Architecture for democracy, freedom and peace | DW Documentary

just like great poetry or music great architecture can tell the story of the human soul it can let us see the world through a completely different lens um [Music] buildings breathe and just like humans they have a body and a soul but how do you design a building that can sing where do you start my parents they gave me an accordion and i became the virtuoso and of course i played that corner for so many years it becomes part of your body but i think that the true connection between the accordion and architecture is that it's vertical the keyboards everything the base it's all vertical and architecture also vertical had i played the piano which is horizontal maybe i would have never been an architect [Music] star architects world architects have been around for a very long time but some architects only became star architects when the world of architecture claimed this kind of globality for itself to say we build buildings that are primarily photogenic and thus promote not only themselves but also the architect and the place where this building was created [Music] is without doubt one of the most interesting and exciting architects of the late 1990s and then there's studio libre skins the lieberskind brand if you like that portrays a certain aesthetic and that runs through his entire life's work so grounds here in new york we're working with many experts traffic experts economics experts experts in planning and i suddenly realized oh my god it's not at all about those things it starts with the memory of those thousands of people who died on that day and it has to really develop out of that memorial place into the towers into an emblematic and also symbolic space of the tower 1776 declaration of human rights first one in america and in the world and of course create a sense of connection to the statue of liberty i saw myself and my parents arriving on that boat you know across the atlantic entering and looking up at the statue of liberty which at that time looked so large to me bigger than than any empire state building and i thought about liberty freedom of people it's not buildings it's not armies it's not rockets it's not going to the moon the biggest thing in the world is the spirit of freedom [Music] liber skin is here background has enabled him to combine very different mindsets and to have unusually high expectations of all his buildings he wants us to experience them as sensuous palaces but in all their sensuality also places that make sense where there's more to them than we can see and believe at first glance [Music] i lived in poland until i was 11 years old but it was time of communism of dictatorship of anti-semitism and then we were lucky to be able to leave the only place we could go to at that time was israel and then of course my father who had his only surviving sister who survived auschwitz was in america so he was determined to come to america and that means home is not a piece of real estate it's really something that is very close to your heart and cannot be taken away from you [Music] my mother was a very free thinker she said become an architect she gave me the right advice i don't feel that i gave up music and i started architecture it's a continuum when you play the right notes it's very much like drawing the right lines building the right ideas on paper getting them built in space they're both about precise vibrations vibrations of soul and the vibrations of space [Music] libyskind inside in his early theoretical phase lieberskind is very interesting because he says himself that he was obsessed by drawing he heard it i find his early phase so the first half of his life's work very exciting very inspirational very conceptual very theoretical that's why he was considered an avant-garde architect by experts back then [Music] the asset side the first drawing cities are not drawings of built architecture he used the drawings to dissect research and alter the space thus creating a new architectural language when i came to architecture i wasn't thinking about building buildings not at all i thought well architecture is going to combine all my love of all these things of numbers of vibrations of music of of the past of the future and somehow the mystery has proven correct that architecture is kind of a mystery believe me no one is an expert in architecture who's good [Music] so [Music] but in chamber works was with the chamber works i saw the drawings and the first thing i thought was wow i had never really thought about architecture before and it was really something brand new [Music] in jazz you have shapes in classical music you have shapes in other music you have shapes too of course there's a structure and here you have to create a structure yourself spontaneously so [Music] the chamber works is very closely related to music because there are many contrapuntal effects there are few cause there are toccatas there are inversions reversals there are different tonalities different modalities because architecture is of course an acoustical art our sense of balance is not in the eye but in the inner ear i like the way you're reading the drawings sometimes you're reading them very figuratively sometimes you're reading them just as almost a kind of a test of your own possibility of interpreting them i think that's kind of was my intention in the drawings for architecture there's this kind of staccato [Music] and then there's some lines with i really admire how you are going about it [Music] daniel lieber's kind breaks with expectations when we enter a building we take for granted that the floor will be absolutely horizontal we can rely on that libra's kind always aims to call these certainties into question to disrupt them his buildings are almost like explosive devices in the way they work with what we perceive to be certainties he very deliberately confronts them perhaps to emphasize the fragility of our way of life [Music] you have to be radical you have to go to the roots that's what radical means go back to the roots of the problem the roots of the house the roots of the city any method that takes you beyond the traditions that are habits that have tied you up into a knot the more you can break out of it the more you can discover that the world is far more interesting than you've been taught by your teachers or by the so-called successes all around you [Music] yeah i think the entry hall is very impressive it's like you're in a museum there are red walls the steep stairway leading upwards the penthouse at the top was designed according to the wishes of the client and if we take a look at the pictures we see the typical liberskint elements so the reflection of the fireplace has exactly the same lines as the facade of the building and if we look at the built-in furniture in the house it's classical lieberskin or the paneling in the living room when we talk about storage space the corners and edges of the house were modified so that inside you can also get this typical liber skinned feeling the company [Music] whether it's san francisco whether it's dresden whether it's in berlin whether it's in denver there's always something else already there we already inherit something that it was not ours but as part of who we are when you build something new it's not just independent the city is always already there so everything you build has to be connected to what is already there [Music] with daniel the surprising thing is that he rejects more than he creates and he demands the same from the people who work for him this process of always questioning always taking things apart cutting them up putting them back together again you can really see it in the architecture it's a process that triggers creativity this openness is initially shocking and radical but it's also incredibly liberating [Music] mmm [Music] whether it's the jewish museum in berlin or ground zero in new york there were not projects that were abstract done you know from some distance they were right here in the heart and how lucky that i was able to build the jewish museum in berlin because it's very closely related to my experience to me as a person the room with the fallen leaves installation remains unique no matter how often you see it the museum also has these elements that serve as memorials so it's a memorial it's commemorative and a museum at the same time [Music] is a master of complexity he tries not to integrate the different aspects into his buildings but to let them occur there and place them under tension and i think this tension between opposites that he always creates is something that will continue to inspire architects [Music] between the lines forbidden between the lines combines two different kinds of drawing the drawing that is his own investigation of the space and the drawing that forms the basis for the architecture itself that's how he noticed that he really wanted to work with these drawings and the way he presented them in an unconventional way [Music] you know i remember in my first building i never built anything before the jewish museum but when i took one window and just tilted it to alter the view people said oh my god this is the end of the world this is horrible but you know it's just people are so bound by convention to break out of it is good in the less drawing that you have i would be interested how you would begin this [Music] um [Music] when i was thinking of the jewish museum first i thought about the music that is no longer played in berlin as a result of the what happened to germany in 1933 and i started thinking of schoenberg of moses and aaron his amazing opera where he you know himself and exile from berlin started to think what about god what does this mean where is the music coming from now after these events create a musical answer in the center of the void as a reverberant space that you know echoes with the footsteps of the visitors and i thought yes that's the third act of moses and aaron that's the answer schoenberg was waiting for the echoes of the footsteps across a void and that's that transition and the transfiguration of architecture as well [Music] when you listen to the opera you notice that the singing voices of aaron and moses as the two main parts are very different aaron sings in coloraturas with very wavy lines while moses almost exclusively speaks almost without intonation so moses stands for constant speech now when we look at the building the interesting thing is that there's an order to the rooms along the length which at the end are also the museum rooms while an empty line the line of the voids seems to cut through the building again and again like a zig-zag and empty places are created vertically at these spots throughout the entire building so if we compare the opera moses and aaron we can say one line represents the museum a kind of aaron line while the line of the voids that penetrates everything could be described as the moses line here moses stands for the unspeakable [Music] doesn't just build his buildings to make them look unique he wants to demonstrate something with them express something that's very important to him that reality as we usually perceive it is only part of what surrounds us and what makes up the world that beyond these realities there are principles that have to be called into question and dismantled again and again so that we don't get too comfortable and believe we are living a truth that we don't actually recognize [Music] the experience with the garden of exile in the jewish museum is always an experience of a boundary in the garden i can decide to proceed very intentionally to control everything to try to keep my balance for example and then i feel how this space offers resistance what the great architects have told us from the beginning of time that architecture is about culture it's about what human beings are where they're going where they have been what they want to do it's not about bricks and mortar and wood only [Music] military is not the opposite of peace in many ways the military and the history of wars tells us that it's one of the ways we can keep our freedom and so when i built several military museums i was very aware of the importance of military in democracy and what it really means imperial war museum north in manchester i thought what about the world is the world really this emblem that we see on tv or on the screen no the world is a real world that has been broken i took a little english teapot threw it out of my studio window and went down and picked up the pieces reassembled them there and that's really the imperium war museum in manchester the shard of air where things strike us from the air the shard of the earth the shard of the water so bringing up all these elements and creating really a space which gives you a sense that you're part of the world [Music] the set for tristan and his older in zarbrucken very clearly takes a fragment from a chamber works drawing and the stage elements develop out of this [Music] it's like a vocabulary of space that's first designed and then using these fragments is of course another story altogether [Music] you can see that clearly in the sets for tristan and his older that we took this object that was created and divided it up again into different segments and then used these segments in very different ways on the stage [Music] i remember the premiere well there was thundering applause as well as deafening whistles of course the first thing i asked daniel at the after party was what it had been like for him and he said it was great the moment you cause such a reaction you know that you've sent a message so he was very satisfied and it was then that i understood just how relaxed and laid back he is in seeking out the radical [Music] buildings are designed to inspire us to take us on a journey into the unpredictable so when you enter a building you don't know what's waiting for you it's also easy to get lost in the building and it's also an allegory of course it's a symbol for always being open to surprises and questioning what tends to be taken for granted [Music] [Music] the message that felix snoozman gave to me is don't forget look at the history because it's a path that if you don't watch out can lead you to a dead end felix knospon taught me a big lesson when i look at his self-portrait with the identity card with that wall behind him with a chimney with smoke up above him he taught me look at yourself because what you might see is not what you expect to see to me there is a magic in the crystal i look at the crystal not the way the romantics looked at the crystal not the way casper david friedrich looked at the crystal i look at the crystal the following way it has a millions of facets it's kind of the symbol of democracy because you can see right through it but there are so many different angles and there is always this kind of center that leads you to a sort of an infinite dispersal point to hold the crystal is in a way to hold the dna which is a crystal is to hold the stars which are the crystal it's to hold the world [Music] you

Channel: DW Documentary

Views: 14,193

Keywords: Documentary, Documentaries, documentaries, DW documentary, full documentary, DW, documentary 2021, Daniel Libeskind, Architecture, Jewish Museum Berlin, New World Trade Center, Ground Zero, Music and architecture, Chamber Works, New York

Id: Wb5yx554FwI

Length: 25min 56sec (1556 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 18 2021