Layered Narratives: An Interview with Daniel Libeskind

Daniel Libeskind’s Manhattan office resembles a library. Books are stacked up to the ceiling and a stepladder extends to reach the upper shelves. “It’s just a portion of my personal collection,” he explains as we take our seats. “I don’t have space for everything at home.”

Given the architect’s broad interest in the liberal arts, the setting isn’t surprising. Throughout our conversation Libeskind likens buildings to sculptures and compares architecture to music and poetry. “I like to say a building is like a book with many layers of meaning,” he says. “Unless it’s not a good project, then it’s just a very short story.”

Born in Poland in 1946, Libeskind moved to New York with his family in 1959. Much of his early career was spent in academia, but in 1989 he founded Studio Libeskind with his wife Nina. In the early days, critics often dismissed his designs as unbuildable or unduly assertive — that is, until the career-defining Jewish Museum in Berlin.

When the Jewish Museum opened to the public in 2001, its radical design propelled Libeskin onto the world stage. The zinc-clad building, which resembles a broken Star of David, features concrete voices and zigzagging corridors that funnel into nothingness. Only occasionally, and then through slit windows, is the outside world visible; the sense of disorientation is palpable.

Jewish Museum Berlin, Interior Void. Photo by Torsten Seidel

Here, Libeskind’s aim was not to simply create a museum building. He wanted to recount German-Jewish history and convey a sense of physical emptiness. “Architecture is more than a game of geometry,” says. “A building should make a point.”

Paul Celan Courtyard at the Jewish Museum Berlin, photo by Bitter Bredt Fotografie

For his subsequent work on Dresden’s Museum of Military History — now the Bundeswehr Military History Museum — Libeskind again mined the city’s history. This time, he designed a dramatic five-story, 14,500-ton steel wedge that slices through the neoclassical facade like a colossal piece of shrapnel, an intervention intended to express the devastating “disconnect” the city experienced during the Second World War.

I ask Libeskind why he thinks he’s become the preferred designer for such buildings: projects that, much like the 9/11 Memorial in New York, carry charged histories.

“In retrospect, I think it’s because I believe that memory is the key to architecture,” he says. “It’s not only about the real estate and the context, through those matter too, but what underpins architecture is much deeper. It’s community, it’s communal memory — the meaning of things that have happened, the uniqueness of place and culture.”

Libeskind’s ability to tap into the past is also evident in less emotionally charged projects, from a recently completed museum in Wuhan, China, dedicated to the life of the city’s icon of industrialisation Zhang ZhiDong, to his large-scale master plans in Europe.

Zhang Zhidong Museum in Wuhan, photo by Hufton+Crow

Studio Libeskind is currently designing a number of mixed-use schemes that introduce height and density into the urban fabric of historic cities like Milan, Toulouse, and Tampere. All the project incorporate the type of planning, technology, and sustainability that Libeskind believes to be necessary for a 21-century city, but he also aims to tie each new design to its existing context. “If you consider my project in Milan, the materiality adheres to the traditions of the city; it’s very contemporary.”

Urban redevelopment project CityLife, which is nearing completion, is set along a stretch of green parkland in the northwest of Milan and includes tall glass office towers designed by Libeskind, Arata Isozaki & associates, and Zaha Hadid Architects, in addition to a retail district and a series of low-rise residential buildings.

CityLife Residences, Milan. Photo by Michele Nastasi

Libeskind oriented the buildings that make up the housing cluster to maximise daylight and foster connection with the surrounding streets. His arrangement of the residential buildings also creates an internal car-free “social space” inspired by the interior courtyards that were prevalent in Milanese housing until the Second World War.

In many ways the project typifies the architect’s belief that a city should recreate its history and traditions in new and relevant ways. “Today, it’s not about countries,” Libeskind avers. “It’s about cities that are lively, interesting, recreating their histories and traditions in new ways so they can be important.” But, as his work repeatedly demonstrates, to find a design language for the future, we must first understand what came before.

This article appears in a print edition of Kohler magazine