, which is to look at buildings as just material reality. I know that any building that I love is a building full of connection to something memorable, to something that has to do with the larger world, not just the immediate functional use of space.
“Architecture should be able to pose questions, not just make people fall asleep and be anaesthetized, but to invoke the real vitality of life, which is full of something wondrous,” he continues, noting that the Talmud also poses questions and that Biblical literature concerns itself with architecture.
“It’s the Jewish idea of what the world is all about – memory, for example,” he says, the cadence of his words picking up speed.
“It’s the Jewish value that space is not just the superficial idol that people often venerate, but that space is connected to culture, to spirit, and has great resonance in terms of tradition, the present and how it’s oriented towards a new horizon.”
Apart from his cowboy boots, partiality to black clothes and perpetual smile, Libeskind’s most distinctive trademark is his eloquence.
A master of metaphors, he has the ability to entice listeners to envision towers he conjures into existence by the mere power of his words.
He harnesses his Jewish worldview to endow his projects with meaning that goes beyond concrete, steel and glass.
A prime example is his first mega-project, the one that propelled him to stardom – the Jewish Museum in Berlin, which opened to the public in 2001. Prior to winning the design competition some 10 years earlier, Libeskind, the professor, had never designed a real building – not even a small private home – much less a major museum in one of the world’s greatest cities.
“But I understood that what was needed was a connection to this invisible Jewish culture,” he says.
Following its opening, the museum became one of the most celebrated architectural projects in the world, with its unique zigzagging shape clad in zinc that, viewed from above, looks like a broken up Star of David. Libeskind used architecture to induce a sense of discomfort, creating a de facto Holocaust memorial. “I didn’t build the Jewish museum for Jews, because Jews don’t need it. The Jews know the story,” he says.
The museum’s interior includes elements such as a tall, empty concrete shaft called the Holocaust Tower, which holds no exhibits, has no heating in the winter or cooling in the summer, and only a single shaft of light.
“When I thought about it, not just as an architect, but, as a Jew, I asked myself is there any light in the Holocaust Tower?” Libeskind said recently, during a lecture he gave at his former architecture school, Cooper Union, in New York. “For the longest time, and this building took many years to construct, I thought there should be no light. And then, by accident, I read an account by one of the survivors of Auschwitz. When she was closed in the cattle cars, she looked through a crack and she stuck to that crack. She said it was the only thing that connected her to the world.
And she believed that somehow her survival had to do with hanging on to the light.”
Libeskind designed a long, inaccessible void that cuts through the building, creating a space that embodies absence, a reminder of the void the slaughter of millions of Jews left in German culture. In order to move from one side of the museum to the other, visitors must cross one of the 60 catwalks that open onto this void. One path inside the building leads to a dead end. Outside, there is the Garden of Exile and Emigration to commemorate the exile of Jews from Berlin.
For the first two years after its opening, the museum didn’t display a single masterpiece or artifact; the building itself was the attraction drawing millions of visitors.
“When I first spoke about the Jewish Museum in Berlin as a kind of narrative, people condemned me,” he recalls. “There was an entire issue of a German architecture magazine condemning the building. They said it’s crazy and that no one will come. It has proven otherwise, that people do understand it, that there is a story that architecture can tell through light, temperature, acoustics and proportions.”
In San Francisco, Libeskind based his design for the Contemporary Jewish Museum on the Hebrew expression, le’chaim (to life), and on the Jewish idea that Hebrew letters are not just signs but active participants in the story through their symbolic and mathematical values. Two parts of the building form the two Hebrew letters chet and yud, which make up the Hebrew word chai (alive). The larger chet provides the overall continuity for the exhibition and educational spaces, and the yud, with its symbolic 36 (double chai) windows, is located on the pedestrian connector. The building, which opened in 2008, is covered by over 3,000 luminous blue steel panels.
When Libeskind sat down to design the Jewish Museum in Denmark, he drew the Hebrew word, mitzva (commandment, kind deed), to commemorate the Danes’ rescue of their Jews in World War II, and used it as the guiding concept of the museum’s form, structure and light.
Libesk ind doesn’t reserve his architectural metaphors exclusively for Jewish buildings.
For Ground Zero in New York City, he planned what he called “the Freedom Tower,” which would rise to exactly 1,776 feet, corresponding to the year the United States declared its independence. Viewed from a certain point, the tower’s spire would align with the torch of the Statue of Liberty.
“Symbols matter,” he says.
The storyteller’s grandson likes to tell his audience how he first saw the statue as a 13-year-old boy when he immigrated to the US with his parents and sister. Before he sat down to plan the project, Libeskind says he reread the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
“My architecture is different because in its sensibility, it is Jewish,” he says, and without stopping for a beat, adds, “but just because an architect is Jewish doesn’t mean that he has Jewish sensibility. He can produce goyish building even if he is Israeli,” he says, and bursts out laughing, his face lighting up with pleasure.
Libeskind was in Israel to speak at the Jerusalem International Tourism Conference, where he lectured about his various projects around the world. After his success in Berlin, he received mostly other museum commissions; but following the World Trade Center competition, Libeskind received commissions for mega-projects around the world, including high-rise and villa apartment blocks in Singapore, a skyscraper complex in South Korea and apartment towers in Sao Paulo, New York City and Seoul.
With traces of a slight Eastern European accent of someone who didn’t start speaking English until age 13, he lectured at the Jerusalem conference at breakneck speed – so many buildings, so little time. The conversation with The Report takes place in the VIP section backstage. But first, he and Nina, his wife and business partner, waited to speak with Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat.
They wait patiently, vigilant for an opening.
Libeskind is planning a mixed-use project in downtown Jerusalem at the site of the former Eden Cinema, with a residential tower, a hotel, retail space and perhaps a small synagogue.
Libeskind says he approaches all his projects with a sense of awe, but in Jerusalem even more so. “When you build in Berlin, when you build in New York, you cannot take it for granted that you can do whatever you want,” he says. “And, of course, in Jerusalem, it is multiplied because of the city’s history and its spiritual quality. At the pedestrian level, you have to create an ambiance that is contemporary, not sentimental, but has the right atmosphere. Jerusalem is about light.”
Libeskind didn’t set out to be an architect.
Born in Lodz, Poland, to Holocaust survivors, his initial passion was music. At five, he wanted a piano; but his parents were reluctant to bring one through the courtyard where they feared the resentment of the Polish neighbors.
So, Libeskind got an accordion instead.
“Had it not been for anti-Semitism, I am sure that I would not have been an architect,” he says. “I would have been a musician for sure.”
He recalls a childhood of what he calls “mini pogroms.”
“Zhid was the appellation we were called, even by our teachers. We were hounded, beaten up and had to run away, never being a part of anything social,” he recalls. “We grew up knowing that we are surrounded by enemies. Nobody had to tell you this. You knew it.”
The family immigrated to Israel in 1957; and after Libeskind won a music competition playing the accordion, famed violinist Isaac Stern, one of the judges, urged him to switch to the piano. Two years later, the family immigrated to New York. Libeskind went on to study architecture at Cooper Union and quit a prestigious job with architect Richard Meier after only seven days to retreat to the world of academia.
In 1998, he had just accepted a position as a senior scholar at the Getty Center in Los Angeles when he won the competition in Berlin. With all the household possessions en route to California, the Libeskinds reversed course and moved to Berlin to make sure the museum would get built as Libeskind had planned it. The rest, as they say, is history.
“You have plenty of Jewish architects who build buildings that have little to do with Jewish thought,” he says. “There may be a Jewish name on the museum, but it is not Jewish thought that has driven the process.
Even in Dublin, or in Milan, I bring to it a different sensibility. I don’t start with ‘here is a plan.’ I start with putting my ear to the ground and thinking of something totally different than the obvious. Because every site has memory and every site has history.
No site is a tabula rasa just for an exercise or an experiment. Every site has an urgency that wants to be voiced, even if it’s just a prosaic place to live, but to make it good, you have to be connected to the place.”
Today, Libeskind has major projects around the world, including a residential tower in Warsaw, close to where his mother, a direct descendant of the Gerer Rebbe, spent her childhood. “It’s a different Poland now,” he says. From Jerusalem, Libeskind and his wife planned to visit so many cities around the world in 20 days that it must have given his travel agent sleepless nights just to think about it.
And if his grandfather went from shtetl to shtetl peddling stories, Libeskind now travels the world from site to site, letting his buildings tells theirs. 