Daniel Libeskind: ‘New York skyscrapers are contemptible, suburban, horrible’

Daniel Libeskind is sitting amid wall-towall, floor-to-ceiling art books in his Lower Manhattan studio, just moments away from the site where one of his most high-profile projects, the new World Trade Center complex, is nearing completion.

Other world-famous architects have designed its towers, but the master plan – entitled Memory Foundations – was Libeskind’s, with waterfalls and acres of green public space providing a place for reflection amid the gleaming new high-rises.

Libeskind, 76, lives near there too, with his wife, Nina, 74, in a 1900s building, ‘on the seventh floor’, he specifies. ‘That’s the best floor, because, as Le Corbusier said, you’re part of the street and part of the horizon at the same time,’ he says, smiling. And on his daily walks around Ground Zero, he is delighted to see the place that, in a split second one bright blue morning 20 years ago became synonymous with terror and loss, now re-emerge in a new light.

‘The neighbourhood has changed so dramatically. Now it has come back to life and it’s a beautiful, wonderful place to be. It has taken nine years to construct the buildings, streets and infrastructure, and to regain that spirit, and it has created a new place to be in New York,’ says Libeskind, who, having moved to the city with his parents and sister at the age of 13, watched the original Twin Towers being built.

When the 9/11 attacks hit, he was in Berlin visiting his daughter, Rachel. ‘I was determined to get back. I had to be there. Little did I know I’d win the competition [to rebuild the World Trade Center].’

New projects

Libeskind, you imagine, is a man who doesn’t like to be pinned down in one place for too long. He used lockdown time well, he says: ‘I produced hundreds of new ideas and immersed myself in architecture.’ But now he is back travelling the world for his many new projects.

He was recently in Chile, where he has designed an anthropology museum in the Atacama Desert. ‘It will house some of the first mummies. They weren’t in Egypt, apparently, they were there,’ he exclaims, relishing the opportunity that every project gives him to learn because, ‘If you stop learning, you’re dead.’

In Jerusalem he’s working on a building to house Albert Einstein’s archives (‘The theory of relativity – it’s all here!’). He’s also working on the Jewish Museum Lisbon, a huge sports arena in Finland, film studios in Berlin, and luxury apartment schemes in Dubai and Miami.

In London, the architect behind the Imperial War Museum North, in Manchester, and the London Metropolitan University Graduate Centre, is watching the completion of a new Maggie’s Centre – the latest in a network providing support to those with cancer and their families, founded by heiress Maggie Keswick Jencks, before her death from cancer in 1995 – take shape, a building he describes as ‘a small, unexpected jewel behind the hospital that will bring solace’.

And he so loves everything he does, he doesn’t see it as a job. ‘I have so much fun. I don’t feel I come to work. I feel, “Wow, so many great things to be discovered today.”’

The Hennessy bottle

Libeskind’s inquiring mind has recently led him to branch out, too, from buildings to bottles, with a $7,000 limited-edition decanter for Richard Hennessy, one of the rarest Cognacs in the producer Hennessy’s collection. The process wasn’t as different from his day job as you might imagine, he says.

‘It’s really quite a rigorous and organic process of coming from the idea to the realisation, and it’s as complex as a building. It’s something you can touch. It’s about your relationship to it. Just because it’s small scale doesn’t make it any simpler than tackling a large project, and just like architecture, you have to take the tradition and embed it in a cutting-edge new form because we’re in the 21st century.’

Visually, too, his Hennessy bottle has the unmistakable hallmarks of Libeskind’s architecture. The angular glass shape that surrounds the curved inner bottle brings to mind the shard that splices through his military history museum in Dresden, or the arrows of mirrored steel that hover above his new Dutch Holocaust Memorial of Names in Amsterdam.

His signature style leads many commentators to describe his architecture as ‘deconstructivist’. ‘It’s a terrible label!’ he retorts. ‘It’s so misleading. Architecture is about constructing things, and that’s what I do.’

Happily for Libeskind, though, with Hennessy based in one of the new World Trade Center towers, the project kept him in the place that fires his imagination unlike anywhere else. ‘Every time I open my eyes in the morning or go home late at night, I feel so lucky to be in the city. It’s beautiful, complex, disturbing, inspiring – full of energy and constant motion towards the future.’

Married life

There is little that doesn’t elicit enthusiasm from Libeskind, and his boyish face often breaks into a beam when he speaks. Particularly so when he talks about Nina, the daughter of the late Canadian politician David Lewis, whom Libeskind met at a summer camp when he was a university student and she a camp counsellor. They married in 1969, set up Studio Libeskind 20 years later, and still work together on every project.

‘What would I do without her partnership? She’s fantastic, and she’s not just a business partner. I would call her my boss,’ he says with a smile. ‘We have a great group of architects, but Nina is a critical thinker. She’s a strategist. We have so many different projects – which do we take, which do we not take, how do we organise things? She’s got a great mind for all of that, which I don’t have. We have such a wonderful time and I’m so happy she agreed to stick this out with me.’

They share aims, he says, such as helping to tackle the climate crisis. ‘How do we decrease the carbon footprint of buildings and innovate new materials? How can people afford good, decent places to live? Whether it’s in Europe, China, South America – the same problems are everywhere,’ he comments. ‘We also share the notion that we have to change how we address the city, because we can’t go on with poverty and accept it.’

He has little truck with New York’s skinny skyscrapers whose residences cost tens of millions of dollars. ‘They’re contemptible. They have no spirit. They’re suburban dreams in the skies of New York. It’s horrible,’ he says. ‘They’re exercises in egotism that suppress the idea of a city. Just because an oligarch can come in and buy a $200 million apartment doesn’t make it something that’s good for the city. When money can just be thrown away like that, it’s not good for civic society.’

Where he and Nina don’t always see eye to eye, he adds, is politics. ‘Yeah, we do argue. That’s healthy. She’s far more radical politically. She’s a fighter. She rejects the status quo. Maybe I’ve become too centrist. She’s not willing to be like that. She thinks some people shouldn’t be part of the political system – they’re too regressive.’

‘A lucky architect’

When the couple need a break from New York, they escape to an apartment in Berlin, close to Rachel, 33, who is an artist, their 42-year-old son Noam, an astrophysicist, and their five grandchildren, all aged under 10. (Another son, Lev, 45, worked for Studio Libeskind until recently, on the business side.)

Libeskind enthuses about the German capital. ‘I’ve spent so many years in Berlin, I have so many friends there. It’s our home. Whenever I go there, I feel, “My gahd, it’s almost like being in Tel Aviv again.”’ The couple also own a 1,000-year-old house in a tiny village in the Var region of southern France. ‘If I only had time to go there,’ he says, laughing. ‘The house exists in my imagination. How beautiful it would be to sit on that terrace and look at the countryside and drink Cognac. That’s a dream I hope will come true.’

In reality, he isn’t a countryside person, though. He thrives on the complexity that big cities bring. ‘I love high-density cities. After two days in Switzerland, I’m longing to go to Kuala Lumpur or Amsterdam or Milan.’

Libeskind’s conversation is constantly animated, and one word crops up frequently: lucky. ‘Oh my God, I’m a lucky architect,’ he says. He’s lucky to live in New York, lucky to have a home in Berlin. Lucky to have Nina.

When he mentions a recent private commission he undertook – a minimalist stone-and-glass house near Tel Aviv for a young family, only the third private home he has ever undertaken (the others were in Mallorca and Connecticut, in 2003 and 2010) – it’s he who feels privileged to be working on a small-scale, personal project, rather than it being the owners’ good fortune to have a one-off property by Daniel Libeskind.

‘If you see someone and you look into their eyes and you see they have vision, then of course you say yes,’ he says, by way of explanation of how these individuals managed to persuade him to build their homes.

Early years

Yet Libeskind’s upbringing was far from fortunate. His parents, Nachman, a factory worker, and Dora, a seamstress, both fled Poland, met each other in Soviet Central Asia after their release from separate Soviet internment camps in 1941, then moved back to Nachman’s hometown of Lódź. They left for Israel in 1957, then moved to New York in 1959.

Nachman lost 89 immediate relatives, including all but one of his nine siblings, in the Holocaust. ‘My mother also lost almost everyone,’ Libeskind says. But he fondly remembers their two-room apartment in a tenement building in industrial Lódź, where his mother showed him how to insert whalebones into girdles. ‘In some ways, it was my introduction to architecture,’ he says.

These days, when he returns to Poland to visit friends, he delights at the sight of the Polish flag projected on his landmark residential tower, Złota 44, in Warsaw. ‘It’s a symbol of Poland, and I love it because it sits opposite the Stalin Palace, which was used to oppress people and my family and myself, so you see the resurrection and the renaissance across history.’

Healing power

Such experiences and memories are integral to his architecture, he says, which has a ‘healing power. I was an immigrant a number of times. My family life, my parents, of course they’re very close to my heart. They always inform my work and make sure there’s balance. You have to stay true to yourself.’

In Pittsburgh, where he has designed a memorial and an institution dedicated to ending antisemitism, on the site of the synagogue where in 2018 a gunman shot dead 11 people, including Holocaust survivors, Libeskind spent months talking to the victims’ families. There is a ‘huge sense of responsibility’, he says, in taking on projects that are imbued with such collective pain.

‘Architecture has to really express something – a profound need that can’t be put into words.’

Part of his success, he thinks, stems from having become an architect relatively late. Previously an architectural theorist and lecturer, he was 52 when his first design – for the Jewish Museum Berlin – was built.

‘It’s definitely a benefit to bring some experience of life to architecture. What’s the rush? You can’t just go straight out and think you can solve society’s problems with architecture. You need to know what it’s like in a homeless shelter or what it’s like to live in a public housing project,’ he says, recalling how he loved sitting on the fire escape of the public housing project in Brooklyn where his family first lived in New York.

‘It was home to hard-working people. The experience showed me architecture is really about people, not just about inventing forms. It’s about how to promote conversation, and spirit, and to give it a shape and a sense of stability.’

Libeskind’s positivity is striking. He isn’t sure where it comes from, though. He pauses, the only moment of uncertainty in our conversation. ‘I don’t know. Given what I know about the past – the genocide, the deaths… I guess I’m a believer that life has an amazing aim,’ he replies.

‘I’m not a cynic or a sceptic or a doubter. I’m a passionate believer that, despite all the awful things that happen, the world is a unique and wonderful place.’