Daniel Libeskind

Libeskind's addition to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto (2007).

Born in Łódź, Poland, Libeskind was the second child of Dora and Nachman Libeskind, both Polish Jews and Holocaust survivors. As a young child, Libeskind learned to play the accordion and quickly became a virtuoso, performing on Polish television in 1953. He won a prestigious America Israel Cultural Foundation scholarship in 1959 and played alongside a young Itzhak Perlman. Libeskind lived in Poland for 11 years and can still speak, read, and write the Polish language.[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, the Libeskinds moved to New York City on one of the last immigrant boats to the United States. In New York, Libeskind lived in the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative in the northwest Bronx, a union-sponsored, middle-income cooperative development. He attended the Bronx High School of Science. The print shop where his father worked was on Stone Street in Lower Manhattan, and Libeskind watched the original World Trade Center being built in the 1960s.[8] Libeskind became a United States citizen in 1965.[9] Libeskind met Nina Lewis, his future wife and business partner, at the Bundist-run Camp Hemshekh in upstate New York in 1966. They married a few years later and, instead of a traditional honeymoon, traveled across the United States visiting Frank Lloyd Wright buildings on a Cooper Union fellowship.[10] Nina now serves as COO for Studio Daniel Libeskind. She is the daughter of the late-Canadian political leader David Lewis and the sister of former Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations Stephen Lewis.

In 1968, Libeskind briefly worked as an apprentice to architect Richard Meier. In 1970, he received his professional architectural degree from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art; he received a postgraduate degree in History and Theory of Architecture at the School of Comparative Studies at the University of Essex in 1972. The same year, he was hired to work at Peter Eisenman's New York Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, but he quit almost immediately.[11] He is both a U.S. and Israeli citizen.[12]

Nina and Daniel Libeskind have three children: Lev, Noam, and Rachel.[13]

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 at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.[14] 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 has lived, among other places, in New York City, Toronto, Michigan, Italy, Germany, and Los Angeles,[10] and has taught at numerous universities across the world, including the University of Kentucky, Yale University, and the University of Pennsylvania.[9] Since 2007, Libeskind has been a visiting professor at the Leuphana University Lüneburg in Lüneburg, Germany.

Libeskind completed his first building at the age of 52, with the opening of the Felix Nussbaum Haus in Osnabruck, Germany in 1998.[15] Prior to this, critics had dismissed his designs as "unbuildable or unduly assertive."[16] In 1987, Libeskind won his first design competition for housing in West Berlin, but the Berlin 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.[17] This was his first major international success and was one of the first building modifications designed after reunification. 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

Libeskind is perhaps most famous for being selected by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to oversee the rebuilding of the World Trade Center,[18] which was destroyed in the September 11, 2001 attacks. He titled his concept for the site Memory Foundations. 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.[19]

Studio Daniel Libeskind, headquartered two blocks south of the World Trade Center site in New York, is currently working on more than forty projects across the world. 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 Haeundae Udong Hyunai I'Park in Busan, South Korea, Academy of the Jewish Museum Berlin in Berlin, Germany, modifications and additions to the Bundeswehr Military History Museum in Dresden, Germany and Reflections at Keppel Bay in Singapore.

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,[20] Artemide,[21] Jacuzzi,[22] TreP-Tre-Piu,[23] Oliviari,[24] Sawaya & Moroni,[25] Poltrona Frau,[26] Swarovski,[27] and others.[28]

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.[29] Later in his career, Libeskind designed the Life Electric sculpture that was completed in 2015 on Lake Como, Italy. This sculpture is dedicated to the physicist Alessandro Volta.

Libeskind has designed opera sets for productions such as the Norwegian National Theatre's The Architect in 1998 and Saarländisches Staatstheater's Tristan und Isolde in 2001. He also designed the sets and costumes for Intolleranza by Luigi Nono and for a production of Messiaen's Saint Francis of Assisi by Deutsche Oper Berlin. He has also written free verse prose, included in his book Fishing from the Pavement.[30]

While much of Libeskind's work has been well-received, it has also been the subject of often severe criticism.[31] Critics often describe Libeskind's work as deconstructivist.[32] Critics charge that it reflects a limited architectural vocabulary of jagged edges, sharp angles and tortured geometries,[33] that can fall into cliche, and that it ignores location and context.[34] In 2008 LA Times critic Christopher 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."[35] In 2006, in the New York Times Nicolai Ouroussoff stated: "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."[33] In the UK magazine Building Design, Owen Hatherley wrote of Libeskind's students' union for London 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."[36] William JR Curtis in Architectural 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".[34]

In response, Libeskind says he ignores critics: "How can I read them? I have more important things to read."[37]

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.

Completed

Jewish Museum Berlin, 1999

Imperial War Museum North, 2001

London Metropolitan University, London, 2004

The Ascent at Roebling's Bridge, Covington, Kentucky. 2008

Westside interior, 2008

Military History Museum – Dresden, 2010

Złota 44, Warsaw

"The Wings" - sculpture in Munich

• 1989–2001 Jewish Museum Berlin – Berlin, Germany
• 1995–1998 Felix Nussbaum Haus – Osnabrück, Germany
• 1997–2001 Imperial War Museum North – Greater Manchester, England, United Kingdom
• 1998–2008 Contemporary Jewish Museum – San Francisco, California, United States
• 2000–2003 Studio Weil – Majorca, Spain
• 2000–2006 Extension to the Denver Art Museum, Frederic C. Hamilton Building – Denver, Colorado, United States
• 2000–2006 Denver Art Museum Residences – Denver, Colorado, United States
• 2000–2008 Westside Shopping and Leisure Centre – Bern, Switzerland
• 2001–2003 Danish Jewish Museum – Copenhagen, Denmark
• 2001–2004 London Metropolitan University Graduate Centre – London, England, United Kingdom
• 2001–2005 The Wohl Centre – Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel
• 2002–2007 Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, extension to Royal Ontario Museum and renovation of ten of its existing galleries – Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• 2003–2005 Tangent, Facade for Hyundai Development Corporation Headquarters – Seoul, South Korea
• 2004–2005 Memoria e Luce, 9/11 Memorial – Padua, Italy
• 2004–2007 Glass Courtyard addition to the Jewish Museum Berlin – Berlin, Germany
• 2004–2008 The Ascent at Roebling's Bridge, residential condominium building – Covington, Kentucky, United States
• 2005–2009 MGM Mirage's CityCenter, retail and public space on the Las Vegas Strip – Paradise, Nevada
• 2004–2010 Grand Canal Square, Grand Canal Theatre and Commercial Development – Dublin, Ireland
• 2010 Wheel of Conscience monument, M.S. St. Louis Memorial, Pier 21 – Halifax, Canada
• 2001–2011 Military History Museum – Dresden, Germany
• 2002–2011 Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre at the City University of Hong Kong – Hong Kong
• 2006–2011 Reflections at Keppel Bay, high-rise and low-rise villa apartment blocks – Keppel Bay, Singapore
• 2007–2008 18.36.54 private residence – Connecticut, United States
• 2007–2011 Haeundae I Park Marina, skyscraper complex – Busan, South Korea
• 2009 Libeskind Villa – prefab smart house – Rheinzink GmbH & Co. KG Global Headquarters, Datteln, Germany
• 2010–2012 Jewish Museum Berlin Academy in the Eric F. Ross Building, academy – Berlin, Germany
• 2009–2013 Kö-Bogen, Königsallee, Düsseldorf, Germany
• 2012–2015 Mons International Congress XPerience, Mons, Belgium
• 2002-ongoing World Trade Center master plan – New York City, New York
• 2013-2014 Ohio Holocaust & Liberators Memorial, Columbus, Ohio
• 2014–2015 Life Electric, sculpture – Como, Italy
• 2015 Vanke Pavilion, sculpture - Milan, Italy[38]
• 2015 Future Flowers, sculpture - Milan, Italy
• 2015 Milan Expo Gates, sculpture - Milan, Italy
• 2010–2015 Vitra Tower – Sao Paulo, Brazil
• 2013-2016 Lotte Mart - Songdo, South Korea
• 2005–2016 L Tower and Sony Centre for the Performing Arts Redevelopment – Toronto, Canada
• 2013-2016 Corals at Keppel Bay, Singapore
• 2012-2016 Sapphire, - Berlin, Germany
• 2007-2017 Złota 44, residential tower - Warsaw, Poland
• 2011–2017 Main building and auditorium, Leuphana University of Lüneburg – Lüneburg, Germany
• 2015–2017 Odgen Centre for Fundamental Physics at Durham University, Durham[39]
• 2014-2017 National Holocaust Monument - Ottawa, Canada
• 2011-2018 Zhang Zhidong Museum - Wuhan, China
• 2017-2018 MO Museum - Vilnius, Lithuania

• First architect to win the Hiroshima Art Prize, awarded to an artist whose work promotes international understanding and peace (2001)[45]
• In 2003, he received the Leo Baeck Medal for his humanitarian work promoting tolerance and social justice.
• AIANY Merit Award for the National Holocaust Monument, Ottawa, Canada (2018)
• MIPIM/The Architectural Review, Future Project Award for L'Occitanie Tower in Toulouse, France (2018)
• CTBUH Urban Habitat Award for the World Trade Center Master Plan (2018)
• AIA National Service Award for the World Trade Center Master Plan (2012)
• Fellow for the American Institute of Architects (2016)
• RIBA Regional Award for Ogden Centre for Fundamental Physics at Durham University (2017)
• Received an Honorary Doctorate of Architecture from the University of South Florida.
• Doctor Honoris Causa of the New Bulgarian University from 2013 in recognition of his influence on the contemporary architectural research and practice
• First recipient of honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Art (DFA) from University of Ulster in recognition of his outstanding services to global architecture and design (2009)[46]
• 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)
• Gold medal for Architecture at the National Arts Club (2007)
• RIBA International Award for Wohl Centre at Bar-Ilan University (2006)
• RIBA International Award for the Imperial War Museum North (2004)
• RIBA Award for the London Metropolitan University Graduate Centre (2004)
• Appointed as the first Cultural Ambassador for Architecture by the U.S. Department of State (2004)[47]
• Honorary member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, England (2004)
• Man of the Year Award from the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2004)
• Goethe Medal for cultural contribution by the Goethe Institute (2000)
• Time Magazine Best of 1998 Design Awards for the Felix Nussbaum Haus (1998)
• Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1996)
• Venice Biennale First Prize Stone Lion Award for Palmanova Project (1985)
• National Endowment for the Arts Design Arts Grant for Studies in Architecture (1983)
• American Institute of Architects Medal for Highest Scholastic Achievement (1970)

• Daniel Libeskind: Countersign (1992) (ISBN 0-8478-1478-5)
• Daniel Libeskind Radix-Matrix (1997) (ISBN 3-7913-1727-X)
• Jewish Museum Berlin (with Helene Binet) (1999) (ISBN 90-5701-252-9)
• Daniel Libeskind: The Space of Encounter (2001) (ISBN 978-0789304834)
• Daniel Libeskind (2001) (ISBN 0-7893-0496-1)
• Breaking Ground (2004) (ISBN 1-57322-292-5)
• Counterpoint (2008) (ISBN 1-58093-206-1)
• In the Unlikeliest of Places: How Nachman Libeskind Survived the Nazis, Gulags, and Soviet Communism (2014) Annette Libeskind Berkovits; Foreword by Daniel Libeskind (ISBN 978-1-77112-0661)
• Edge of Order (2018) (ISBN 978-0451497352)

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Daniel Libeskind.

• Official Studio Libeskind homepage
• Daniel Libeskind papers, 1968–1992 Research Library at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California
• Libeskind Residences as part of CityLife (Milan) project
• Libeskind Tower as part of CityLife (Milan) project
• Daniel Libeskind at TED
• Architecture in the 20th Century Liebeskind in conversation with Richard Weston and Melvyn Bragg, first broadcast 25 March 1999 on BBC4's 'In Our Time'.
• Unbuilding Walls Libeskind interviewed by Graft Architects.