More from the Globe... a bio of Libeskind
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Inside the Crystal, outside the box
MICHAEL POSNER
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
May 19, 2007 at 12:43 AM EDT
NEW YORK — From the surprisingly Spartan 19th-floor conference room of Studio Daniel Libeskind, near the southern tip of Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty rises from the mouth of the Hudson River, a majestic beacon. Almost incongruously, a six-inch model of the same icon – one of those cheap souvenir replicas hawked in Times Square and elsewhere – sits perched on the firm's boardroom windowsill. Neither its presence here nor the panoramic view of New York Harbor are an accident.
Almost 50 years ago, a ship called the Constitution sailed through these waters into port. Among the passengers, arriving from Israel, was an immigrant family of four that included a 12-year-old accordion prodigy named Daniel Libeskind. His parents, Polish Jews from Lodz who had lost 85 relatives in the Holocaust, woke him at dawn to behold the lady with the lamp – symbol of American freedom and possibility.
“I have never forgotten that sight or what it stands for,†Libeskind later wrote. “I saw that statue and the skyline not just as a representation of steel and concrete and glass, but as, really, the substance of the American Dream.â€
Today, 61-year-old Daniel Libeskind is arguably the world's most famous architect. And his career, which he took up in his early 20s, has been a fulfilment of that dream, a story that, if submitted as a script for a Hollywood biopic, would be rejected on grounds of incredulity.
It's the story of a man whose parents survived the Second World War eating bugs and boiled weeds, and who remembers his own childhood years in Lodz chiefly for its anti-Semitism, chased and beaten through the streets. “It was as if the Holocaust had not yet been finished,†he recalls. “It's why I studied the accordion. My parents were afraid to bring a piano into the courtyard for fear of offending the neighbours. Pathetic.â€
The story continues as Libeskind matures into an academic, brilliant but obscure. He enters design competitions but never wins. Until he builds his first building at the age of 52, he has spent no more than three weeks working as a professional architect. A theorist, he conceives of beautiful but commercially improbable, ostensibly unviable buildings – ostensibly, because some of the same mad designs he once scrawled in his basement office are now the toast of the architecture world.
Indeed, from nowhere, Libeskind vaults into the rarefied world of celebrity. People accost him in restaurants, take his picture on subway platforms. He is lavished with prizes, commissions, money. He designs furniture, grand pianos, opera, becomes a media darling and a household name.
On June 2, dressed no doubt in a black Armani suit and cowboy boots, he will be in Toronto to help celebrate the opening of his latest achievement – the $135-million Michael Lee-Chin crystalline addition to the Royal Ontario Museum (which is currently undergoing a $270-million reconstruction). The jury remains decidedly out on the 80,000-square-foot structure that promises to spur a renaissance within the ROM and throughout its urban environs – a colossal gamble by one of Canada's premier cultural institutions.
His goal, Libeksind says, has been to create something grand, a civic presence on an incredibly important Toronto corner that would generate excitement for the ROM's collections. His controversial cantilevered, glass-and-aluminum design was initially sketched and submitted on 11 paper napkins FedExed from Berlin, where he was then based. They were, recalls ROM CEO William Thorsell, “so wonderfully amusing, creative, spirited and cheeky.â€
Libeskind won the competition over 51 other submissions – not just for the boldness of his vision, Thorsell says, but for a dozen other reasons, too, including a meticulous attention to detail. (One of Libeskind's first questions was where schoolchildren would go after depositing their jackets in the cloakroom.)
“He'd call me up on a Sunday morning and we'd have hour-long conversations about the most minute details,†says Thorsell. “For a big thinker, he is very practical. But it's not just about talent and vision. When you choose, you're also choosing a relationship. You're married to this person for five or six years and you have to ask, ‘Can I work with them as people?' and on that issue, I was very keen on Libeskind. We hit it off right from the beginning. He's a very eclectic guy. His subject matter ranges from literature to music to philosophy, ideas – bang, bang, bang. Some people find it a bit disorienting. I do not.â€
Libeskind is equally complimentary about Thorsell. “I wish all my clients,†he says, “had his intellect, his commitment and civic pride.â€
The abstract jigsaw puzzle of his ROM sculpture, however, constitutes only a small chapter in the extraordinary Daniel Libeskind story – and of what he has become.
In the United States, he is far better known for winning the 2003 competition – over some of the world's top architects – to become master planner of probably the most ambitious architectural project in American history: reconstruction of the 16-acre (6.5-hectare) World Trade Center at ground zero.
Years of brutal infighting among the stakeholders – avaricious developers, conflicted public agencies, egotistical architects – have ensued. Libeskind was repeatedly told to walk away, but that's not his style. He compromised, but fought to keep as much of the original schemata as he could. “This is a marathon,†he said, “not a sprint. I'll win some battles and I'll lose some.â€
Libeskind's resourceful wife and business partner, Nina – daughter of late federal NDP leader David Lewis, sister of Canadian diplomat Stephen Lewis, and a veteran political campaigner in her own right – is less sanguine. “I thought I had learned about politics, but I didn't realize what I was up against. I made some mistakes.â€
Still, despite all the losses, “it's my master plan that will be implemented,†Libeskind insists. “And it's finally under construction,†two blocks from his Rector Street offices.
Philosopher though he may be, Libeskind does not shy away from a good scrap. The building that really established his name as an architect of world class – the critical turning point in his career – was the astonishing Jewish Museum in Berlin (opening in 1999, it is the single most popular tourist attraction in the German capital). It took a full decade to complete, so fierce and powerful were the voices of opposition. Even many in the local Jewish community, fearful of a resurgence of anti-Semitism that the high-profile building might precipitate, were ambivalent.
At one point, Berlin's mayor offered Libeskind a chance to build a skyscraper in Alexanderplatz, heart of the united city, if only he would walk away from the Jewish Museum; Libeskind declined. At another, the Berlin Senate scrapped the project outright. But the resourceful Nina organized an international lobby effort to pressure Berlin to reverse the decision.
When the building opened in 1999, German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder knelt in front of Libeskind's 90-year-old father, Nachman, and said, “Thank you for coming to Germany.â€
Since then, Libeskind has also put his signature on several other high-profile commissions, including the Imperial War Museum in Manchester, England, and the Denver Art Museum (hailed as one of the new wonders of the modern world by Condé Nast Traveler Magazine).
Dozens of other ventures are in development: a shopping mall (Bern), an art centre (Boston) a theatre (Dublin), a university complex (London), condo high-rises (Singapore, Kentucky, Warsaw), a retail emporium (Las Vegas). He has been offered 90 projects in China and refused them all, on political grounds. Every week brings new invitations. With its head office in New York, a satellite operation in Zurich and project centres in three or four other cities, his studio now employs a staff of about 180.
“The biggest challenge is how to stay small,†says Libeskind. “We could expand tomorrow and be double the size. But at this scale, I can be involved at every level of every project. Otherwise, it wouldn't be fun.â€
About becoming a starchitect, Libeskind is unapologetic. “It's about time people appreciate that architecture is not anonymous. Nobody buys a book without an author; a piece of music without a composer.†Now, along with a few contemporaries – Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid – the diminutive Libeskind is helping to transform the way the world thinks about materials, design and the use of public and private space, articulating a revolutionary vision of what architecture can and should be.
According to Dutch professor Marc Schoonderbeek, Libeskind sees post-Holocaust, post-Hiroshima architecture as a spiritual domain. “Libeskind has a profound desire for a new time in which the experience of architecture aims at the liberation of space. [He] does not search for a synthesis of solutions; rather he tries constantly to intensify the mystery.â€
Libeskind himself, writing in his 2004 book, Breaking Ground, acknowledges that his own works are a visceral reaction to the cold, neutral, modernist approach. “The goal has been to be immune to expression, to produce objective, not subjective architecture. But who wants to be trapped in an anonymous box? Neutrality is not a value. … The world is enriched not by neutrality or indifference, but by passions and beliefs. Why settle for buildings based on a regimented formula that denies human desire?â€
More artist than technician, Libeskind, says the ROM's Thorsell, leads the vanguard of those mounting the postmodern assault on the efficient, rationalist, grid-oriented Bauhaus style. “He's insisting that architecture is also psychology: emotional, symbolic and romantic. And just as van Gogh's art is different from Matisse's, so Libeskind's is different from Frank Gehry's or Santiago Calatrava's.â€
Although his favourite things in life are solitary – a Bach concerto, a book of poetry, a pad of paper for abstract design – Libeskind is these days almost constantly in motion. He spends more than half his waking life travelling from project meeting to construction site to speaking engagement, Nina usually beside him.
Most architects, however talented, toil in anonymity. Few become famous. Those who do tend to follow a conventional path. They study, apprentice, eventually strike out on their own and, years later, by some alchemical formula of luck, talent and bravura, ascend to a higher plain. Then they retire to academia.
And then there is Daniel – his first name pronounced as in French – Libeskind. “I always say I lived my life completely in reverse,†he says. “Usually, you're active and then reflective. I did it backward. But it shows you: There's hope.â€
For the first 20 years of his career, outside of the academic world, Libeskind was a nonentity, a misfit.
While studying architecture at New York's Cooper Union college, he landed a summer job as an intern with the prominent Richard Meier. Libeskind lasted a single day, repulsed by office routine and what he saw as a cookie-cutter approach to design. After taking a postgraduate degree in England, he came to Toronto, briefly worked as a house planner, and then started teaching, wandering from job to job. Two years in Kentucky. A year with an architectural association. Another year back in Toronto. A Fulbright fellowship at Harvard. “As soon as he came close to getting tenure, the man fled,†says his wife.
Then in 1978, he became architecture director at Michigan's Cranbrook Academy of Art, outside Detroit. He stayed six years. One project from that period, dubbed Chamber Works, was a collection of 28 abstract drawings inspired by music and the writings of Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher. These, Libeskind called pure architecture. Thorsell, who has seen them as well as three-dimensional models Libeskind later made by hand, calls them utterly stunning.
Libeskin also wrote, producing essays that were, depending on your point of view, either incomprehensible or brilliant explorations of the philosophy of his craft. In one particularly dense paper, for example, he observed that “architecture is neither on the inside nor the outside. It is not a given nor a physical fact. It has no history and it does not follow fate. … Architecture as non-existent reality is a symbol, which in the process of consciousness leaves a trail of hieroglyphs in space and time that touch equivalent depth of unoriginality.â€
In 1986, the Libeskinds moved again, this time to Milan, Italy, where he founded his own private school, unaccredited – Architecture Intermundium. One day, unexpectedly, he found a notice under his door announcing a competition to design a new Jewish wing to the Berlin museum. “Within seconds I knew: This was a message sent to me.â€
Then he noticed that, courtesy of Italian postal efficiency, he had already missed the deadline for applications. He asked for an extension, but was denied. Enter she to whom “No†cannot be said – Nina. “We'll just have to get them to understand,†she said. And of course she did.
Libeskind's winning design, a jagged lightning bolt of a building, seemed to break every possible rule. There was no front door. A zigzag void ran through the entire structure. One corridor led to a dead end. In the Holocaust tower, it is so dark you cannot see your feet, just a thin slit of light near the top, out of reach. Most people had assumed it would never be built.
Ironically, Libeskind had just taken a job as resident scholar at the Getty Center in Los Angeles – good salary, assistants, a generous travel budget, a house overlooking the ocean; he'd already shipped the family furniture. “Go,†said the Germans. “A local architect can oversee everything.â€
Nina knew better. “Libeskind,†she said, using the name she always calls him by, “you realize what this means? If you want to build this building, we have to stay in Berlin.â€
He agreed, with one proviso – that Nina, until then a political organizer, labour arbitrator and researcher, work with him. All she knew about architecture, she knew by osmosis.
And so Libeskind, at the age of 42, opened his first architectural office. When he went to the bank to ask for a $125,000 loan, he was asked what collateral he could offer. “We have books,†he replied. “Hardcover art books.†The banker was not impressed.
Today, although it is he who grabs the headlines, the success of Studio Daniel Libeskind owes as much to her as to him. “He would not be doing what he's doing without Nina,†says Thorsell. “She is the total manager of the agenda: what they will do, go after. She manages the clients, all contractual issues, does the hiring and firing, while he is liberated to go off and do his work. It's a real partnership. And she, to boot, knows what she's doing. She's a very shrewd, capable negotiator.â€
The Libeskinds own a summer home in the south of France, but now live principally in a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan's Tribeca neighbourhood, bought for about $1-million (U.S.) in 2003 and remodelled (for another $650,000) by architect Alexander Gorlin. The flat was not large enough to accommodate Libeskind's vast book collections; they are now parked in a storeroom at his office, filling dozens of floor-to-ceiling racks.
Only the youngest of their three children, Rachel, is still at home; finishing high school, she's hoping to study at Harvard. Eldest son Lev is a writer, humanist and translator, living in Zurich. Noam is a cosmologist, finishing postdoctoral work at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The Libeskinds' romantic back story is as unlikely as the rest of the narrative. They met at a Yiddish-language summer camp in upstate New York in 1966. He was 20, she was 17. Both insist it was love at first sight.
“He had wonderful eyes,†Nina recalls. “The intelligence was very clear on his face. He was incredibly thoughtful, mature, always very optimistic and cheerful.â€
“Love has no explanation,†Libeskind says. “There was nothing rational or intellectual about it.†But, he adds in his book, “I knew immediately I should be with her for the rest of my life.â€
After that summer, she went to British Columbia to study, staying only in sporadic contact with Daniel. They did not meet again until 1968, near Montreal, and decided then to get married. “We did not tell anyone,†she says. “They would have been fairly aghast.†They met once more – on Valentine's Day, 1969 – and were married the following May in Ottawa.
Between summer camp and the wedding vows, they had spent five days in each other's company. Her father and mother were, Nina allows, a little worried about the race to the altar. But they were also Polish immigrants and “they loved Daniel and had the highest regard for his intelligence.â€
“We seemed to be completely irresponsible,†says Libeskind, “but time has proven us right.†They just celebrated their 38th wedding anniversary.
Toronto therapist Sandy Fainer, who introduced the couple, says they are fundamentally unchanged, except, she laughs, that Nina, who failed Grade 10 math, can now carry on detailed conversations about engineering and weight loads and stress factors. She is what she always was, a straight shooter who addresses issues head on. She never lets the ball drop. Daniel has had to become a more public pon than he really is at heart, and more pragmatic.â€
Not long ago, when they were considering ideas for the Tribeca renovation, Libeskind initially wanted the entire apartment to be painted white.
“I did play around with that idea,†he says, “but of course the critics from all sides of the family began to question it. I mean, that's how the process works: You go from fantasy to reality.â€
