Word: libeskind
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...Libeskind's design, along with most of the designs submitted for the competition--buildings that swoop and stride--tell you again what Frank Gehry first made plain with his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. In architecture, the old 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...
These days, Libeskind has commissions that include major additions to museums in London, Toronto, San Francisco and Denver; a university media center in Hong Kong; and a shopping and housing complex in Switzerland. That Denver, let alone the staid, pragmatic Beijing government that rules Hong Kong, is welcoming some of the most radical design ideas in the world is another sign of how much change is in the air. Libeskind is happy but not surprised. "People want to see something that reflects the excitement of life," he says. "If you look at how much is happening in the sciences...
...their architects. Libeskind and his wife and partner Nina--she also manages his practice--are recognizable specimens of the global cultural elite. As a rule, they dress all in black and gray, the International Gothic of metropolitan chic. Nothing else about them is dour. His conversation, in particular, is a series of sharp, rabbity observations on history, music and architecture, punctuated by bursts of laughter. He reminds you of a cross between Martin Scorsese and Tickle Me Elmo...
...When Libeskind began studying architecture at Cooper Union in New York City, he was just 19 years old, but it already 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...
...Libeskind's parents, Polish Jews, met for the first time in Kyrgyzstan, bordering China, to which they had separately made their way after escaping the Nazis in Poland and subsequently being arrested at the Soviet border, sent to Siberia, then released. Both lost most of their families in concentration camps. When they returned to Poland, they were trapped under the communist regime until the late 1950s, when an opportunity came for them to immigrate, first to Israel, then to New York with Daniel and his younger sister...