Architecture is a Language: Daniel Libeskind at TEDxDUBLIN

I'm so happy to be here with so many distinguished colleagues so many distinguished lecturers and I love Dublin I'd like to share with you what informs my work what inspires me certainly James Joyce's use of language the complexity the ambiguity the meanings that model and modernize language are part of what I like to think about when I create plans cities buildings and of course this building is part of of generating new energy for a social cultural space in this fantastic City but just on the other side of this space in the atrium of the office buildings I think I built my second largest really homage to James Joyce it's a thousand and one inverted letters that are based on his Thunder words you know the one hunt that the words of God and I have to say I built this without a commission for this this is just part of the second memorial to James Joyce I build in Japan on the sea on the Sea of Japan but I think Joyce's use of language his his unfathomable aspiration to speak all languages to all people is something that certainly inspired me in doing architecture and in creating cities now I'd like to share with you thoughts that that that are part of what I do and certainly because in my former life I was a musician professional musician I've always thought that architecture and music are closely related first of all emotionally architecture is as complex and as abstract as music but it communicates to the soul doesn't just communicate to the mind when you listen to a Bach oratorio it's it's about the soul and so it is an architecture architecture is based on balance and that balance is actually in the inner ear it's not in the I and so when I do drawing these are abstract drawings which I did before I had any Commission's because I'm a late bloomer I think for half of my life I didn't build a single building I thought about the fact that drawing is really a score it's just like a piece of music and has to interpret it by a community and of course proportions light materiality are all implicated in the drawing which when it comes to a building of course has to also present the space present the atmosphere of a building a drawing has to illuminate the practice and of course in our work we have many computers and of course you couldn't do anything without a computer to be efficient on time Russian and so on but still I truly believe that drawing is the source of architecture it is really the source because it's the hand itself is the eye it's the mind interconnected and really sharing in that process which is not purely intellectual but it's really spiritual of kind of desire of faith in something you cannot see and it's a proof of something that is really there but not purely visible now one of the thoughts or my favorite poetess is the fact that a building is not a repetition of another building a building does not need to necessarily have the same formula a building is not really built out of the same aspect that of buildings that we have seen before so the notion of what is the tradition and architecture is something that has always interested me and when I had a chance to design a small house for two art lovers in Connecticut I thought how can a house really in our time really be a house of our time and in that sense my clients were very special there there are a couple who owned works of art they deal with works of art and they asked me to design a house which would itself be a work of art which would not have any sculptors paintings or in the house itself and its space should be the inspiring aspect I thought that was really an amazing assignment and of course how do you do that well first of all one has to rethink you know are the rafters in the house you know what does the house need does it have walls does it have windows does it need windows but of course it has to be something really fantastic to live with and something that really works for my clients needs which has to do with a bedroom a kitchen they love to cook they love to have parties invite guests and so on so really the house is really a kind of a stainless steel folded space it's a complex place to describe in a plan which I showed before but it's a house that really it moves your vision through the interior and to the exterior in very very specific ways the interiors completely in in real wood it's not it's not cladding it's it's solid wood it's like kind of like a cave of wood exteriors stainless steel which of course always mirrors the colors of the sky and the landscape and of course it's house that doesn't have the topography of a traditional house it's not a box it's not organized the way a house is normally organized in terms of where the kitchen is how where you eat where do you watch television what you do and it has a very very specific and I think unusual relation to the landscape which is located which is a fantastic landscape which which is full of light full of liveliness and again just as that thought of Emily Dickinson what makes what gives a hope in life it's not really necessary the things we think are necessary to bring that reality on to the place now certainly I share the thought that history is not something which is over it's not just something that exists in the past it's something urgent and it's something which is often hidden by traditions so my interest in history has always been to address history and every site and every place has a history sometimes you cannot see it sometimes voices are almost inaudible as sometimes the actions are invisible and yet the history continues to to cry out for justice and when I was designing when I won the competition to design a Military History Museum which is actually the largest museum in Germany in dressed in a city that was devastated by the Allied bombings I thought a lot about history the past the future how do you take that history and create something that that has a meaning and you can see in the sketch the building is this wedge-like of volume that that dramatically interferes with the old arsenal by the way this old Arsenal built at the end of 19th century was always a military museum the saxony military museum there the german military museum the nazi military museum the russian military museum the east german military museum what do you do today well I created this movement towards the city to show the newly rebuilt city but at the think that to point the self-similar triangulation in the bombing of dresden within these three points and of course a building interrupt I also restored the Arsenal of course but it interrupts and it gives a specific direction to see the panorama of the city which is of course not being rebuilt and at the same time to present that history not as one more militaristic glorification of what militaries but why do people participate in such histories why do they follow totalitarian leaders and what is it military museum in Germany to say in a democratic society there's the plan you can see the u-shape of the of the old armoury restructured and it's chronological its horizontal chronology of of from the 13th century German military history and then you have this vector moving through the opacity and penetrating and going outside and it disrupts the chronology exactly between 1914 and 1933 and there it is completely different space with oblique vertical latrines a totally different reorientation and of course the armory in itself is a very interesting building it was really kind of almost vandalized by the eastern government they brought it back to its life and presented a building that isn't just one more Military Museum which shows hardware but presents that point towards the city from which you can understand and towards which you can apply the fact that history has been disrupted history is not just a story that has a good or bad ending it depends on on where we are what we do what we decide and of course it's a very raw building you can see this incorporate this is the the other side of the building it incorporates the old neoclassic stairs so it preserves actually the entire building is preserved it's only cut in two lines from which the wedge appears and of course I worked very closely with the exhibition designer Hagen Mertz and Barbara Holt sir to create a museum which distances which redefines the relation between equipment because this equipment is not to be seen as military commander how did people invent it what did he want to do with these helicopters that kill and how to display them and it's I think an interesting lesson in how to how wars how violence is actually perceived by those who perpetrate it and by those who experience it of course at the end of this journey you you you jut out to a dramatic upward moving wedge and you see the rebuild panorama of of Dresden you see you see the Franco here you see the growler glorious run around but just your sight the word moves towards the point from which Dresden was bombed and I wanted people to have the double that complexity that history has that passed in a true way pointing to the devastation to the crimes of history which can never be rethought which cannot never be reversed but at the same time that there's a hope that the city has a new light and here one of my favorite poets German I thought was so interesting because the thought here is what do we remember in our lives what do we remember complex ideas what do we just remember something very very real like a brook or a window or a tree or a tower so when I'm designing think I think about it not just as an object a functional presentation a technological even a cultural invention but something that has to do with memory because that's what we are we are oriented because we can remember and so when I was designing a large-scale neighborhood in Singapore I thought how do you design such a high-density neighborhood that has an individuality because we are used to the fact that a house can have ended revert individuality and architect but when it comes to high density developments this is one of the highest density developments in the world how do you give each occupant a sense of being a sense of specialness and in these towers which are doubly curved you can see that each of the apartments is just slightly off the apartment above and below you kind of float in a space and even the lower villas are related to nature in a very specific way in their complex geometries and really that is really that Brook that that piece of that wall that door that image that I think is so important in high-density and of course high density is sustainability we can't afford just to build private residences we can't afford just to build low density places so how does one activate that thought that memory and each individual should be given the opportunity of being free of having a space of having something that at the end of the day is something inspiring in something so of course the high level bridges with their greenery which connect these high-density spaces the entire topography of the place the fact that it is really really much higher than most of the buildings in in the place is part of it well I come to really because it's it's at the end of your day it's Christopher Logue you know in his brilliant translation of the Iliad I thought really his references also to the city itself because the conflicts the tensions in a city the search for social justice for opportunity for diversity that curve I brron see of what a city really represents as a creative entity is there in the Greek notion of the archipelago and of course the Greeks lived in the archipelago of those little islands that were connected in mainland with with the boats and I thought when I was designing probably one of the largest projects in the world in Yongsan Korea how do you bring that nature of of freedom and social space to high density City we have you know millions of people will be here this is the formal railway lands that that were occupied by old infrastructure you know closing the waterfront how do you bring the mountains to the waterfront how do you recreate civics civic space with what 30 skyscrapers and what has a million square feet of retail and museums cultural activities transportation how do you really create it without just imposing on it some sort of artificial grid so I took that grid that implied grid which really doesn't exist in historical cities in the same way and adopted it to sort of neighborhoods which are connected by the green and you can see kind of a sequence of images here that break up that homogeneous notion of the city into a city that has true diversity even though of course it has so many high places and to organize that city around nature around public spaces around where people are where people shop where people walk where people go to to the movies to to concerts to to to museums and there it is now it's something very new because usually skyscrapers have been designed simply on the same streets that lowered buildings were designed they were just taller buildings just got a total in tall tall so my notion here was how do you design a city where the buildings are no longer just imitations of lower buildings but have a speciality and of course there are at least I know 2030 architects from around the world which are part of the scheme to design each building really as a kind of an unique work of art not connected to the street in the same way as we have known it before of course as an architect you have to do it with very often very physical means paper models it's not just all computerized it's not just statistical it's not mathematics although a lot of it is really how do you create that that sense of space for each of these objects which are so large I mean one of the tools may be the tallest tower in the world is going to be there but many many other very very high tall buildings and at the same time the sense of what is tradition what is history what is the the memory of a city as rich as a soul center of Korea is so there it is on the river a kind of crown of possibilities that refers to its history now of course you can see here that the spaces are vast that they are designed to give a new sense of feeling new sense of activity and you can see that this is really for millions of people again designed as a intersubjective work with many many different architects buzz as a master planner of course my responsibility is to create the idea of how nature and that space can be brought together and here is one of my own skyscraper office buildings there and here is social housing on the waterfront which is again low cost housing because it's not only for the rich it's not only for business it's for all people that should share in this part of the center of the city and there it is it's of course just begun the master plan has taken a few years the architects have done their designs the construction is beginning it will take some time even in Asia to to create a city but that's really what it is and I end here I wanted to show that between the notion of a drawing of a house of a museum of a neighborhood another city I rather erase the lines because a city is a museum a museum is a drawing a drawing is a neighborhood a neighborhood is a house so the old categories of what we have always considered sort of separate entities really in my view coexist together as a singular word world and what I didn't manage to show it was not here is my last picture of Ground Zero where I just came from from New York where there was so much controversy so much skepticism cynicism so many fights so many emotions and I just wanted to show you the picture that indeed is under construction it has had more than half a million visitors already even though it's a building site the memorial is finished the towers the tower number one Freedom Tower tower number four tower number three are highly visible almost completed the museum is in construction almost completed of course it one has to have patience it cannot be done in a day but I think what I've learned from all of this is when you live in a free society when there is an openness when we appreciate what freedom and liberty are then we can really build a city for all thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 468,448

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Keywords: Daniel Libeskind, ted talks, Sustainability, ted, Culture, ted x, English, Design, Ireland, TEDxDUBLIN, community, tedx talks, ted talk, tedx talk, Architecture, cities, tedx

Id: yEkDosanxGk

Length: 18min 29sec (1109 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 19 2012