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Daniel Libeskind

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The aluminium clad east face of the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, England.
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The aluminium clad east face of the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, England.

The Jewish Museum in Berlin
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The Jewish Museum in Berlin

Freedom Tower (under construction) in Manhattan
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Freedom Tower (under construction) in Manhattan
Daniel Libeskind, (born May 12, 1946 in Łódź, Poland) is an architect who rocketed to fame in 2003 after receiving a commission to create the master plan for the reconstruction of the World Trade Center.





Contents





Biography

One of the leading contemporary architects of today, Daniel Libeskind is the son of Holocaust survivors and became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1965. He is a 1965 alumnus of the Bronx High School of Science. He studied music in Israel and became a virtuoso accordion performer before pursuing an architecture degree in New York City's prestigious Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1970.  
In 1972, he graduated from Essex University with a postgraduate degree in History and Theory of Architecture. Since 1989 he has lived in Berlin with his wife Nina and their three children. 


His architecture uses a language of skewed angles, intersecting geometries, shards, voids and punctured lines to communicate feelings of loss, absence and memory whilst addressing the immediate situation, however typical, in a manner that constantly calls attention to itself. He has mainly designed museums and galleries.


He is married to Nina Libeskind, daughter of former Canadian federal New Democratic Party leader David Lewis and sister of former Ontario NDP leader and United Nations ambassador Stephen Lewis.



World Trade Center Master Design


The Libeskind Museums

Libeskind early credentials were academic and esoteric.


In the 1980s he was head of the Architecture Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.  The academic life gave way when he won two high profile design competitions.  The first was in 1989 to build the Jewish Museum in Berlin.  The museum was to take more than 10 years to build when it opened in September 2001.


The second major competition Libeskind won during this period was the Imperial War Museum North in Greater Manchester, England. which he won in 1997 and which was also completed in 2001.


Both of the museums had striking off-centered placement of simple geometric box structures.  They also caught the eye of New York Governor George Pataki.







2002 World Center Master Design Contest

After the 9/11 attacks destroyed the World Trade Center, Pataki and then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani established the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) to distribute more than $10 billion in federal funds aimed at rebuilding the towers and downtown Manhattan.


LMDC had questionable legal status at the World Trade Center since the owners of the property is the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and Larry Silverstein held a lease which permitted him to rebuild office towers on the site.


None-the-less, the LMDC declared that it -- rather than the site owners or leaseholder -- should create the master plan for a memorial and office towers.


In 2002, LMDC conducted a national competition for a master designer for Ground Zero.


Libeskind was among the finalists[link] which included: 




The finalists were narrowed to Libeskind and Vinoly.


Frank Gehry said several high profile architects refused to even participate as they considered the $40,000 (US) paid to the finalists was demeaning for a project of such stature.[link]


The other finalists depicted massive buildings and a more open space at their base.  Libeskind's design spread the offices over smaller buildings with one large central tower and less open space at their base.


LMDC chose the Vinoly design (dubbed "Project Think").  However Pataki intervened on Libeskind's behalf.  LMDC reversed course and Libeskind who had never designed a big tower wound up with a commission for one of the biggest, most high profile complexes in the world.







Memory Foundations Master Plan


Overview

Libeskind's plan called for a memorial in the center with five large office buildings arranged in an ascending spiral upward from the southeast of the site.  The spiral's pinnacle - the tallest building at the site - would be the 1776 foot (541 m) Freedom Tower, designed by David Childs.  Also included will be a transit station designed by Santiago Calatrava, a museum being designed by architectural firm Snøhetta, a cultural complex being designed by Frank Gehry, and various parks and public spaces.


The plan aims to fully replace the 10 million square feet (1 km²) of office space lost on September 11th, to memorialize the victims of the attacks, and to revive New York City's economy and skyline.  If schedules were met, the plan would be completed by the year 2015.


Detailed information about the Memory Foundations site plan can be seen [here].


LMDC was to be criticized for allowing Libeskind to attempt to micromanage the exact look and feel of the buildings.  The argument had been that a master designer merely says what buildings go where and then leaves it up to the actual building architects to design the building.  While most of his plan has changed so significantly that he now does not even acknowledge the plan as one of his official projects, there are major legacies that affect the overall project for better or worse.



Freedom Tower

The single biggest Libeskind legacy is the Freedom Tower.  Libeskind envisioned a tower with aerial gardens and windmills with an off center spire reaching a symbolic 1,776 feet high.  Libeskind thumbed his nose at a request to place it in a more rentable location next to the World Trade Center (PATH station) and instead placed it a block west because in profile it would line up and resemble the Statue of Liberty.  Although the design was to be changed so the tower lost the Libeskind touches and become more buildable, the name "Freedom" stuck as did the height and the spot on the grid.

The Slurry Wall

The so called slurry wall that had kept the Hudson River out of the base of the original WTC tower was little more than an engineering footnote before Libeskind enshrined it as a basic part of any design.  Libeskind's original plan called for the WTC memorial to be 70 feet below street level so that it could celebrate the wall.  Because of various technical considerations to the depth was raised to 30 feet and there was a philosophical desire to turn the  footprints into a piazza for the new buildings.  The slurry wall is now considered a major part of the memorial process contributed to efforts to protect other parts of the footings of the original towers.  The idea of a sunken rather than street level memorial has stuck thus far.

Wedge of Light

Since the memorial would be below ground level, Libeskind left the northeast corner of the site open as he hoped the light around the September autumnal equinox would hit the footprints.  There was considerable criticism that this would not happen.  However, the World Trade Center (PATH station) was set at an angle so that it would permit the light if it in fact comes.



Memorial Master Design Abandoned in 2003 With Reflecting Absence

Libeskind's plans first started coming undone in the 2003 World Trade Center Memorial Design Competition.


Libeskind had envisioned that the memorial would be 30 feet below ground, with an exposed truck ramp coming in from the southwest corner.  Further a massive golden World Trade Center museum would hang suspended over the northeast corner of the site.  A Performing Arts Center would be built over part of the footprints of one tower and a think tank/art gallery (to become the International Freedom Center) was to overhang the other footprint.  The entire southeast corner was to have a giant waterfall.


The design rules said you should follow that guideline but you absolutely did not have to.  All of the finalists except Michael Arad met those guidelines.  Arad totally obliterated Libeskind's buildings and his design won the World Trade Center Memorial competition.



Freedom Tower Redesign Ends the Libeskind Era

Libeskind's involvement with Ground Zero effectively ended in 2004 after he also lost a battle with David Childs who is actually designing the Freedom Tower for developer Larry Silverstein.  Libeskind's soaring glass enclosed design with airborne windmills was considered unsafe and unbuildable.  Libeskind continued to be quoted in the newspapers about developments but his active involvement was over.  


Libeskind has received numerous commissions since then on the strength of his World Trade Center fame.



Buildings




Internal space of Jewish Museum in Berlin

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Internal space of Jewish Museum in Berlin






The following projects are listed on the Libeskind official site.  The first date is the competition date.  The second is the estimated completion date



Completed



Underway




Artist's rendering of the Royal Ontario Museum expansion when completed

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Artist's rendering of the Royal Ontario Museum expansion when completed









Proposed




Proposed apartment tower in Warsaw.

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Proposed apartment tower in Warsaw.









Unbuilt



Other projects

In addition to his architectural projects, Libeskind has also worked in the theatre creating set designs for opera. He created the sets for the 2001 production of Tristan und Isolde at Saarbrücken's Saarländisches Staatstheater. The following year he designed the sets for a production of Messiaen's Saint Francis of Assisi by Deutsche Oper in Berlin.  He has also written free verse poetry included in his book Fishing from the Pavement.



Bibliography



External links











































 





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