DANIEL LIBESKIND: “I NEVER HAD A

GOAL”
SHORT PROFILE
Name: Daniel Libeskind
DOB: 12 May 1946
Place of Birth: Łódź, Poland
Occupation: Architect

MARCH 7, 2014

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Mr. Libeskind, Goethe compared architecture to frozen music and
said that “the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches
the effect of music.” Do you agree?

Oh, absolutely! Architecture is not just an intellectual or abstract exercise, it is

an emotional experience just as music is. It is very precise, it cannot be off by
one half of a vibration because everyone would know that it doesn’t sound
right. It has to communicate to the soul and everybody has to share it in a
deep emotional way. It is always about a performance and what happens after
the performance. When you leave a building, it is like leaving a piece of music.
It is still in you and still with you. So yes, I think these two are very closely
linked in my experience.

Did your history as a virtuoso musician somehow help lead you

into architecture?
I don’t think I would be doing architecture if I hadn’t been a musician in a
former lifetime. You have to be able to create a series of drawings just like a
musical score, you have to orchestrate it, you have to be able to communicate
it, to conduct it. Even though I gave up performing music, I never gave up
music at all because as an architect, what do you do? You have to first of all
listen to a place, you have to listen to the sound of a place, you have to get into
the vibrations of the world, of the unique moment. I don’t think I’ve given up
music, I’ve just changed the instrument!
You are active all over the world – in Germany, Italy, Belgium,
Brazil, Canada, Poland, France, the UK, China, Korea, the
Philippines, and the United States to name a few. Does that
diversity make it more difficult to “get into the vibrations” of a
place?

Oddly enough, the stranger is often a person who can see and understand the
context much better than a person who has lived there for a thousand years.
The “other” can sometimes penetrate through a place and get to know it in a
way which is kind of unbiased and without the huge weight of convention.

How important is it for you to understand the context surrounding

a building – the street, the neighborhood, the city, the country?

Very important. You can’t build anything meaningful if you don’t understand
the context in depth. The context is extremely important, but the real context
is not always apparent – very often it is forgotten and hardly visible: the
history of a place, the traditions of a place. I have been lucky to not just work
around the world, but to have lived around the world too, and not just as a
tourist. So it is actually very important to me to see the connection between
the building and the genius loci of the place. Also, the human soul is universal
wherever you go, across religion, across ethnicities, across continents. We are
all connected. That is the beautiful thing about architecture.

Architecture is also an ancient practice. Do you think it has

changed significantly with the advent of modern technology?

Of course with modern technology, with communications, we can do things

that have never even been dreamed of before. But don’t overestimate
technology. At the end, no matter how much technology we have, we will still
want to have the real experience because we have a body. We are not just
minds, we are carnal, we are incarnated, it is a visceral experience, so
architecture will always play an incredibly important role in this primordial
sense of light, of weight, of transcendence, of hope, of dreams.

Would you ever design a church or a synagogue?

You know in fact I designed a synagogue that didn’t get built and I designed a
mosque that didn’t get built. Those are really amazing programs because they
deal with something that is the most difficult thing – to present an experience
of divinity. In a way every building aspires to do that anyway. Whatever they
say about the secular, about the sky and the earth, we long for something that
isn’t just the question of causality, but answers why we are doing it. So yes, I
would certainly love to design one day a church, or a synagogue, or a mosque.

Jüdisches Museum BerlinPhoto by Günter Schneider

You have created a lot of buildings laden with meaning – the
Jewish Museum in Berlin and the master plan for Ground Zero in
New York being the two best known. Is it important for your
projects to have such profound symbolism?

I do lots of very prosaic programs too – shopping centers, houses, housing

projects, offices, educational buildings – but somehow it was my fate that I
started with the Jewish Museum, that was my first project, and then, more
than a decade later, I won the competition for Ground Zero. These are projects
that are for me the most complex because they deal with such a moment of
importance that cannot just be reduced to a roof and some walls and some
windows. But every project that I do has a poetic element, so everything has a
dimension of meaning that has to be addressed in my view.

How did you have the confidence to take on a project as ambitious

as the Jewish Museum as your first project?
Many people overestimate the notion of experience, that you have to work and
work and work and then you can do something. I was an architect, but I chose
a different path. I didn’t apprentice myself to an office, I didn’t like that path,
so I tried to forge another path. Gaining experience is good, but it is also an
obstacle because in some ways you have to forget what you know. You have to
cease being an expert in order to do something new and something good.

“I think it is much better not to have a

goal, but rather to have a path.”
The Jewish Museum was completed when you were already over 50
years old. Before that were you frustrated to be teaching
architecture rather than actually building things?

No, it was a privileged existence to be a teacher. And I wasn’t just talking – I

was drawing, I was building models. You know, you have to have a path,
pursue a path. I never had a goal. Many people think you should have a goal
and then go for it and get to the goal. I think it is much better not to have a
goal, but rather to have a path. Taking the path is very vulnerable and
threatened by being pulled to the left or to the right, but if you stay on this
thin and narrow, straight path, something of an adventure, something of
meaning will happen to you. That is how I pursued my path.

What was your path?

Follow the things you love! Follow the things that you are intensely passionate
about. Follow the things that you like to do, which often to others might seem
unimportant. When I was doing my series of drawings, that is how I really
developed my architecture. Maybe they seemed abstract to people, maybe they
seemed crazy, but to me they were architecture at the time. And they are still
architecture, because I still use those drawings in my current work. Drawing
was a path.

What does it feel like to walk through a building that began as a

dream in your mind?

It’s literally like a dream coming true. The dream is on your desk, and you
develop it through drawings and models, and then suddenly it happens and
you are walking through a building or even through a whole neighborhood
that you built. It is something unprecedented because you can’t simulate a
dream and then make it reality. That doesn’t work. You have to develop the
dream! It is an amazing thing. It is something that is hard to put into words
because you go from such a delicate thing like some lines on paper to
something that is very large and important, like a civic space.

It sounds like you don’t have a problem finding inspiration.

No, if you have a problem with inspiration you shouldn’t be an architect! You
should be a technician. Architecture is a fantastic art because it allows you to
be inspired by everything from science and mathematics to the most ineffable
senses of light and sound. It is one of the spectral fields that covers the full
range of human desires, emotions, and weaknesses.

Do you have a favorite building?

I was just in Paris and one of the buildings I always think about is the Eiffel
Tower. When it was first built, all the great writers like Baudelaire, Dumas,
Maupassant, all the great musicians like Gounod, and all the great
philosophers wrote a petition against it to tear it down. They said, “We hate
this building! It is marring the beauty of Paris.” And yet it is the most fantastic
building because it has no real function, it has no apparent origin, but it
created the idea of Paris itself. To me that is one of the symbols of greatness: a
building that at the beginning nobody liked, that everybody thought was a
folly, and yet in the long run it created the entire mythology of one of the great
cities of the world.

Do you ever worry about your buildings becoming dated as they

age?

No, I think only what is dated can be great. Things that are not dated will
never be great. That is why we have the Renaissance, we have Baroque, we
have Ancient Chinese architecture, we have Modern. If it has no date, it is a
generic product. But architecture does have a date. It comes out of the spirit of
the times, call it the Weltanschauung, it is inspired by that reality. So yes, of
course you have to do something that has a date and transcends that date as
well, but anything that is not dated is, I believe, not architecture; it is simply
construction. It is something totally different, bland and faceless.

What is architecture for you?

I think it communicates the richness of culture. Despite the fact that it has a
lot to do with technology and with engineering, it is a central cultural field.
When you do a building you are also communicating a story, you are telling
something, and I often say even the most banal building tells you something –
it tells you that there is nothing to tell you! But architecture is an art of
communication and it is an art of culture and it is an art of the intellect, it is
poetry, it is music.