(slow calm music) - I'd like to welcome you all
to this evening's lecture. It's a vital part of our year-long program of public events, and it's
a pleasure to see friends from across campus,
from across the school, and from the community at large. We're delighted to see you. This lecture would not have been possible without the enthusiastic
support of many people, and I'd like to recognize
and thank Peter Fleischmann, and the Foundation For
Jewish Philanthropies for their help and commitment, and Bob Skerker for his
continued support for our school and ever expanding interest
in architecture and design. Thank you all very much indeed. It's very much appreciated. (audience applauding) There are also thanks that are
due to faculty and students in the schools lecture committee, and staff whose help is invaluable. (laughing)
(audience applauding) To Joyce Huang and Cory Smith,
the chairs of architecture, and to Dean Robert Shibley, and it would be impolite not to thank Daniel and Nina at this point too. Their tolerance and patience in the face of extraordinary weather a few weeks ago, and their eagerness to find time to come to Buffalo and
speak at our school anyway, after the storms, is
very much appreciated. Thank you very much. (audience applauding) It's really like this all the time here. Daniel Libeskind is
perhaps one of the most delightful yet difficult
architects to introduce. His extraordinary
commitment and contribution to architecture and the city, together with a worldwide reputation as a designer of significance
and global standing, combine to make it a
delight to introduce him. His notable achievements which include the design and supervision,
and the construction of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, his vital role in the
planning and redevelopment of the 9/11 site in New York City and the recently completed,
and very significant Holocaust Memorial in Ottawa, are just three projects
that combine to make a timeline of remarkable civic
and cultural achievements. It is work that many of us here are familiar with and admire. But perhaps more difficult to introduce is the remarkable breadth
of Daniel Libeskind's work. He was an accomplished and
internationally recognized musician, this is for
anybody in the audience and in the program who
plays an instrument, before he turned to architecture, and having once turned to architecture he was to excel as a creative force, remarkable draftsman, and theorist. Daniel has a significant reputation as a teacher of architecture, and a reputation that's
rooted in his own work and the innovative
programs that he initiated in the school that he founded in Milan, directed at Cranbrook
Academy for the Arts, and pioneered in Germany. After winning the first
prize in the competition to design an extension to
the Berlin Museum in 1989, he was offered a senior fellowship in the Getty Museum in California. He was the first architect
to receive such an award. However, he declined that position in order to move to Berlin and to oversee the realization of the project for the Berlin Museum. So life is not always straightforward, but that building was his
first major built work. Daniel Libeskind continues
to inspire in so many ways. However, I think he would
be the first to agree that his work is rooted
in deep and significant collaborations with his
wife and partner Nina, and we are thrilled that
Nina was able to make time to be here with us tonight. We're delighted. (audience applauding) On behalf of all of our
students, faculty, and staff, I want to thank her so
much for coming to Buffalo, and recognize her tireless
efforts and inspiration that is embedded in all of
the work of Studio Libeskind. I won't talk about the
conversations in the car, but it was about all her
work at Studio Libeskind. On behalf of the University of Buffalo, our School of Architecture and Planning, and the wider communities
across the city and the region, I most cordially welcome
Daniel and Nina Libeskind. Please join me in extending that welcome. (audience applauding) - [Daniel] Thank you so much. - [Brian] Thank you, thank you so much. (talking drowned out by applauding) - Yes. Thank you so much Brian, thank you. I'm delighted to be here, without the snow. (laughing) Let me share with you, this is not really the typical
lecture about buildings. It's really a journey
across the creative process of how buildings are born,
how they can be realized, and I call it the Edge
of Order, Edge of Order, and if you think about
it, that's the book. The book is a finely illustrated book with many different things, but it really deals with what is architecture as I see it, not just as a architect making buildings. So, this is the quote
I start the book with. It's Paul Valery, the great
philosopher, French poet, who said that "Two dangers
constantly threaten the world: "order and disorder," and we can see it. Ordering the world, putting it to order, marching that order into the future we can see the negative pole here, but also the pole of chaos, disorder is also something negative in other poles. So how to navigate between these two I would say evils the evil of order. And we know how order has been used to order people, to order society and we know the fatal
results of that order. We also know the terrible
things that happen in anarchy and disorder. So navigation between these poles that's really about architecture and that's how I see the field itself. Now this might seem obvious, that architecture's an art but what kind of art is it? Well, we know it's a civic art. What is it based on? It's based on free
thinking, the liberal arts. Of course there's science
involved, mathematics, but think about it the liberal
arts contained geometry, contained cosmology, the stars, poetry, tragedy, dance, philosophy. That's really the traditional
basis of architecture. And I always think to myself that in arts there's only one word, art, everything is art. Take it or leave it, it's art. But in architecture there's two words, we have the word building
and the word architecture. So you can have a building which is built which is not a piece
of architecture at all. You can have an architecture,
that's never been built, just in a drawing, but
it is the art itself. So that's really what the book is about and I share with you some of the chapters, new language which deals with how to create something through
a language of architecture. Now, how to be an architect. Go to school, drafting tools, building codes, fashions of architecture? No, travel and read books. Now that's not me, that's a quote from one
of the great architects of the 20th Century, Le Corbusier and even though I went to school and I had an architecture education and I even had drafting
tools, I see the point here that it's about the freedom of thinking, freedom to see other things, travel, read a few books, he didn't say read a lot of books, just read a couple of books, but the right ones, just the right ones. So, yes, that's really about that freedom that architecture is based on. Home, I don't know whether
you can read this page, it's kind of blurred, it's difficult because we don't choose our home. We are born somewhere. We didn't choose it, we
didn't even choose our parents we're just born in their home and that's kind of my experience as well because I was born, as a matter of fact I was born in a homeless
shelter in Poland. My parents were survivors
of the Holocaust. I grew up under communism, dictatorship. Poland had a Stalinist dictatorship. I grew up under anti-Semitism. I grew up under very adverse things. So that also forms your personality and everybody, you know, everybody's work is
formed by who they are. Where do they come from? What is their home? What do they aspire to? And then this. We are not in Poland anymore. I was able to be really released you know by luck, the Polish
authorities allowed Jews to leave Poland in the late 50s to Israel. And that's where I discovered color. That bleakness disappeared. Freedom of society, liberty, beauty and then I had my second paradise which was of course New York. I was also immigrant to the Bronx. So I had two sort of sets of the future. Now, how did, you know, what did I do? Where did I come from? You know, I started my work by drawing. Now I didn't have a client and by thew way, I tried
to work for architects, some famous ones, but I didn't last more
than one or two days because I thought it was too boring. So I tried it but I said,
no there must be another way to do architecture. So if you don't have a client, you don't have a budget, you don't have a social
structure, you don't have, what do you do? You're not going to draw
just fantasy castles. I thought let me draw what I
think architecture really is and all those lines and all those spaces and all those projections
and collapsing projections are part of the way I
discovered for myself. And that's kind of a radical step. Discover for yourself not
by what you've been taught by other what architecture may be. Now think about it. Architecture is based on drawings. It has always been based on it. You couldn't even make this lantern here without a drawing. You need a drawing to
produce a table, a chair nevermind a building or a city. And every line in that
drawing is giving reality to something that cannot
exist without that plan. So those are the drawings. There's the sense of three dimensionality, two dimensionality and a kind of desire to create a language in which architecture can thrive. Later on I created a
different set of drawings. It was through drawings
as I said for many years, I didn't really have a job
properly as an architect, but I thought drawings will lead me there. And I'm a believer that drawings are really something almost
divine, inexplicable. When the nephew of Michelangelo Antonio asked his uncle, Michelangelo what should I do? Uncle, I want to be an architect. He said, "Don't apprentice yourself, "don't go and get a job,
draw Antonio, draw." I don't know what happened to Antonio, but his uncle gave him good advice. These drawings which
I called Chamberworks, were based on my love for music, but they are really architecture drawings, they're very systematic,
very much, you know, disciplined in ways which are not obvious and it is true that a
drawing has it's own destiny. Now when I, before I built any buildings I would sometimes show these drawings. Many people would turn
their heads and say, no, now you're not an architect anymore. You're not doing architecture, but I was fully convinced
that this was architecture. To me this series and it's a long series there are 28 drawings which
are highly constructed and many students when I showed
this as a young architect in colleges and universities said, did you take LSD to do this or did you, you know, what kind of drug? No. I was doing architecture, but in a path that was
not really conventional. Shifting Stones. This is about memory because I consider that memory is really the ground of architecture. Really it's not that real estate, it's not even the site as we see it it's what under lies the site and what under lies it is memory. Think about it. Without memory there would
be absolutely nothing. We would not know who we are. As you see with people suffering from dementia or alzheimer's their life is lost, they have lost that sense of what it
is to be in this world. I called the chapter Shifting Stones and I base it really on an experience of one of my favorite
writers, Marcel Proust a French writer writing in the beginning of the 20th Century, 1910, 1915, 1920. He wrote a magnificent opus Remembrance of things passed,
you know, many volumes, but what does he say? He said that he was standing in basilicas in San Marco, in Venice. He was a rich man. He was traveled widely. Stood and stood on two uneven stones, suddenly realized that the
ground was not completely straight under his feet, you know, as those old basilicas are
not perfectly straight. And when he experienced
this sudden shock of, he remembered the exactly
the same unevenness on the pavement of his little village in Illiers, in France, in Normandy where he used to go with his grandmother and grandfather as a little boy and that experience suddenly
brought back his childhood, his life and his moment in Venice and he decided that the task of his life was to record this memory
as a revelatory thing, not just as a memory of personality, but as the memory of the world. So memory is a key to what I believe architecture really is. Now, this is a building, one of the first buildings
I was able to build. It's the Felix Nussbaum Museum. Now who's Felix Nussbaum? When I started this project, and this was a competition, I went to my 23 volume encyclopedia Judiaca,
the Jewish encyclopedia 23 volumes, there was not an entry. And that's when I realized what
the Holocaust really means. It's not about six million. We cannot fathom what that possibly means but a single individual. Here's Felix Nussbaum. This is his self portrait
with identity card. He was a famous German painter, Jewish, but basically German and as of 1933, his life took a dark turn. Nazi's came to power. He escaped from various holding camps. Escaped to France, was
held in Saint Cyprian. Escaped to Belgium, where
he still hid with his wife Felka Platek, a Polish painter. Painted his experience as what was happening
to him and unfortunately he didn't make it. He was found out by his neighbors who smelt the turpentine
in the attic of his house, in Brussels, in the apartment
building where he lived and he was unfortunately
departed on the last train to Auschwitz to be
murdered together with his wife. Then there's his painting. There's his identity card and look at his eyes. That tells you really everything about what that memory really is and how to construct a
building based on it. Now I created a building that is really fractured in many different ways. There's three different parts. Very simple volumes. There is the bridge,
there is the empty volume, there is the romantic wooden volume. So it's a kind of typography of his life. That's an aerial view. It's connected to the
Kulturgeschichtliches Museum that's a famous historical
museum of the city and by the way Osnabruck,
near the Dutch border, is one of the oldest places in Germany. That's where Teutoburg Forest is, that's where Hitler
thought Germans came from. That was the ethnic sort of epicenter. And the oldest coins of
Germany are in that building. The Durer engravings. But I connected it in this very radical building which as I said is a typography of roots that end nowhere and I call it
actual, in German museum, (speaking in a foreign language),
a museum without an exit. Once you enter the museum
of course there are doors you can leave the museum, but there's no exit from the experience of this particular life of Felix Nussbaum. The great painter, the
painter lost in history the painter deported,
the painter murdered. So here it is, right behind
the famous museum of Osnabruck. Just in front of the walls
where the treaty of Westphalia was signed. Here we have, actually now a space I could
build under German regulations. I wanted to build a space
where the paintings are not like in a museum but hang
in a very narrow space. It's really two wheel
chairs passing each other. 90 centimeters each, so a meter eighty. The narrowest space I
could possibly build. So that you don't look
at this painting just as master works of art but see how he saw them. He saw them in that proximity in his attic and you can see the wooden
volume which represents the old romantic paintings before 1933. You can see the Nussbaum
(speaking in a foreign language), the Nussbaum walk, which is
that narrow slice of concrete and the metal building which is the bridge and by the way when I made this building somebody
said, what is the bridge? I said that's the bridge for the unknown paintings of unknown Nussbaum. And they said, but we know, we have historians, we know everything there is to be known about him and as a result of building this museum strangely enough two collections of paintings were given back to the museum of Osnabruck. A collection from New York and Tel Aviv where his name had been erased during of course those terrible years. So there it is a building that is small, but tells that story and tells
that shifting stone story how this individual is
part of that world history and you can see maybe on the edge there on that sharp pointed wall a painting of Roland Strasser's synagogue where he had his bar mitzvah just exactly next to this building. So it's a building that
is kind of in a nutshell as Hamlet says somewhere, "If I could be locked in a nutshell, "I could really tell the
story of the world in it." And luckily for me I was able to build another building many years
after I finished the building because audiences increased. When I built it there was no cafe there was no, you know, they thought it's a small building we don't need these things, but luckily I was able to build and the museum is thriving and is moving forward in this small town. So past, present and future. The triangle is an
important one in my work and memory of course is not only about old things, it's about new things. How do you create memory
when you build a building? Now this is really my first house. I never built a house. Why? Because I lived my life in reverse. Most people start with buildings and then when they've sort of done a lot they can relax and think about, you know, reflect on that they've done, but I had time to reflect
before I built anything and now I really have to work hard. So it's a house. This is a house Connecticut, for a couple. You can see that it's a stainless steal. It's mono cut construction. It's really a sculptured form that really penetrates into the house. The house many different colors depending on the angle which you access it. It's completely wood inside, solid oak. My clients are art lovers, they're art experts, they have collections but their brief to me was, we don't want to bring
our art into this house, we have it in New York and elsewhere, we want a house to inspire us. Ah, that's a hard assignment, to create an ambiance, an intimacy, a domestic sense of life with the means of architecture and it's not a large house but again, to create a sustainable house. Well, it's almost a total work of art because they asked me to design everything the furniture, even the
zincs and the shower and you can see, I don't like those taps those British Victoria silver things so I was able to design this
bronze sort of sculpture that's, you know, is a
line when you close it and of course the shower
also without those curves and without those bath
things that I never like. And so again, the house has few openings kind of almost porch like. It's a sustainable building. Doesn't have glass, you
know, large pains of glass. It's on a hill, this beautiful thing and really it's organized
around the light, you know, in the winter and
summer where is the light? And how to create really
new memories for clients. And it's, you know, it's a
small but dramatic structure. I always say, the only one mistake that
I made, one single mistake, they gave Nina and
myself a key to the house one weekend, said you can stay
in the house for the weekend and we stayed and then I never recovered because my wife said to me like why don't we have a house like this? (audience laughing) The Unobserved Unicorn is another chapter. The Unobserved Unicorn is a Chinese idea. You know, the Chinese believe that we only see the white horses, but among the white
horse are the unicorns. You know, those special creatures. And they said you have to be ready to see the unexpected otherwise
you'll just see the horses you'll never see the unicorn. It's a beautiful thought because in this case it's about the site. How do you discover a site? It is like a unicorn, they all blend together like white horses, but the one with the horn is the one. So there's always
something hidden in a site just waiting to be discovered. That's true. There's always something hidden in a site just waiting to be discovered and you can see that vertically
there's the unicorn right? Just in the center of it, but we an skip over it easily because it's easier to read it that way and that's kind of the
illustration of a project here. As I mentioned I was born in Poland and as I mentioned Stalin the dictator who after the war
swallowed half of Europe, so called in eastern Europe, Poland included, the dictatorship was. And he gave a gift to Poland. The gift to Poland was
first of all the deaths that followed the
German, the Nazi murders, but also the Soviet ones and I was able to build a
building across this gift, the gift was the Palace of Culture, which exists in Moscow. It exists in many places. He put it as a stamp of oppression and by the way I remember as a boy with my parents, you know, Warsaw was pretty destroyed
in the late '40, '50s. They completely wiped it off the map. The Germans completely leveled it. The only building there was this symbol of oppression of the Polish people
and the Polish nation. Now, there I was able to build a really a spectacular apartment building it's not a cultural building it's just a residential tower. It happens to be the tallest
one in Europe right now. It's about 68 stories high. And it's a sculptured form that is just in front of the palace. And in itself represents in its form, it's a torqued wing like form, which really is the wing of the Polish ego that has been cut by the
Soviets and cut by history. It's a dramatic building
in an area which has really almost no, well, no
residential buildings at all because it was just wiped during the war and it became kind of
the center of the city in a sort of political way,
but there is the building bringing life to the building and really pushing the Stalin
building to the background. It's a complex building. It has many different shapes and forms. It speaks to the city and luckily for me who speaks
and reads Polish and is Polish this building has become
the icon of Warsaw. I was staying in a hotel in the
intercontinental next to it, on their key chain, the
key card was the building. So people identify this
building even though it's just a residential building as something that gives
new life to Poland. And true, when I came back to
Poland after so many years, I saw a different country. It was not the country of
darkness, of oppression, of fear, it was a country of liberty. A beautiful country of a
new sense of what Poland has always wanted to be, but often not been given a chance. That's another chapter. It's about the sketch, The Round-Cornered Table and I have to tell you this story because it's about the formica table that I grew up in the Bronx. We had only a two room apartment. My sister and I slept in the bedroom. My parents were in the living room. We had a very small kitchen. We had a table, a formica. A sort of ungainly brown
formica table of that time. After finishing supper, I would clean the dishes, wipe the table and put my drawings on this table but then to do my homework. Now how do you do homework? You had ink, you had
pencils, you had a T-square. A T-square is a device that you put around an edge of a table as you
know and you slide it down. And I had very modernist exercises. I's draw an axonometric of a brick wall, you know, with all the bricks. Very Meusian kind of exercise. But I had a problem because as I was sliding
this T-square down the table at what point is the curve
beginning to deflect the line by a millimeter, by .0 of a millimeter or one of a millimeter? You never knew. At some point that line was no longer at a perfect right angle and then I had my eureka moment. I realized, why is everyone
obsessed with a right angle, since there 359 others? And suddenly I was able
to use the T-square around the corner with great pleasure. By the way Le Poeme de
l'Angle Droit, Le Corbusier's mystical book called The
Poem to the Right Angle. In that book, in this
French master's thesis he says very specific, if the world ever departs
from the right angle, we will have entered the apocalypse. (audience laughing) Well, okay. So why was there just one angle? Why was there just one angle? One accepted angle on which
the world seemed to depend? And really I mean, I'm an
architect, people who love, it's still such a policing force in the field of architecture
that it seems really like everything is based on this. Think about it. It's a plutonic idea. Plato, postulated the
right angle, correct? In the Timaeus, but when he walked through
the streets of Athens there was not a single right
angle that he could see. 'Cause Athens' topography. There's not a single, not
even in the Parthenon. The Parthenon is curved, the columns lean inwards. It's not, there's not a single right angle in that amazing building. So, the right angle and the freedom to
discover something other. So I had a chance to build this important building in Dusseldorf. One of the most sophisticated and beautiful cities in Germany. Ko-Bogen, which is really two major blocks at the end of the major avenue the konig side, the king's
alley right on the Hofgarten, the Royal Garden and two blocks, you know, the regulations are very strict. The building has to be this, the building has to be this high. How do you find any
freedom to design anything but two gigantic blocks? It's very hard because it's really, you know, it dictates the zoning and their regulations
dictate there have to be two large blocks, exactly, given the heights, given the orders for each elevation. So suddenly I had a inspiring moment. Le Petit Prince, The Little Prince. Now remember in the
little prince the snake swallows the elephant
and it looks like a hat. So that's a brilliant idea. A snake swallows an elephant
and looks like a hat. Things that don't go together
can suddenly come together in an unexpected way. So I said, I'm gonna try to swallow the two blocks with my pencil. So there they are. You can see the large scale. This is right on the Hofgarten, on the water there on the lake. And then the building
develops just through into public spaces and, you know, it's marble and it's glass with patterns. And I also opened the building with large green sort of openings that are read both from the inside of the
building and from the outside. It's really a dramatic structure, following all the regulations but really free in its geometry within this very strict parameter. And I think that's really what I discovered, that within
this very tight regulation there's amazing amount of freedom if you have the right
snake, the right elephant and the right hat. So there it is. It's really, has become really the center. It has offices, it has
retail shops, restaurants it's really at the end of this avenue one of the most sort
of important buildings. And it has given, a really a sign to redevelop the areas everywhere there as well. Okay, The Overture. Well, I mean, you know, I was as I said a professional musician. So the Overture. You know what the overture
in Mozart, Magic Flute, the overture in Beethoven's Fidelio generally overture is a kind of summary of what's going to follow. Well, what is the
overture in architecture? The overture in architecture is the idea. What is the idea in architecture? And this is what I really kind of illustrated with. This is a Velazquez painting, A women playing a harpsichord. Question is what is the
idea of this painting? Now you don't have to be a
Flemish expert in history to know that this painting is not about a woman playing a harpsichord. She's playing a harpsichord, sure. The light is falling and
she's at that chair below, but we know that there is
an idea in this painting which has nothing to do with this obvious figuration of what,
it's a complex painting. Lots of ideas are happening in here. Certainly very similar to architecture. What is the idea in architecture? It's not the buildings program explicitly or what the building stands for it's something internally
like in this Velazquez, in this Vermeer painting. So Reflections in Keppel Bay in Singapore. Well, you know that Mies
van der Rohe said that, "The most important thing
is to have a singular idea. "One idea which can be
repeated over and over again "in a close a possible way." And of course if you compare Toronto-Dominion project of
Mies and his Chicago project, they're almost identical. Slightly different side, but they stood the two towers then, well, I always rejected this idea. I don't think you can, an idea can be transposed in that way. Here's Singapore's side,
right on Keppel Bay. You know, all the industrial sites. These sites have become
now more available, industry has changed and I was able to win a competition with this project for housing. This is towers and lower
buildings around Keppel Bay. What is the idea of the building? Well, there were two idea, major ones. First of all I said, the regulations are for
rather low buildings. But I'm going to try to show the redevelopment agency of Singapore, and Singapore is a city state, but very advanced in many ways. That they should be really
allowing much higher buildings. Buildings that are 50% higher than the zoning because it's
better, more sustainable, not to eat up all the green
space, it's a small country. You need to keep the green space. Create buildings that
are tall, highly dense still create the shore
line with lower buildings. Create amenities in the bridges. Then I had another idea. Why should be people just
live in extruded towers with just repeat, you can
repeat plans very rationally, but you can create a tower
which is doubly curved where every floor is in a
different position of space. And it really is something
amazing when you're there. It's hard to explain and form a picture, but when you're on a floor there's someone above you and below you, but not exactly where you are
and it's a different feeling. And by the way, when I
proposed this to my developers Keppel Company, they
said okay Mr. Libeskind that's a little bit too much for us. One curve will be enough. So, I said, well, if you say that. So we went back, they went back to the
redevelopment agency of Singapore and the agency said,
okay, to the developers you can have the one curve but then buildings have be lower by 40%. Now they were not stupid. There's much more money to
be made in the tall building. So there it is, a sense of creating a vital neighborhood and by the way Ridley Scott just made
a movie about the future using this as his prop. But it's not the future,
it's already built you have people living there. You have, spectacular views and
again, this is something that I'm very interested how do you make, you know, people expect a museum
to be iconic, right? Or a town hall, but
housing is just housing just like the right angle, it's the banal, but I think housing is
the most important thing for people to live and by the way I just I'm not only working on luxury project. I just won a competition, two competitions in New York City. One in Bedford-Stuyvesant
and one in Long Island to build housing, you know, social housing in those block, tenement blocks for older people which really believe me has nothing to do with
the way those blocks look. They have totally different qualities. They have a different, same
amount of money as those you know, brick blocks that
mar so many people lives because of their terrible
idea or lack of idea about how to live. So there it is, Singapore. And I'm very proud that this was actually believe it or not the most
profitable project of Singapore. Singapore has, you know,
Jean Nouve, you know, Foster, really the most famous colleagues and architects working there. So to create a project which is the most profitable is fantastic. Now I had another chance to
build right next door almost. High density project called the Corals. Again, you know, standing in water. There are very different
regulations, very different sense to give everybody a view of the site. To give everybody a sense
of beauty and also luxury. The Labyrinth. Well, The Labyrinth, you know, we live in a labyrinth. Life is a labyrinth, but
labyrinth is also the method. What method can you use to
design a building or a city? What is it? Now we know from the story of Daedalus, and Icarus, remember? Daedalus was in the Greek ancient times, designed the labyrinth. He designed the labyrinth, but he also designed a way
to get out of the labyrinth, which is the wings and remember
Icarus, one of his sons flew just too close to the sun and his wings melted and he fell to death in the water. So that's really the
sense of the labyrinth. How do we deal with a method without really falling apart? Now these three faces. The different methods, you have Descartes, the scientific method. The coordinate access, very rational. Reject everything you've been told, that's what Descartes' says. Forget everything you've been taught. It's all a lie. Start thinking from
zero, doubt everything, there is no truth, doubt everything. Even doubt that there is truth. So he went very far to create a system. Brunelleshi, one of my favorite
artists and architects. The system of perspective which means that whatever is close to you is large whatever is far from you
is small, it's amazing. So God is the smallest,
it's the infinite point, it's a point, it doesn't almost exist. It's out of this world, literally and then we have Mendelsohn,
Erich Mendelsohn. The great architect on 1920s, '30s, '40s in Berlin and then in America who really had a method
of designing his building by listening to a piece of music. Believe it or not he listened to apiece of Bach and just made a gesture on his drawing and then I don't know how but he was able to translate the gesture into large office buildings,
into schools, universities. Amazing. So, methods you can,
there are many methods there's no one method, there are many, many different methods and each design that I do really you have to invent a method, the right method
for this right program. Now here is a project
in Germany, in Dresden. A project for the Military
History Museum of Germany. That's no small topic. It is the largest museum in Germany because German military history is powerful and long and devastating as well. There is a picture of Dresden after the Allied bombings in 1945. This beautiful city which was considered the Venice of the north. The most beautiful city
in the north of Europe was completely, just vanished from sight. So what did I do? Here is the U shape, that armory and there's a vector and I created a building
which is self similar to the triangulation of
the bombings of Dresden. That's the new part of the building. So your standing within the three bombs that started the total
destruction of the city and these vector points actually at the first bomb, the two
others, second and third bombs. So here is a plan of
it, plan of the armory. It was built in 19th Century. It soon became a military
museum then became Museum of Saxony, Museum of
Hitler, was Hitler's museum. Museum of Stalin, the Russian,
the East Germany Museum and after the unification of Germany the question was what do we do? How do we go on? So we can see that this vector in which you're in that triangle disrupts the old structure
in a very particular point just between the chronology. The chronology goes from right to left. From Teutonic knights in 12th Century all the way to NATO soldiers, German soldiers in Afghanistan. Interrupts that chronology
just between 1914 and 1945 exactly the militaristic years that devastated the world. Here is from the book. It's a kind of a, yes, the building, the armory which I restored. It was poorly handled by
East German architects. It was kind of dilapidated. I restored it and sort of had that strong vector traveling through it. You can see that the building cuts through that structure, that common structure with a
completely different structure. It's a country structure,
it's leaning, it's dynamic, and by the way that running
text as you enter it is from von Clausewitz. Von Clausewitz wrote the book on war, a book that, I think, every
general in this country and every other country
is reading right now. In which he said, peace
is just delay of war. it's a frightening thought, but that's Prussian militarism taken to its extreme philosophical end. So, again, the museum does
not have really let's say in this new part, normal exhibits. It's more emblematic objects. There's the door rocket. It's sort of emblematic objects that, things that fall from the sky. And by the way, in this
part of the museum, which doesn't have normal artifacts, questions are asked. The questions are the following, why do people follow
authoritarian leaders? Why do people march when
they are told to march? Why do people pull out their
guns when told to shoot? Why do they shoot? Well, no answers can be
given to such questions, but the questions are posed. No answers can be given, but the questions are
posed to the audiences. And you can see toys and all the things that
are part of everyday life and then at the end of this journey at the very top you can
go out of the building. That was my idea. You're out of the building. You're in an open structure, pointed towards that first bomb and you have the view of Dresden. It's a beautiful rebuilt city. Rebuilt in a kind of baroque style. Mock baroque I would call it because it's all new construction, but it looks like baroque. And you're in the wind. You're suspended in the
wind, you know, there's wind. You're just suspended
in front of the building and I think that's really the idea of a military history museum. You're a human being suspended in front. The military is not behind
the walls in a democracy, and Germany's a democracy, the military is responsible
to the civic order. Military is not an autonomous group, it's a responsible to citizens. And so you as an individual are suspended in front of the building and you're free to think, to float, to act as you think fit in a democracy so that the devastation of wars don't come to you, to us. The Chess Game. Well, the Chess game, is about strategy. Chess is very interesting,
for those of you who play it. It has very few rules, yes? Very few rules. The knight moves, the
queen the king, the pawn, very, but very complex outcomes. As apposed to modern
technology algorithm which have very complex rules and
very, very simple outcomes. So that's the difference between chess and this is about strategy. Every building needs a
strategy to be built. So the building, the client, the budget, all this is part of a strategic thinking. How to get something done. The Jewish Museum Berlin, which in fact actually was my first building. I never built anything before, not even a small addition. As I told you I didn't
work for any architect. I didn't work on any
buildings in my whole life and by the way, when I
won this competition, quote competition, usually winning a competition
is a ticket to oblivion. Don't try to win a competition because nothing really happens
when you win a competition. But I was with Nina actually
on my way and our kids in Berlin on the way to
paradise of Santa Monica and the Getty and I said to her, we stay in Berlin in
order to try to build this although nobody had any attempt
to build such a building under one condition that
you join me as my partner, that's Nina, and she said to me the words which I still remember very well, she said, "How can I be your partner?" "In my whole life I've never even been "in an architect's office." And I said to her, "The same applies to me "so we are both in this together." (audience laughing) So there is how I started. The black line there, the black line is the Berlin Wall. The museum was built in, well
the competition was in 1989, just before the fall of the wall. There it is and by the way when I drew that Star of David
connecting addresses of people and I multiplied that matrix to sort of many, many different geometries I really felt that I destroyed the wall and how strange it was because Jews had nothing to do
with the division of Berlin. Jews were citizens of
Berlin, successful citizens, workers, people who made the city into an interesting important city. So there is the building. There is kind of the matrix
in which I sort of married Jews and none Jews, inter-married them. Famous one, Rachel von Hagen, Friedrich Schleiermacher,
Mies van der Rohe, Paul Salon, the writers,
poets, theologians, and I sort of ramified this system into the planning of the building. Well, strategy. What is the building based on? Well, you see the music paper. I wrote it between, I call it Between The Lines. Between the lines of music, in the empty space of music. And you have a portrait here
by Egon Schiele of Schoenberg, the great Arnold later Aaron Schoenberg, the great composer,
Vienesse, came to America maybe you know, he's famous. You should listen to his music it's not screechy and difficult although it's seldom played,
but Schoenberg was a genius and he created an opera
when he was in Berlin which he did not complete
called Moses and Aaron. I highly recommend it,
it's not often performed. It's a complex opera. He gave it up after the second act. And second act, it's
an aporia and a paradox because Moses calls to God
and there's just silence and then Schoenberg is exiled from Berlin. He leaves Berlin, he's
hounded and that's it. I thought if I build this building I could use this building
to complete an opera, to complete the third act
which is unwritten musically. It cannot be written I could complete it in
the echos of the footsteps of the visitors across the void, which runs across the whole museum. There's an emptiness. The presence of absence is
the center of the museum. And of course there are many
other things that I show. Walter Benjamin, the
great writer of Berlin, (speaking in a foreign
language) One-Way Street. How do you open a one way street? So, there is the building, there is the old baroque building. There is, kind of the void, it runs right through that building. There's a Holocaust tower. It's a piece of architecture
that is dramatic. You enter really through the old building, into the underground. That's a very unusual
way to enter a building. You don't enter the new building at all you can only access it from the darkness. And that was my idea that
only through the darkness of the history of Berlin, of Germany, which is during the
height of it's prominence. Great philosophers like
Hegel and Schelling and Lessing, the bigotry against Jews and against others was so powerful that the destruction of Berlin was not surprising actually in retrospect. By the way, the stones
of Jewish cemeteries were used as of 1933 to
pave the subways of Berlin. So you have to enter through the darkness and then you enter really
a different kind of space it's a totally different story and by the way my
strategy in this building was to tell a story. Now a building could tell a story. Now when I said that and excited, wanted to do it, I was excoriated by famous historians, by famous architects, by
famous architectural experts not by the public. They said no, architecture
does not tell a story. Architecture is an
abstract object in space. Beautiful in it's proportions and so on, but nothing to do with a story. I said no, architecture can tell story, not in words but in proportions
and materials, in light, those are the languages of architecture. So there it is, a kind of tense relationship
between two buildings that are not really connected and ny the way this was international competition. There were 120 architects
from around the world and I was the only one
who proposed no bridge between the buildings. There should be no bridge. Every project had a bridge, of course, that's the obvious way. Connect the baroque, put a bridge, and you have a new building. I said, no, no bridge, there is a bridge, but only in darkness. And then of course in this
darkness you enter this plane, this overture I call it,
which leads you to the, what I call the Holocaust Tower. It's an emptiness, just a tower. 23 meters, 24 meters high. Just empty, just with a
sliver of light at the end and I have to tell you I, for many years I worked on this project and I had no light in this tower. I thought that in the
Holocaust, the dead end. There is no light in murdering people, there's nothing we can say about it. It's fatal darkness. It's darkness that cannot be penetrated. By then I read an account of a survivor who was then in Brooklyn, a women. She said, "When I was put
into those cattle cars "to be taken to one of the
concentration camps, Steinhoff," she said, "I saw a crack of light," and she said, this is many years later, "I don't know what that
crack of light was, "was it a split in the wood of the car? "Was I looking at plume
of smoke of an airplane, "but I don't know what it was,
but I held on to that light "and I believe I survived because of it." How interesting. So at the last moment the
building was almost finished I put this sharp end of
light into this tower. There is also, that plate, that overture gives you also access to this garden. I call it the Garden of Exile because Berlin is exiled. Berliners were exiled, but
also the city's exiled from it. So it was a different
city, a city of new hope. It's a symbolic garden. The vegetation is high
up, seven meters high, there's a system that things grow, and symbolic because
it's seven times seven, 49 columns like that standing at right angle to the plate of ground which itself is tilted so you feel really like you're in a boat. You feel, many people sort
of suffer from lack balance. It's hard to stand there. Symbolic, the central column
is filled with the earth of Jerusalem and the 48 are
filled with the earth of Berlin. 1948, the creation of the state of Israel and of course the stair itself
that takes you to exhibitions which are, don't have
really normal windows. They are really that matrix of that star that shines towards addresses that have been erased in
history, but are accessible. And of course the memory
void at the very end where if stand, if you
cross those bridges. And much of the building has
no possibly of hanging art. You cannot hang art here because
these places are not heated and not in the winter or
not cold in the summer. That was also part of my idea. The inside of the building, there's an outside of a building. And of course authorities would ask me, why are we paying money to build something where we can't part art? But I said to them, it's important to show visitors that the key to the building is
that which cannot be shown which is the spiritual carriers of those objects and those ideas. So there it is. It's a building that's certainly has had an impact on the city,
on the consciousness. Many of the chancellors
of Germany whom I've known over the years have told me that more than all the speeches they gave, more than all the political agreements that they made across the world the building is the thing
that took Germany, Berlin, to different steps and that's what I say, you know, a book can be
filed away or even burned. So can a building but it's more difficult. You can wipe memory out with a mouse, but a building is something on the street and it brings that sense of what it is and that history and the
memory really to the public. Expression. Well, Expression is about building. It's a dirty word in architecture right? You can have expression in
art, but not in architecture, but I just had a very
good espresso coffee. You know, espresso coffee,
nobody just wants diluted coffee. Yeah, maybe you do, but mostly
we like having espresso, the real coffee, the essence of coffee, that's really what it is. And, expression, ah, my
favorite person, James Joyce. I think his archives are in
Buffalo, if I'm not mistaken. You know, when I won this
competition in Dublin, I felt I knew Dublin very well 'cause I read Ulysses numerous times and that book is really,
you know, as he said, it will keep scholars busy for 1,000 years and then there'll be
more time to find out. So yeah I thought okay, I'm going to dedicate this building, kind of in my own way to James Joyce. Now what is it? It's a public theater. 2,200 seats. It's a sketch, there it is on really a piece of land that was nothing when I started, just the docks. You can see there is a piazza I created. A very shallow entry making
the building very economical. Again, it's not a big
deal to design a theater for a billion dollars which
has been designed in Hamburg. But this was 40 million. So that's the difference,
costs are very important. And to create a building
with great acoustics, with elegance, with a sense of prominence. and now of course it's really
a very popular building. It's, the whole area is thriving. It's flanked by, you
can see a piece of it, two office buildings. We had a public private partnership. So I built two office buildings. One of them is Facebook, the other one is a big law company. And just to give you a
sense, that's the street. This street is called Misery Hill. So you can see what it used to be. Misery Hill, that was the poor Dublin, which has now risen to be a
fantastic city, beautiful city. There is the Grand Canal Theater. There's the office building sort of touching into the theater. There's the piazza which
is occupied every day with markets and now Google and Microsoft and all the companies and this theater has generated to restaurants and hotels. And then I made my own little
memorial to James Joyce. Nobody asked me. Just between the theater and the atrium I was able, ah, the Dubliners
are a literary people, to put 10 100 letter words from, actually not from Ulysses,
but from Finnegan's Wake. You know, he was a linguist, Joyce, so he thought that there
were 10 words of God, thunder words he called them that connected all languages. And he was, you know, knew all languages. He knew everything, Swahili
and Finnish and all. And he out these 100 letter words. And I actually was able to
put them kind of backwards as if to print the words, but if you were to have
a minute to sit there you're overwhelmed by really
the sense of where you are. Okay, Denver Art Museum,
another great place. We're in the Rocky
Mountains where I was able to win a competition to
design a major museum. Now a sketch, you have
to sketch something. As I was coming down in
the airplane I thought this is a great place, it's
got the Rocky Mountains and it's got this beautiful city. So I called it Two Lines Going For a Walk. Really two different
lines of movement that are really creating the building itself. There is the building it's really an unprecedented building, it's a radical building. It's not a box, it's not a tame building. It's radical in every way spatially. And it's radical not just because I am sort of a believer in it, but because the museum itself said to me don't give us any box. We're not interested
in the old idea of art. We're interested in contemporary art, which is installation art,
it's sound it's music, it's dance, it's not
just hanging paintings. And Frederick Heinrich who runs the museum has used it in a way that is unfathomable. Shows that cannot come
to New York, or Chicago, or Los Angeles come to this building because they have the space. For example like Christian Dior, a mega fashion show which is right now. They wanted to have it New York, they wanted to have it
in Chicago, in L.A., but no one had the space. And by the way, it gets about
a million visitors a year. When I started it was
called the count down but look on the right is
also a piece of the project. That's a view from the top. I was with great architects,
Isozaki, Thom Mayne. Many, many great architects
in the competition and we had to build, you know, there was a program to build a car garage to park 5,000 cars or whatever it was. So everybody thought put
them underground, great, have a nice space, but if you calculate, you
build an underground garage, you have no money to build the building. So I said, okay let's
build a regular garage, five story garage, but put
housing around it, create art. There it is, across the street towards the Gio Ponti building. Kind of a diagonal cut in
the city and the piazza. Again, I had support from the authorities to close the street, it
was full of just cars. I was able to build housing. And by the way it was interesting this housing which I built, the apartments that had
the view of the museum was sold first for the most money the apartments that had a
view of the Rockies sold last. (audience laughing) It shows you that people
want to look at architecture. So there it. The museum that has different capacity, a different sense of form,
different sense of excitement. And it's really a museum that in many ways it's not for itself, it
changed the whole area. The area became the art area. There's, two new museums have been built. The Clyfford Still Museum, another museum, all the galleries, hotels housing. So this area near the state capital has suddenly become a cultural
center of a great city not just an empty street of car parking. Okay, World Trade Center. Well, that may just be the most difficult project ever to even fathom what it is. I have to tell, there is no, so to speak, a road map for this project because first of all,
there's not a single client. Who's the client? There is the families of
the victims, number one, in the thousands, think about it. 3,000 people or so perished, but each of them had an
uncle, an aunt, a son, a brother, a mother, a father. So those numbers are in mega
thousands and thousands. The site is owned by Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. One of the largest organization. It has about 7,000
engineers and architects. Think about it. 7,000 engineers and architects. Run by the governor, two
governors of powerful states, New York and New Jersey governors are in charge of the Port Authority. The Port Authority leases the land to private developers and
their own architects to boot and of course underneath run
the path trains and subways, which are independent
authorities themselves. So take that. That's your client, federal money as well. There's money of the federal government. So, yeah, that's, how are
you going to do something? What are you going to do? Well, that's my early sketch. In the book it's kind of a pullout and I have to tell you, I was in One Liberty Plaza,
very close to the site with the seven finalists. Norman Foster, Richard Meyer,
famous friends and colleagues. And somebody from the Port Authority said, "Does anybody want to
go down to the site?" and every architect said, no, it's much easier to see
the site from the top. You can see everything. You can see the whole cleaned up site, you can see it, but Nina and I said, yeah we want to go down. It was a miserable
November day, windy, wet. The classic gray day in New york. I went down, we went down to the site and really I have to tell you that as I descended that
ramp, that 75 feet below street level, really my life changed. I experienced something that I never experienced, I
never thought about it. And I touched the wall
which was holding the site, that slurry wall and the engineer said, "That's the slurry wall." and even though I studied architecture I had not a clear a idea
what was a slurry wall. It's a dam, it's like a huge dam holding the waters, the
pressure of Hudson River from flooding the entire city and it would have had that wall collapsed. Then I created, you know, I decided never to build on most of the site. Out of the 16 aches, eight aches I said, nobody should ever build on. It's a sacred, even though
it's a piece of real estate you have to understand nobody
declared this a sacred site. It's a piece of real estate and every square inch of this real estate in New York is very expensive, but I said, no, nothing
should be built there. That should be a public space. There's the footprints, the names, the museum should be there. And then I had the
towers really as far away as possible so that they would be not casting shadows,
as little as possible. And 776 Tower, which is
the tower number one. That's the height, again,
which will never be surpassed. even though taller towers
will be built in New York nobody will ever surpass 776 because that's the date of the
Declaration of Independence, which is the first
document of human rights. And of course the many other connections underground and the bedrock. So of course it's not
easy to do such a project. You're under tremendous scrutiny. There are people that want
to rebuild the towers, just the old towers. There are people who want
to have low rise buildings. Let's have just low rise
buildings and a park. There are people that don't
want to rebuild anything. Let's not build anything for
the next 30, let's think about. So you have to go into the fray. Yeah, it's a marathon, it's not a sprint. And there it is. I illustrate what is there now, actually the towers. Tower number two is not yet constructed but tower one, three and four are. Footprints, the museum,
the visitor center, the path terminal, the
performing arts center under construction. So, almost I would say
85, 90% is almost here. And that's really the sense
of what a master plan is. People don't really now
what a master plan is. They think it's some fiction
or some mental abstraction, but to think about it,
it's a musical score. The composer is not visible on the stage. You don't see Mozart conducting
or Schoenberg conducting. They're invisible, they wrote the score. The score has to be very precise geometrically, architecturally, musically. Has to be given to others to interpret otherwise it's a mechanical score, you have to have some
freedom of interpretation. It's called maybe
compromise in a democracy and you have to be very precise to achieve the consensus of all the players. If the musicians don't want to play it nothing's going to get built, right? If the orchestra goes on
strike, no performance. So consensus was the key and I'm a great believer in democracy. Many people told me wouldn't
you like this to be in China? They would build it in three years. It would be perfect. It would appear on the
cover of all the magazines. You'd be finished. I said, "No, I wouldn't
prefer this to be in China "I like that it's in New York, it's hard." As Churchill said, "Democracy
is the worst system "but the best of all the worst systems." No matter what is democracy is difficult, but it's the best of the systems. So there it is, there is the slurry wall. Which is now really sort of
orienting the museum itself and the underground 9/11 museum
has millions of visitors. The site itself has 35
million visitors a year. It's not even complete. People like it people
like the feeling of it. And by the way to expose the
slurry wall is very difficult. That was one of the things
that I was lucky to have support at the Port Authority engineers because it's a foundation foundation is meant to
put something on top of it so you don't see it, so you know, but to expose a foundation is something that has never been done. We see foundations in old ancient cities which have collapsed. In Greece, in Rome, in Jerusalem. You see foundations that are open, but they're not working anymore, they're not working for the buildings so this is a living foundation
which is testament really to the power of the wall, to the power of America to the power of liberty,
to the power of strength and it's very moving if you go over there. And of course, the
footprints with the water and by the way that was
also in my master plan. I wanted to bring the water
to the site in a big way. You know, the tabloids, New York Post, on the front cover they
said, Libeskind is crazy you don't bring Niagara Falls
to New York but you need it. You need it for the acoustics. It's very noisy in all of Manhattan and to give it a private experience. And if you're ever there you stand there, you can read a name. You have a sense of communion. A sense of sensitivity and of course also bringing water to the heartscape is good. There's so much asphalt
in lower Manhattan. So there it is, looking towards it. It's not yet finished as I said. There are many, sort of some
elements still not there, but it is what intended it to be, which is really an echo of
liberty and echo of what America is, really city of immigrants and I have to say this to you that as I said my parents were immigrants. What did my parents do? They were workers in sweatshops. My mother was in the garment industry. Sweatshops with other immigrant women. My father worked in a printing shop in a very tough
environment on Stone Street and I said to myself when
I was doing this project, who is this project for? My parents and 99% of New Yorkers will not be in those wonderful towers, Conde Nast and Time Magazine, they'll be on the streets,
they'll be in the subways, they'll be running to feed their families. What do they get? That was my intent. Give them a beautiful
view, give the memory, but also something amazingly
beautiful in New York, which is this sense of
perspective and what New York is. And that's really what the book is about. It's really about how architecture can contribute to civic life. How it can respond in a creative way and how one can take a
path that is individual. Thank you. (audience applauding) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. - [Man] So we're gonna
take some questions. I'm not sure if Daniel's
prepared to answer them. - I can take a few questions. - [Woman] Thank you very much for your very interesting talk. I just wanted to ask you,
you really like acute corner. So can you explain more
character, philosophies when you used lots of acute corner? And also based on this can
you have some reflection of architecture should be
harmonized with the surrounding, around, surrounded by some
very difference like you do? Thank you. - I don't know whether I
understood the question completely. - [Women] Yeah, so it seems like you really like acute corner, like-- - Ah, about geometry.
- Yeah geometry. - Oh, yes.
- Yeah. - Yes.
- Acute. - I love acute corners.
- Yeah I really like that, so. - Look, look if you think about it this is what Frank Lloyd Wright said, who, you know, you have some great buildings here in Buffalo for example, he said, "If a building is
not sharp and wedge like "it's not going to work." His buildings are, even some of them who have just right angles
wedged like and sharp. Well, look everybody has
to follow their notion of what the world is about, but I think the world is not obtuse and it's not right, it's acute. - Yes.
(audience laughing) So that's why I want to
ask regarding to acute because cut up if I, the people who just see the building
is very impressive, but if I live, I was just in the building and maybe I don't feel well when the acute go directly to me. - Okay, well you're right. Many projects particularly
in Asia which I do there is the question of feng
shui and all these things. But I'm not really a believer in it at all because I think a lot of
it is just superstition. A lot of it is ancient lore, superstition, like astrology rather on astronomy. And I think we live in
a contemporary world. We have science, we have brain science, we have astrophysics, we have genetics, we have radical new views of the world, architecture is not changing that quickly, but architecture can also
be contemporary as well. - [Man] Yes, about the Freedom Tower. The Twin Trade Towers, were
twins both the same height and you replaced them with
a collection of towers with one that was most
prominent and tallest. In any way at all did
you see that as giving a classic New York gesture to our enemies? - No, well--
(audience laughing) It is, the project, you're right. The project is an affirmation of life over the terror of New York, absolutely. And really if you analyze the
two towers that were there and I know them because my brother-in-law worked in the Port
Authority in those towers and I was in them many times, it was not the best environment. It was very windy, the piazza, the plaza was closed in the winter because the wind around the plaza. There was no life in it,
there was no shopping, there was no, it was a
building of it's time. Very abstract kind of sculptures. So my idea was really
to create a neighborhood and to tell you the truth, since I started working
on this 300,000 people have moved to Lower
Manhattan around the site. If one ever wanted to know
if a project is good or not 300,000 people moving, which means schools, housing, shopping, hotels. Let's put it this way, Lower Manhattan around
this Ground Zero site is now the center of New York by far. There is Midtown, there is Hudson Yards there's Uptown, but for the
next 30 years there's no doubt that this is the epicenter of New York and I like it because that's the original, that's the, you know, old New York, China Town, Battery Park
City, Soho, Tribeca, all those subway lines which merge into this tip of Manhattan. So that was really pretty
much part of the project. There was no housing required here. It was really about 10 million square feet of density office space, five million square
feet of infrastructure, five more million in cultural. This project if you take the density of it this project is larger than all of Denver. Just try to get this in your head that this, what you see, those towers, it's larger than a downtown
of a major American city. That's what it is. And the fact that it looks open, that I kept the footprints
of the buildings as narrow as possible even though people at
that time wanted large, have big buildings for trading floors, I said by the time the buildings are built there won't be any trading floors because the technology will have changed. You don't need such huge buildings. So there's a lot of openness,
a lot of permeability and just think about it building number two
which not yet been built is still much taller than
the Empire State Building so it's sometimes hard to get sort of the scale but what is important is what it feels like really
on the streets of New York. The feeling as a pedestrian, as somebody taking the subway or the train and that's really the human scale and that's I think why
people do love coming there. There was a lot of controversy,
don't get me wrong. Oh my god, there was so much controversy. I was attacked by so many
people, but it's not new to me. Every project I've done
has been like that. So it's part of my life. (audience laughing) - [Woman] I just wanted to make
a comment or an observation, and thank you so much for coming. - Thank you. - [Woman] I had the opportunity to visit the Jewish museum in Berlin and of course I was quite
struck by the exterior and as an art historian I wondering how this was going to function as a museum and particularly the
history of the Jewish people and the Holocaust in Germany. Museum fatigue is a chronic thing and this, the Jewish museum
is dense with information it's extremely dense,
it's extremely layered there are many different
types of media in it that you can interact with, but I never got museum fatigue and I was not tired at the end. It was a very comfortable
walking experience. One of the best experiences
I've had in a museum. - Thank you.
- You're welcome. - And in fact the German
government has just appropriated 30 million Euro to redo the exhibitions they're aware that some problems and they asked the visitors why do they come to the building? And it's 50/50. 50% of them say they're
interested in Jewish history, 50% say they're interested in the building and so that's kind of what the 50/50 is and they decided to really modernize the exhibitions, completely go back in concept because they
did them very quickly and a lot of people were
not completely satisfied. But I agree with you, the visitors-- - [Woman] The point I was
just trying to make was although your buildings are
very radical from the outside it could bring people to think well, how do these buildings function? Do they function at all? That was just one experience that I -- - Thank you. Well, if you're an architect you have to make a comfortable building, a building that people want
to come to, definitely. Thank you. - [Man] Will you take one more question? - One more question, yes? - [Man] Thank you so much and one thing I really appreciated about your lecture was that you took this opportunity to
speak about current projects but also to go through your entire, kind of span across your entire career and reflect and give us some insight on it's beginnings as well and so it was just nice
to see that whole range of projects and ideas tonight. And in that same spirit
I just wondered if you could maybe reflect, it's
been now just over 30 years since the Deconstructivist
Architecture show at the MoMA. And that was a point in time
before you had built work. - That's right.
- As you acknowledged before you won the competition
for the Jewish museum. And so I just wondered
if you could reflect on that moment, as a
moment in your career, what that meant for you? But then also the kind
of label at the time Deconstructivist Architecture,
what that term meant and now maybe 30 years
later means for you? - Thank you so much, a great question. I never like the name
Deconstructivist Architecture. It sounded to me too academic and really not true to architecture because architecture
always about construction. It's not about deconstruction. Now, I knew Jacques Derrida pretty well. I had many talks with him
both in public and private. And once, he was kind of
inventor really of the term, and he once said to me,
"I can do what ever I want "I can write any text I want "and I can get a small
publisher in France, in Paris, "to publish it and if not I
can put it on the internet "and let people read it "but you Mr. Libeskind need
legal permission to do anything" and it is absolutely true. And then you suddenly realize
the difference between art, writing and architecture
which has a legal component a kind of policing component. We are not free. when it comes to
architecture there is a law. We're in a political
zone so I always thought that deconstruction was
not really the best term. Now what did it mean to me personally? Well, I was struggling to
do something at that point. I didn't build a single building, not even a single addition to a house, not even a garage, nothing really. And I never even drew a house. In fact I tell this story in
the book when I was in school when I was in a grade school,
The Cooper Union in New York. One of my professors,
Professor Israel Synech was a very famous engineer
in New York of skyscrapers. He died recently. He gave us a project that
everybody should design a house complete with electrical, technical, all the plumbing, everything. Now being a, kind of a
stupid rebel, I said, this is crazy 'cause I'm never
gonna do that in my life. I'm going to analyze the rebar system in the Port Authority bus
station that Nervy designed. well, it was the only time
in my career that I got a D. I got a D+, I got a D+, but my mentors in the school were laughing
all the time about that. So when that letter arrived
from Philip Johnson, who organized the exhibition,
asked me to participate, I really didn't even what it was because I didn't have any building. I scrounged up my models and my drawings that I was working on and luckily for me it was a great exhibition with great people, great architects, who subsequently did a lot
of very important work. I think it helped me to
position that work at the time. and Philip Johnson I remember standing with him at his penthouse. And Philip Johnson spoke a fluent German, he was an intellectual, all the things I house, in his penthouse were all the Rothkos. He was the first one to buy a Rothko. All the Giacomettis. He was the first one to buy a Giacometti. He was the first one to, the Philip johnson collection as we know is one of the greatest
collections in the world. But he stood at the window
and we were looking, and you could see the AT&T
building which he designed, and he looked at me laughing and he said, "You know, tomorrow the
world is going to change "after this exhibition is opened "architecture's gonna change in a moment" and it's definitely true. History doesn't change
gradually, it changes suddenly with an act, with whatever that thing is it's not a gradual change, it's
a sudden change and I think the world did change, globally, architecture took a different turn, maybe it was just part of what was happening and
somebody gave it a signal and by the way it was
the first exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art of architecture which was on the ground floor. It was not on the fifth
floor with the design it was where everybody entered the museum. The mass of the public liked the international style
exhibition back in the late '20s. So it was a great moment and whatever one thinks of Philip
Johnson he was an amazing powerful mind to do things culturally and the rest is sort of, yeah, the rest is the rest. Thank you. (audience applauding) (slow calm music)
