40 DESIGNER FILE
WORDS BY PAMELA BUXTON
Daniel Libeskind co-founded Studio Libeskind in 1989, the acclaimed projects of which include the Jewish Museum Berlin and the masterplan for the World Trade Center redevelopment. Below, he sets out the 15 things he’s learnt in his career
1 You can be an artist as an architect, but you can’t be an architect as an artist Choosing architecture was an accidental choice. Once you got into the Cooper Union [college] in New York City, you could choose to study either architecture or art. My tendency was to go for art, but my mother’s very wise advice was that I should be an architect, because if you’re an artist you won’t be able to do anything – you won’t even be able to buy a pencil! But if you’re an architect you can also be an artist. In fact, I didn’t find that much difference between the two fields. I painted and drew voluminous numbers of
pictures of architecture, both imaginary and real, but I’d never met an architect in my life. My parents were working class, in a working- class neighbourhood. Te people about us
worked in factories and there were no architects, or doctors or lawyers or accountants around. So I hardly knew what that world was. However, I went to school at the Bronx High School of Science, which has produced more Nobel Prize winners than France, and I was in an experimental programme to catch up with the Russians in space technology. So when I applied to Cooper, they wondered why I was lowering my scientific standards, and why I wasn’t going to MIT instead.
2 Tere’s a single line in my life, which is the line of drawing I really believe that architecture comes out of a drawing. It doesn’t come from being out in the field laying bricks or cutting up pieces of 2 x 4. I arrived at my architecture through drawing, purely because when I didn’t have any buildings to design, I still drew architecture. But it wasn’t architecture of the imagination like Piranesi, it was constructional – what architecture could be through a drawing. Tese drawings were kind of like my treatises.
3 I’ve never used a computer, and never intend to I always think the pencil is a smarter machine than a computer. Trough thickness and pressure of the hand, with the eye and brain, it’s far quicker, far better and far more articulate. I couldn’t have built all the buildings I’ve built without technology, but certainly that isn’t where I start.
4 You have to listen to the site In many ways a site is not visible – maps, plans and drawings of that kind offer a very superficial view. Instead, you have to listen to the invisible, and listen to the inaudible, in order to commune with the site in a way that is true. You have to put yourself into a certain state of being reincarnated in the site in other times, and in other worlds, in order to grasp
Right The Maggie’s cancer support building at the Royal Free Hospital, in London
PHOTO: STEFAN RUIZ
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