Groundbreaker

Architect Daniel Libeskind at Ground Zero in New York. AP Photo by Gregory Bull

As Daniel Libeskind’s profile grows, the architect’s world-renowned reputation is taking some significant hits. A conversation about the controversies over the new ROM, Berlin’s Jewish Museum and the reconstruction of Ground Zero.

In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re living in the era of the rock star architect. Big names like Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas and Santiago Calatrava have traded the workaday anonymity of this once humble profession for autograph requests and Vanity Fair profiles. Pushing the needle of this fame-o-meter is 58-year-old architect Daniel Libeskind.

If Libeskind’s profile has soared a little higher than the others, it’s because back in February of 2003, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) named him site planner for Ground Zero, the former site of the World Trade Center – perhaps the most ballyhooed architectural project since Wren rebuilt St. Paul’s Cathedral. Because he designed the addition to the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), due for completion some time in 2006, he’s getting extra attention here in Canada. Also feeding this fame machine is his recently released memoir, Breaking Ground: Adventures in Life and Architecture.

The question is, now that he’s enjoying the kind of VIP treatment normally reserved for concert pianists and movie directors, how does Libeskind feel about this new, somewhat accidental, celebrity?

“It’s a bit unnerving at times,” he says. “The other day the New York Post reported that Daniel Libeskind was spotted in a bookstore, reading a book on medieval architecture. Nina said to me: Thank God it was medieval architecture and not something else.”

The Nina in question is his wife, Nina Libeskind, neé Lewis. As in Steven Lewis (her brother and former Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations) and David Lewis (her father and a founder of the New Democratic Party). Constantly at his side, she’s his business partner, manager and lieutenant. And many a profile has suggested that her savvy in this capacity is what has freed up her husband’s creative soul. Her tireless championing may explain why Libeskind is now a household name, despite having completed his first building less than seven years ago.

As the Libeskind boat gets lifted higher out of the water, there are inevitably those who’d like to sink it. A rancorous and very public battle with the architect David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill – the other firm working on the Ground Zero reconstruction – has meant divided support among New Yorkers for his Ground Zero master plan, which includes the gracefully soaring Freedom Tower, Park of Heroes, hanging gardens and a beam of sunlight that would penetrate the building every Sept. 11, at precisely the moments when the hijacked planes hit the WTC towers.

This hasn’t been his only battlefront. He’s also faced down former New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp. As the competition for Ground Zero lurched toward its conclusion in late 2002, the LMDC narrowed the competitors to two. Libeskind’s Freedom Tower was one; the other was a helical twin tower construction conceived of by the Uruguay-born, New York-based architect Rafael Viñoly and his company THINK. Muschamp at first sided with Libeskind, calling his proposal “marvelous” and pointing out the “brilliantly faceted skyscrapers, forms that recreate the aspiration many architects felt when plate glass was new.” But a few short weeks later the critic abruptly – and rather mysteriously – turned on Libeskind and sided with the THINK team. “Why should a large piece of Manhattan,” Muschamp asked in a column dated Feb. 6, 2003, “be permanently dedicated to an artistic representation of enemy assault? It is an astonishingly tasteless idea. It has produced a predictably kitsch result.”

The New York Post was even less kind, hinting that Libeskind’s immigrant boat voyage from Israel – poignantly recounted in his memoir – was a bit of self-mythologizing. The paper also dredged up Fishing From the Pavement, an all-but-forgotten collection of his poetry, and smirkingly presented samples to their readers.

Through all this Libeskind has kept his cool, remaining masterfully resilient – a proven street fighter whose key weapon is charm.

Given the sturm und drang – his battles with Childs over Ground Zero, breaching the fortress of stodgy Berlin city planners to build his controversial Jewish Museum in Berlin, not to mention his parents’ harrowing escape from the Holocaust, poignantly recounted in his memoir – you’d almost expect a cold, even morose character, one who is all hidebound determination. Instead Libeskind is always laughing, giddy. He’s determined all right – to remain upbeat no matter what. It may just be his lightheartedness, as much as his ground-breaking work, that has set him apart from all the architects that aren’t getting book deals and Charlie Rose interviews.

“All this fighting, all this drama. It’s all part of the deal. Architecture is a very public art,” says Libeskind. “There’s a great deal at stake and a lot of people want their say. In New York everything is harder than anywhere else. It’s an island. A fishbowl. Things take on an intensity.”

Libeskind's controversial vision for the addition to Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum, slated for completion in 2006. Courtesy Miller Hare

It hasn’t been all rose petals here in Canada either. In the June 2004 issue of Toronto Life, Mark Kingwell took aim at Libeskind’s ROM project in an article on what cultural observers are calling the pillars of Toronto’s architectural awakening. In addition to the ROM upgrade, there’s Frank Gehry's Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) rethink, Will Alsop's cantilevered Lego box at the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) and Jack Diamond's new opera house at University and Queen. “The ROM, AGO and OCAD may realize some of [Toronto’s limitless potential], though I take leave to doubt it,” writes Kingwell. “They are, at best, test runs for what is possible. They whet the appetite without satisfying the hunger.”

Kingwell is unimpressed by the architect’s absenteeism from the ROM renovation, torn away as he is by the WTC site reconstruction and “his mounting hunger for publicity – leeching personality appeal from the project.” But Kingwell’s gravest assault on his crystalline ROM addition is that it resembles Libeskind’s plan for the proposed Spiral gallery of the Victoria and Albert museum in London – an upwardly cascading series of glass boxes – and was hence merely a cookie cutter attempt by the architect.

William Thorsell, CEO of the ROM and the man instrumental in commissioning Libeskind for the museum’s renovation, is not, of course, buying any of this. “Libeskind,” he says, “has designed something that is incredibly expressive. It is ebullient. There is nothing shy about it whatsoever. As for comparisons to the Victoria and Albert design, well, anyone who has seen both side by side knows there is very little resemblance.” Thorsell also points out that “the ROM chose Libeskind a year before he was picked to oversee the WTC project. Our whole schematic design was finished in January of 2003. That’s way before he started work on Ground Zero.”

Libeskind’s new memoir has not quieted any of his critics, some of whom have found it heavy on self-promotion and light on architectural insight. It’s flippant in its criticism of his competitors and his account of the fight with Childs is one-sided. While Libeskind’s telling of the story feels genuine, it does, at times, veer toward the earnest. Then again, he is working frequently at Ground Zero, the place where irony very nearly died.

Still, there is plenty to admire in this book, including the way it waltzes between the professional and the personal; from the vicissitudes of his major projects to his parents’ narrow escape from Holocaust deportation – not to mention starvation – and the family’s subsequent immigration first to Israel and then the United States when he was 12. His account of his parents’ time in Stalin’s labour camps and then as refugees in an Uzbek village – where they lived for a time off bugs and boiled weeds – borders on dark absurdity. His aunt Rózia survived Auschwitz but “watched as her baby boy was thrown out of a window and her husband shot.” By his late father’s estimate, the Libeskinds of Lodz lost some 85 of their ranks to the Holocaust. But these tales of Hugo-esque misery end with an uplifting moral message – in this case, the good that comes from tragedy. It’s as though the title could fit into the self-help section at Chapters, right beside copies of Tuesdays With Morrie.

It is perhaps Libeskind’s ability to communicate – a skill sometimes lacking in architects, who have a taste for obscurantist jargon – that helped him win the Ground Zero competition.

Libeskind's vision for Ground Zero. Courtesy archimation

When the seven competing architects presented schemes for the site at a press conference in December of 2003, it was Libeskind’s gift of connecting with his listeners that set him above the rest. Instead of technical descriptions, his speech was laden with emotive references to American symbols of freedom. He spoke of his arrival in the U.S. and the first sight of the Statue of Liberty, of how he was struck by the power and clarity of the Declaration of Independence. (His Freedom Tower would stand 1,776 feet tall in tribute to the year of independence.) Then there was the slurry wall – a concrete barrier that holds back the water of the Hudson River and survived the destruction that day. He vowed to make it an integral part of his plan “to stand as eloquent as the Constitution itself asserting the durability of Democracy and the value of individual life.” It was an oratorical outreach of Clintonesque proportions. Like Bob Dole, Libeskind’s competitors didn’t seem to stand much of a chance. At least it seemed that way then.

At the time the World Trade Center was destroyed by terrorists, the New York developer Larry Silvers held the lease on the buildings. He recently settled an insurance claim in the billions. Silvers believes he has the right to develop the site however he wants and while he was willing to accept Libeskind’s master plan, he told the LMDC that David Childs – whose former projects include the Bertelsmann Tower at Times Square and the AOL-Time Warner headquarters at Columbus Circle – would be designing the Freedom Tower. That’s when things turned nasty. Childs had his own idea for a tower, with a different location from the one Libeskind had in mind. Libeskind, in his book, hints at Childs’ passive aggressiveness, how he “wrapped his arm around me and called me Danny.”

Governor George Pataki and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, as well as the LMDC, found themselves in a tough position, caught between the public – who expected Libeskind’s plan to be implemented – and the site owner, who wanted his own architect. In the end, Pataki took the stance of neutral parent and sternly commanded them – like two petulant children – to find a way to get along. Today, the two architects, says Libeskind, “have settled on a framework for developing a long-term reconstruction plan.”

By comparison, Libeskind’s battle to build the Jewish Museum in Berlin – a project he was awarded in 1989 – seems like small potatoes, akin to a squabble with his drycleaner over whether he shrank his trousers. “It’s easy to win a competition,” says Libeskind. “But to build something that’s meaningful, that contributes to the culture, that is practical… that’s a lot harder.”

At the outset, Libeskind’s plan was ambitious. A fractured pattern “like a deconstructed Star of David,” as he describes it, the 10,000-square-metre space would have disorienting sloped floors and spiraling walls as well as a windowless Holocaust Tower. The dour paladins of German architectural tradition – members of the city’s planning commission – weren’t convinced. The mayor felt it was going to be too expensive, while many wondered aloud whether the city needed a Jewish museum at all.

“It was a project so fraught with emotion. Many people, for many reasons – some of them evil – did not want it to go ahead,” says Libeskind.

He persisted, and eventually the museum – a zinc-clad zigzag along Lindenstrasse, the former border between East and West Berlin – opened on Sept. 9, 2001. The result is, from any perspective, astonishing – a moving tribute to all the suffering and, given its plain oddness, a monument to perseverance. Once built, all the naysayers fell into an awe-struck silence.

“I never hear from my critics,” says Libeskind, “once my buildings are built.”

On paper, that may sound arrogant but when you hear it from him, it just sounds confident. At any rate, Thorsell insists that Libeskind’s unique brand of architecture has earned him the right to blow his own horn. “This is architectural expressionism,” says Thorsell, “pure and simple. What that means exactly is that the work is completely original. It’s not a throwback to anything or a comment on an earlier style. It’s always signature. I can look at one of Libeskind’s buildings and identify him immediately as its author. Like Gehry and Calatrava, he’s an architect who has discovered a new language that is quite distinctive. It’s all very rigorous. It’s emotionally compelling. And that’s why it’s so terribly exciting.”