Daniel Libeskind Q&A
Daniel Libeskind is one of the world’s most famous architects for the same reason that he’s one of the most controversial: He delights in bellowing on hushed emotional ground. He made his name in 1999 with the Jewish Museum Berlin, a march of irregular walls and sweeping light and shadow in a tidy garden, and attracted further notice with similarly jagged museums in Copenhagen and Manchester.
His winning proposal for the new World Trade Center tower—1,776 feet high, with a sheared top that he said would glaze the lost towers’ pits with sunlight at the same spot every September 11—led competitors like Frederic Schwartz to charge that his flourishes advance his celebrity in defiance of urban or engineering logic. But his exuberance makes him popular, as his eighteen projects underway around the world attest. So can Libeskind help San Francisco’s new Contemporary Jewish Museum shake the Holocaust’s shadow from Jewish cultural life? Alec Appelbaum interviews Libeskind on his latest project.
