Daniel Libeskind (born May 12, 1946) is a Polish–American architect, artist, professor, and set designer. Libeskind founded Studio Daniel Libeskind in 1989 with his wife, Nina, and is its principal design architect.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
Born in Łódź, Poland, Libeskind was the second child of Dora and Nachman Libeskind, both Polish Jews and Holocaust survivors. As a young child, Libeskind learned to play the accordion and quickly became a virtuoso, performing on Polish television in 1953. He won a America Israel Cultural Foundation scholarship in 1959 and played alongside a young Itzhak Perlman. Libeskind lived in Poland for 11 years and says "I can still speak, read and write Polish."<ref name="Dw">Template:Cite news</ref>
In 1957, the Libeskinds moved to Kibbutz Gvat, Israel and then to Tel Aviv before moving to New York in 1959.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> In his autobiography, Breaking Ground: An Immigrant's Journey from Poland to Ground Zero, Libeskind spoke of how the kibbutz experience influenced his concern for green architecture.<ref>Breaking Ground: An Immigrant's Journey from Poland to Ground Zero By Daniel Libeskind</ref>
In the summer of 1959, his family moved to New York City on one of the last immigrant boats to the United States. In New York, Libeskind lived in the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative in the northwest Bronx, a union-sponsored, middle-income cooperative development. He attended the Bronx High School of Science. The print shop where his father worked was on Stone Street in Lower Manhattan, and he watched the original World Trade Center being built in the 1960s.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Libeskind became a United States citizen in 1965.<ref name="Studio Daniel Libeskind" />
Libeskind began his career as an architectural theorist and professor, holding positions at various institutions around the world. From 1978 to 1985, Libeskind was the director of the Architecture Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> His practical architectural career began in Milan in the late 1980s, where he submitted to architectural competitions and also founded and directed Architecture Intermundium, Institute for Architecture & Urbanism.
Libeskind completed his first building at the age of 52, with the opening of the Felix Nussbaum Haus in Osnabrück, Germany in 1998.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Prior to this, critics had dismissed his designs as "unbuildable or unduly assertive".<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> In 1987, Libeskind won his first design competition for housing in West Berlin, but the Berlin Wall fell shortly thereafter and the project was cancelled. Libeskind won the first four project competitions he entered including the Jewish Museum Berlin in 1989, which became the first museum dedicated to the Holocaust in WWII and opened to the public in 2001 with international acclaim.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> This was his first major international success and was one of the first building modifications designed after reunification. A glass courtyard was designed by Libeskind and added in 2007. The Academy of the Jewish Museum Berlin also designed by Libeskind was completed in 2012.
Libeskind was selected by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to oversee the rebuilding of the World Trade Center,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> which was destroyed in the September 11, 2001 attacks. The concept for the site, which he titled Memory Foundations, was well-received upon its presentation to the public in 2003, although it was ultimately changed significantly before its execution.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> He was the first architect to win the Hiroshima Art Prize, awarded to an artist whose work promotes international understanding and peace. Many of his projects look at the deep cultural connections between memory and architecture.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Studio Daniel Libeskind is headquartered two blocks south of the World Trade Center site in New York. He has designed numerous cultural and commercial institutions, museums, concert halls, convention centers, universities, residences, hotels, and shopping centers. The studio's most recent completed projects include the MO Museum in Vilnius, Lithuania; Zlota 44, a high-rise residential tower in Warsaw, Poland; the Ogden Centre for Fundamental Physics at Durham University in Durham, England; the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa, Canada; and Corals at Keppel Bay in Singapore, adjacent to the studio's previous completed project Reflections at Keppel Bay.
Libeskind's design projects also include sculpture. Several sculptures built in the early 1990s were based on the explorations of his Micromegas and Chamberworks drawings series that he did in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Polderland Garden of Love and Fire in Almere, Netherlands is a permanent installation completed in 1997 and restored on October 4, 2017.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Later in his career, Libeskind designed the Life Electric sculpture that was completed in 2015 on Lake Como, Italy. This sculpture is dedicated to the physicist Alessandro Volta.
Daniel Libeskind was the Head of the Architecture Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan from 1978 to 1985. He produced exhibitions, several essays and books, suites of drawings, and large-scale explorations like the three machines (Reading Machine, Writing Machine and Memory Machine).<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> The machines, produced with his Cranbrook graduate students during the 1984-85 academic year, called the Three Lessons in Architecture were displayed at the Venice Biennale in 1985. Libeskind and the group won a Stone Lion award for the work.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
His work is inscribed within the loosely-defined style of deconstructivistm.<ref>Erbacher, Doris and Kubitz, Peter Paul. "'You appear to have something against right angles", The Guardian, October 11, 2007</ref> While much of Libeskind's work has been well-received, it has also been the subject of often severe criticism.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Critics charge that it reflects a limited architectural vocabulary of jagged edges, sharp angles and tortured geometries,<ref name="nytimes.com">Template:Cite news</ref> that can fall into cliche, and that it ignores location and context.<ref name="architectural-review.com">Template:Cite web</ref> In 2008 Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Hawthorne wrote: "Anyone looking for signs that Daniel Libeskind's work might deepen profoundly over time, or shift in some surprising direction, has mostly been doing so in vain."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Nicolai Ouroussoff stated in The New York Times in 2006: "His worst buildings, like a 2002 war museum in England suggesting the shards of a fractured globe, can seem like a caricature of his own aesthetic."<ref name="nytimes.com" /> In the UK magazine Building Design, Owen Hatherley wrote of Libeskind's students' union for London Metropolitan University: "All of its vaulting, aggressive gestures were designed to 'put London Met on the map', and to give an image of fearless modernity with, however, little of consequence."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> William JR Curtis in Architectural Review called his Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre "a pile-up of Libeskindian clichés without sense, form or meaning" and wrote that his Hyundai Development Corporation Headquarters delivered "a trite and noisy corporate message".<ref name="architectural-review.com" />
In response, Libeskind says that he ignores critics: "How can I read them? I have more important things to read."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Work
Jewish Museum Berlin, Germany
Felix Nussbaum Haus, Osnabrück, Germany
Reflections at Keppel Bay, Singapore
Zlota 44, Warsaw, Poland
L Tower in Toronto, Canada
Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin, Ireland
Bord Gais Theatre, Dublin, Ireland
Studio Weil, Mallorca, Spain
Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado, US
Kö-Bogen Düsseldorf, Germany
Kö-Bogen Düsseldorf, Germany
Crystals at CityCenter, Las Vegas, Nevada, US
Interior at Crystals at CityCenter, Las Vegas, Nevada, US
Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, California, US
Ogden Centre for Fundamental Physics at Durham University, Durham, England
National Holocaust Monument, Ottawa, Canada
Vanke Pavilion, Expo 2015, Milan, Italy
Imperial War Museum North, Trafford, Manchester, England
The following projects are listed on the Studio Libeskind website. The first date is the competition, commission, or first presentation date. The second is the completion date or the estimated date of completion.
Alexander Hamilton Immigrant Achievement Award (2025)
First architect to receive the Jan Kaplicky Lifetime Achievement Award (2023)
First architect to receive the Dresden International Peace Prize (2023)
First architect to win the Hiroshima Art Prize, awarded to an artist whose work promotes international understanding and peace (2001)<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
In 2003, he received the Leo Baeck Medal for his humanitarian work promoting tolerance and social justice.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
AIANY Merit Award for the National Holocaust Monument, Ottawa, Canada (2018)
Libeskind has lived, among other places, in New York City, Toronto, Michigan, Italy, Germany, and Los Angeles.<ref name="Davidson" /> He is both a U.S. and Israeli citizen.<ref>See, Frequent Flyer. When the Wife is a Lucky Charm, Don't Leave Home Without Her. The New York Times, Tuesday, August 9, 2011, p. B6.</ref>
Nina and Daniel Libeskind have three children: Lev, Noam, and Rachel.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Bibliography
Daniel Libeskind: Countersign (1992) (Template:ISBN)
Daniel Libeskind Radix-Matrix (1997) (Template:ISBN)
Fishing from the Pavement (1998)
Jewish Museum Berlin (with Helene Binet) (1999) (Template:ISBN)
Daniel Libeskind: The Space of Encounter (2001) (Template:ISBN)
In the Unlikeliest of Places: How Nachman Libeskind Survived the Nazis, Gulags, and Soviet Communism (2014) Annette Libeskind Berkovits; foreword by Daniel Libeskind (Template:ISBN)
Jewish Museum Berlin, Germany
Felix Nussbaum Haus, Osnabrück, Germany
Reflections at Keppel Bay, Singapore
Zlota 44, Warsaw, Poland
L Tower in Toronto, Canada
Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin, Ireland
Bord Gais Theatre, Dublin, Ireland
Studio Weil, Mallorca, Spain
Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado, US
Kö-Bogen Düsseldorf, Germany
Kö-Bogen Düsseldorf, Germany
Crystals at CityCenter, Las Vegas, Nevada, US
Interior at Crystals at CityCenter, Las Vegas, Nevada, US
Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, California, US
CityLife Residences, Milan, Italy
Ogden Centre for Fundamental Physics at Durham University, Durham, England
National Holocaust Monument, Ottawa, Canada
Vanke Pavilion, Expo 2015, Milan, Italy
Imperial War Museum North, Trafford, Manchester, England
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