Word: berlin
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When Daniel Libeskind was invited last summer to submit ideas for rebuilding the area around the World Trade Center, he flew from his home in Berlin to visit the site. He descended into "the bathtub," the vast concrete basin in which the foundations of both towers once rested. As the street-level sounds of the city fell away, the primeval depths of Manhattan filled his view. "At that bedrock level you can see the indelible traces of the towers," says Libeskind. "These were walls that had withstood the trauma of the attack. I thought to myself, There is something very...
...world is dead. And with the exception of Gehry, there's no more powerful emblem of that change than Libeskind, 57, who was thrust into fame three years ago with his first building. In the late 1980s, when he won a competition to design the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Libeskind's name was known only to people who followed architectural theory. Though he was a respected teacher and thinker, he had never built anything. But when the Jewish Museum opened in 2000, with its broken-thunderbolt design and the shock-cut diagonals of its windows, it instantly made...
...represented a career change for him. For years as a teenager he had been a concert pianist and--why not?--an accordionist. He says merely that his interests shifted. All the same, he found time last year to design and direct Messiaen's opera St. Francis of Assisi at Berlin's Deutsche Oper, and he is working on sets for a full cycle of Wagner's Ring at London's Covent Garden. But Libeskind rarely touches the piano anymore. "It's hard just to play for yourself," he says, "when you used to play for a big audience...
Libeskind is playing for a big audience again, so he is planning to return with his family to New York. It was probably an advantage to have lived so long in Berlin--a city that is everywhere a reflection of its own near extinction--as preparation for the World Trade Center project. Aside from any specific monuments, every neighborhood remembers in its bones the catastrophe of World War II. Long streets where no old buildings survived lead to others where a single Wilhelmine facade is wedged between stretches of postwar Housing Emergency Modern. Every inch of the city tells...
Before age 20 she had earned a doctorate in Islamic languages and civilization from the University of Berlin, where she wrote her dissertation on the history of Egypt’s Mameluk caste...