Ahead of Time

Daniel Libeskind

World-renowned architect

Daniel Libeskind made his name with buildings that represented and memorialised tragic histories, such as the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the Bundeswehr Military History Museum in Dresden.

In 2003, he began what is arguably his most high-profile project to date when he won a global competition to design the overarching World Trade Center Master Plan, the redevelopment of the site in New York where the Twin Towers once stood.

The son of Jewish Holocaust survivors, Libeskind has never shied away from such poignant and emotionally charged projects, believing architecture to be an art form that has to connect with people on an emotional level. As he puts it, “Our life is not made up only of logic, calculation and transaction. It’s primarily lived in an emotional way, in a spiritual way. Architecture, in the same way, has to touch on the emotions.”

This is not to say that architecture necessarily needs to make people feel good, according to Libeskind. Indeed, what has become recognised as his trademark style – characterised by sharp angles and fragmented forms – is sometimes specifically designed to make those in its midst feel discomfort. This is perhaps clearest in his design for Berlin’s Jewish Museum, which opened to the public in 2001 and makes visitors experience the full gamut of human emotion. The project initially divided opinion within the architecture community for its unconventional approach, but has widely come to be seen as a masterpiece of modern architecture.

Aside from these projects, Studio Libeskind has also designed a wide range of buildings all over the globe, from a mixed-use tower in Manila to a hotel and residential building in Dubai. More recently, Libeskind was behind the

design of the Einstein House, a building currently under construction in Jerusalem that will house the legacy and work of Nobel laureate Albert Einstein. The striking design features a twisted cube that is angled skywards, creating a complex geometry inspired by Einstein’s own mathematical research. The project reaffirms what many already know – that Daniel Libeskind is one of the most versatile, original, and forward-looking architects working today.

In this wide-ranging interview, Libeskind discusses how technology is impacting the field of architecture, why memory and history are the key to building the future, and how our cities are really reflections of our society and culture.

Professionally speaking, how do you define your guiding principles?

What is true, what is beautiful, and what is good. Those are the great, ancient values that I subscribe to. Truth in architecture means authenticity, an authentic response, not a stylised one or a simulation, but really delving into the truth of the project and its place in the world. Good in architecture means sustainable, something which will last forever, not just an exercise in commodities. And what is beautiful is beautiful. You can’t define beauty. It just is or it isn’t.

What’s the next big ‘thing’ in architecture, and how might it impact our lives?

There will be, of course, a technological aspect – new discoveries in the physics of materials and the technology of construction to make it more efficient, because building is a very ancient exercise and it hasn’t changed that much in thousands of years. There will be great leaps forwards in how buildings are built. And, of course, artificial intelligence, which will make design completely robotic, and also robots will be used in construction. The big challenge will be: where is the human value of all of this development? How will architecture be relevant to human beings using these artificial means? The art of architecture will be in danger. And architecture as just a commercial product that is manufactured in factories will be commonplace. Will there be an art of architecture, or will it all be just a simulated field of building?

“There will be great leaps forwards in how buildings are built. … The big challenge will be: where is the human value of all of this development? …

Will there be an art of architecture, or will it all be just a simulated field of building?”

We tend to think about AI predominantly in the world of software these days, but you’re saying even architecture, which is such a physical practice, will be affected by it?

It is already. Many offices don’t really have human beings designing anything, it’s all designed by AI. And I think we will see this artificial, simulated product, which looks nice at first, but when you look at it closely, it lacks all artistic meaning, because it’s just a fake collage of already pre-existing forms and ideas.

As someone who has given your whole career to making, as you said, beautiful buildings, how does that make you feel?

I think it will make architecture even more desirable, because it will separate the technological production from the artistic production of architecture. It will be desirable to find architects who can still work on a human level and with a certain spirit. It’s similar to buying a mass-produced, off-the-rack suit and buying a custom-made suit tailored to your proportions, and to your liking.

Another technology that the architectural world has been quick to embrace is virtual reality for visualising designs. What impact might that have?

No doubt about it, that immersive idea of communicating design is already here. People want to have that feeling of what the building will be like, so using this new technology will become the formula. But there is also a problem here, because whatever you can get through a virtual experience of architecture, it is not the same as the architectural experience itself. Architecture depends on your body, on your gravity, and on your whole emotional response. It’s one of the few fields that cannot really thrive on virtual technology. We can do all the acrobatics with technology, but we are alive, we have bodies that are more than just our brains. That’s the enigma of the human condition. Maybe at some point we will just be brains, and we will not move around, like in science fiction. But I would not call that life.

When you look ahead, what creative opportunities will this future present for architects?

The creative part is to understand the history of the city, not treating the city like a tabula rasa for utopian dreams, but really using the history of the city to bring out its best. That means adaptive reuse of buildings, and also, of course, finding new ways of bringing something completely new to the city through structures that are unprecedented.

So much of your work has been about memory, about understanding history and bringing it to life in the form of architecture. Do you worry that sometimes modern architecture is too ‘utopian’, that it has lost its foundation within memory?

Definitely. Without memory, the city becomes a demented operation. We are like people with Alzheimer’s who don’t recognise where they are. Memory, to me, is the ground of architecture. If architecture and the city do not really lock themselves to the foundations of memory, they’ll be producing things that won’t last a long time, because it’s the memory that keeps the shape of the city – not the bricks, not the steel.

“Without memory, the city becomes a demented operation. … Memory, to me, is the ground of architecture. … It’s the memory that keeps the shape of the city – not the bricks, not the steel.”

How does this connect to your thoughts around sustainability? You’ve spoken in the past about how sustainability is the way in which people relate to a building over a long period of time.

That’s right. What is sustainable is the memory. That’s why we keep things, why we love things, and take care of them, because we relate to them in the depths of time. Without that relationship, things are just objects in space that don’t have particular validity for us as human beings. For something to be built to last, it has to be really well conceived. It’s not just a trick of the latest technology. It has to really last and outlast all the desires that we have today and provide a space for future desires. That’s why we love traditional buildings, why we love old temples, even ruins, because we see that they survived their own era, because they had a cultural and spiritual content. Without this content, architecture in the city will become really prone to the plague of fashion.

“Our life is not made up only of logic, calculation and transaction. It’s primarily lived in an emotional way, in a spiritual way. Architecture, in the same way, has to touch on the emotions.”

Talk us through the World Trade Center Master Plan and how you approached that challenge, with all of these ideas of memory and sustainability in mind.

That was my first radical departure from the rest of my colleagues, which was to decide not to build where people perished. The seven competing architects all built exactly where the buildings once stood. But I felt it wasn’t right. We have to acknowledge that this is no longer just a secular space that we can do whatever we want with; there is a spiritual aspect, because people perished in their thousands. We cannot build here. So I left the centre of the site as a memory, as a memorial, with accessibility to the deep foundations, to the bedrock of New York. That is really the centre of my project – the sense that you have to encounter that memory to understand the buildings, which are then spaced around it. And at the same time, we created a vibrant neighbourhood with state-of-the-art buildings, which are shaped around the space in a symbolic way, to create an ensemble that is both looking back towards the event but also looking towards the future of New York.

That project perfectly reflects your humanistic approach to design. Looking ahead, what impact might the architecture of the future have on people’s lives?

We have to bring the political arena in here, because we need equality and democracy in the city. The danger is that we have a segregated city, one for the rich and one for the poor, which is, of course, already a growing danger. It will be a huge challenge to create an integrated whole, where people of all sorts can thrive. And I think it’s a challenge for democracy. How can we give the benefits of the city not just to the few, but to its entire working public? I really think this is the most important thing for the future: how to create new typologies with dignity and beauty for people in cities. Not just the buildings that we often venerate, which are for the very wealthy, but buildings for regular people.

Generally speaking, what creative or technological opportunities does the future hold? What are you particularly excited about?

We can think of technology in two ways: there’s technology of the environment, but also technology of the body. We can apply new technologies to memory, we can grow from the other side – not only from the object side, but from the subject side, as it were. I think that will be a future challenge: how to make people more sensitive, more attentive to the minor key in a Mozart symphony, more sensitive to life itself. That might be achieved, not through drugs, but through other new technologies that are looking at the human body. We already have prosthetics for people who have lost the ability to improve their functioning; I think that can also happen in the emotional spheres of the body.

Lastly, what still keeps you excited and energised about the field of architecture?

What gets me energised about the future of architecture is that it is, I would almost say, the solitary art among all the great arts that creates a place for people in a real way, and that will never go away. There will always be a desire, from ancient times to the distant future, to have a meaningful place, to have meaning in space. And I think that meaning is, of course, also forever changing. Architecture holds up a mirror to who we are. When you look at a city, it mirrors the time we live in. When we look at old cities, they mirror the cultures of those times. Whatever technological changes, whatever futuristic changes, whatever new things come into it, architecture will always be hinged on the human soul. It will never be detached from it, because it’s who we are, how we walk, how we get up in the morning, how we look out onto the street, what we feel about other people. Everything is architecture, that’s why it’s such an exciting field.

“I really think this is the most important thing for the future: how to create new typologies with dignity and beauty for people in cities. Not just the buildings that we often venerate, which are for the very wealthy, but buildings for regular people.”