PART OF A GREATER REALITY

Ralf F. Broekman and Olaf Winkler in conversation with Daniel Libeskind

Daniel Libeskind, you were a talented musician already as a child, received a scholarship and started in that direction at the beginning of your professional life. Why and how did you decide to become an architect?
It’s a very good question, but I don’t have a very rational answer to it, because I was a virtuoso performer. Perhaps the only answer is that my interests shifted. And of course it was also the fact that I performed on a very bizarre instrument within the field of classical music, or an instrument which normally is not associated with classical music, the accordion. When Isaac Stern heard me playing, he said: You know, you have exhausted the whole instrument, you have to go on now! So I began with the piano, which means going from the vertical to the horizontal – and maybe that let me think of another vertical, which would be architecture. And I was interested in mathematics and drawing, so I drifted into architecture. It was not that I gave up music; I transformed it into another interest.

It had nothing to do with a possible differentiation between architecture as an applied art and music as a free art? You do not differentiate between these two fields?
Absolutely not. I consider them very close. And even though I gave up the performance of music, I am still involved in music in the architecture that I do.

In the field of architecture you became known as part of a group – at least from the outside perception – of very individual architects that were, by the exhibition at the MoMA in New York in 1988, called the Deconstructivists. Did you have a problem with this labeling?
I have no problem with the word or the conception of deconstructivism as it is presented in philosophy, by Derrida, by many other great thinkers in different disciplines, be it law, literature, philosophy, and so on. I was part of the exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art and I would say that was a very ironic title, because it was all about construction. But that was a title given by Philip Johnson at that time. I didn’t have any problems to participate, even though I thought about something rather different than the deconstructivist theory of many people at that time in other fields. Of course there are also interesting analogies, because philosophically, deconstruction is something very profound, in the sense of seeing language in a different mode, seeing thought in a different mode, a different device system of interpretation. It enriches the means of the contemporary. But I certainly didn’t think it was appropriate for architecture.

At that time you worked mainly on a theoretical level. The first building that you completed ten years later was the Felix-Nussbaum-Haus in Osnabrück. How did you experience this shift from theory to practical work?
I never thought that I was a theoretical architect, even though I was considered as such, and even though I didn’t build any buildings and I often drew drawings that were very obscure from the point of construction. Of course architecture is more than drawing and more than writing and more than models; it’s also construction, and there are more problems to solve. But I actually considered myself an architect and I considered what I was doing as architectural work. So I wouldn’t say that it was some sort of a new field when I built the Felix-Nussbaum-Haus.

In your designs you work a lot with something one might call a surplus of semantics. You involve a lot of other cultural influences; e.g. for the Jewish Museum in Berlin you referred to the Opera “Moses und Aron” by Arnold Schönberg, and there are a lot of other elements, especially a strong verbal layer. Did you find it difficult to transfer these aspects not just into drawings, but into built buildings?
I thought that that is what was missing in so-called real buildings. So I brought in a kind of para-architectural ideas, which come, as you say, maybe from modern literature or music or other fields. That was of course also my interest beforehand: to get away from just a modernist formalism and a kind of structuralism that was very prevalent at that time, towards something that I was interested in. Which is architecture as a language, architecture as a means of communication.

Can cultural meaning, transcending the fulfillment of functional needs, consciously be planned; do you think that it can be read, or felt, in the completed building as well?
I definitely think so. I never agreed with Aldo Rossi or Peter Eisenman or theorists who thought that architecture was an autonomous, self-referential discipline. I have always thought that it is part of a greater reality. Of course buildings are communicating in their own way. They do not communicate with words, but they do communicate in other ways, and that has something to do with the tradition of architecture – from way back, whether in the Greco-Roman world or in the Jewish world or in any other world.

Does that mean that the user has to be educated in a specific way?
No. I think every building is part of a cultural context, and either it relates to it and interprets it and moves forward with that cultural context, or it is simply designed as a consumer’s item, as an object that could be replaced by another object. I have always considered it rather nihilistic to see architecture as just dealing with objects, especially autonomous objects. I think that architecture is really more part of the humanistic tradition, of the liberal arts, which deal of course with everything from geometry to poetry.

In current architecture we have a growing dominance of the iconic and of “stars”. This development – which was very much connected to the rise of the so-called deconstructivist architects and their non-conformist designs – might be considered counter-productive to what you say, insofar as it puts the attention on the impact of the outward appearance and takes it away from other aspects.
Of course, but there are all sorts of ways to deal with architecture, whether old architecture or new architecture. I think a reduction of this work to something iconic is just a shortcut to something totally different. It depends on what you mean by iconic. Gothic cathedrals are iconic, a Greek temple is iconic, a Citroën car is iconic, but in very different ways. So, certainly, you are right; I think, the discourse is elsewhere, and perhaps it is true that buildings which strike people in a certain way have shifted the meaning away from, let’s say, the older way of looking at architecture as just as a sort of fabric and pull the attention to something else. Maybe people just call it iconic, but maybe more is lying underneath that word – it might be more than just the image, might be that there is something that is registering things in a different way.

Some tendencies in architecture call for a “normal” architecture, while others very much emphasize the extra-ordinary. How important is individuality in architecture, also in terms of its urban impact?
You know, I don’t share this view of the “normal” and the “abnormal” or the “formed” and the “deformed” or the right or the wrong, in that sense. I think there is a much broader horizon here, at least in my own thinking. And so this idea that there is a kind of standard against which the individual is expressing itself is not the right way of putting the problem. Individuality is important, insofar as architecture is a civic art. If it was just a civic industry, then it could be mass-produced and standardized in a kind of average mass way. But as far as it is a cultural discourse, it is an art, and it does require individuality, it does require an abnormality in that sense, and it requires a certain critique of what you call the norm.

That leads to a question which seems to be quite important within your work: How do you see the relation between cultural continuity – also in a historical sense, including its ruptures – and the originality of a piece of work?
I consider my work as definitely within the tradition, but that does not necessarily mean the obvious aspects of it. There are other, more revolutionary aspects which tradition is always transmitting through its forgetfulness. So there is no contradiction between a building that might seem like a disruption and a building that is actually very well connected to tradition exactly because of that.

In Germany you are very much perceived via cultural projects, while you are also doing urban projects like e.g. the Kö-Bogen in Düsseldorf, which are oriented in a much more commercial direction. Do you differentiate between these different fields?
No, I don’t. But certainly, working on an office building or a retail complex is different from working on a museum, working on a house is different from working on a city plan. Each program requires a connection to its own history. I would not approach an office building as a museum, in that sense. But my interest is to blur the lines between what a shopping center is and a museum or what a residential building is and an educational institution might be. So it’s a very complex question. But whether it’s a city plan in Seoul, which I have just finished, or a house – I think it’s the same discourse, but on different levels because of the different profiles of these programs.

Do you find it more difficult to inscribe these bigger questions into bigger projects?
I don’t think so. I think it’s just a matter of what is inscribed in a certain project. The city plans I designed are certainly not following some clichees or truisms of historical tradition of city planning. And neither the office complex nor the residential building is simply a matter of repetition. One has to push the ideas in a different form, because each of these vast fields of reference has its own very obvious history. And if you want to get in touch with history, you have to do it from the Archimedian point on which that history stands; you can’t just go from the outside and do something bizarre.

Is it more difficult to deal with clients on projects that are more commercial?
No. I think, people who I work with on a large commercial project are interested to create a cultural dimension for these projects, quite equal to those clients on the cultural side who are interested in injecting a commercial aspect into those projects as well. There is a kind of schism between culture and commerce, which applies a division that is really kind of false. Where is the boundary between culture and commerce? Between a museum that ought to be commercially successful and a commercial enterprise that might be culturally important? So again, it’s about how to transform these non-existing borders into something interesting.

How important is signature? You certainly have a very specific signature in your designs. A building by Daniel Libeskind can be recognized.
I can’t help it. I am certainly not interested in a style. It’s not something that I strive for; it’s not something that I think about or try to sort of emulate. Somehow it inevitably looks like my work, no matter what I try to do. Where I didn’t think of myself at all, at some point somebody said: this looks exactly like your work – and I thought it looked like something completely different. Maybe it is the inevitable part of being engaged in that particular way: you just can’t get away. It was never my intent to become a sort of a committee of myself where I neutralise all those aspects. There are new aspects that I continue to find in my drawings, unexpectable, and also in the buildings.

In Milan on the Salone del Mobile you presented some furniture. How important are these small objects in comparison to the big projects? Is that more about playfulness?
Of course it doesn’t have the gravitas of the big projects, but it’s equally architectural. I approached the chairs, the table not as a designer, but as an architect. I am not interested in computer-generated games with forms, but in what is an architectural idea of a sitting position of the human figure, of the human proportion today. How is it different or how does it relate to history? And how does it move into a different direction? So I approach it as a classical, in a way architectural problem which many architects have dealt with in the past.

You work in a lot of different countries and continents, including the U.S., Europe, Asia. Do you see, in these different regions, a specific difference in how architecture is perceived, especially as far as the topics that you talk about are concerned? How do you experience working conditions, but also cultural expectations?
Europe is still Europe, Europe is a continent with an enormous tradition and culture. America is the promised land, the new country. And Asia has its own characteristics. So each one of these continents is different in a way, culturally, in terms of its heritage. But you also find common knowledges, similar desires, similar aspects of how to bring the tradition and the new together somehow. And that makes it so interesting. I am so lucky to work with such diverse clients in so different parts of the world and yet to see that there is an appreciation for architecture and cities. There is a re-awakened sense that this is not just a commercial transaction, but that there is something greater in terms of sustainability than technology, that sustainability is memory itself. That is something that I find connecting all the continents.

Did your cultural influences change since you moved back to the USA?
No. But the cultural references for e.g. a Jewish Museum in Berlin are different from those for the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. It’s a different light. There are different shadows in Europe and a different light in America. You have to see the light of the place you are in. You can’t just universally apply the same. The light changes, and history also has a different weight. So of course there are differences. But I do try – whether it is Ground Zero or elsewhere in North America – to bring other aspects also of a difficult history that is not always appreciated to the fore and to build it.

Would you say that architecture is clearly political, or would you, for specific reasons, prefer to emphasize its cultural meaning?
No, it’s deeply political – you cannot divide the politeia from the cultural or from cultivation. It is deeply political because it’s public. The political is the city, the idiot is the private person; that is the Greek definition. Some buildings are private, some are public, but buildings are standing on public ground. They are standing in cities, on places that are accessible to others, so by definition architecture has a public role.

It feels, though, like some architects today enjoy the freedom due to the stylistic openness and the way technology has developed, but do not expect architecture to have a big influence on the development of the public, of the city in a social sense anymore.
I think that is a complete loss of the field of architecture. People as you say play with technology, play with nice shapes or clever static ideas, but don’t care about the transformation of the city as a cultural entity. And architecture is part of that, it is the biggest book that is open to the citizens in an open society. So I think it is very dangerous when architects forget this cultural, political role of architecture, and treat it nearly as a matter of just follies in the cities, as entertainment rather than a serious part of a discourse of the daily life of people in an open society. Of course it’s different when you work in a society which doesn’t have any freedom. But in an open society that is a key ingredient of architecture: that it is part of public life and therefore part of the political discourse.


Daniel Libeskind, born in Lodz in Poland in 1946, studied music in Israel and New York and was a musician before becoming an architect. He received his professional architectural degree in 1970 from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City as well as a a postgraduate degree in History and Theory of Architecture at the School of Comparative Studies at Essex University (England) in 1972. In 1988 Libeskind was part of the famous exhibition „Deconstructivist Architecture“ at the MoMA in New York. In 1989 he established his architectural studio in Berlin; roughly ten years later he completed his first buildings, namely the Felix-Nussbaum-Haus in Osnabrück and the Jewish Museum in Berlin. In 2003 Studio Daniel Libeskind (SDL) moved its headquarters to New York City. SDL has European partner offices based in Zürich and Milan and maintains site offices around the world, including San Francisco, Denver, Bern, Toronto, and Hong Kong. Daniel Libeskind, who has received numerous international awards, teaches and lectures at universities across the world.
www.daniel-libeskind.com