Cities want the drawing power of an iconic building, and the Bilbao effect has nurtured a climate that both sustains and rewards dramatic architecture. Rybczynski offers the example of Robert Venturi, who was commissioned to design a new concert hall in Philadelphia, his hometown. His graceful, integrative design lacked the punch that the city wanted; he was fired and the budget was raised from $60 million to around $250 million and the commission given to Rafael Vinoly (who, with the THINK team, was a finalist in New York’s Ground Zero competition). “Vinoly’s glass vault,” Rybczynski writes, “however impressive its drama, is an alien presence. The devaluing of context is even more flagrant in international competitions, in which architects are expected to add major civic monuments to cities they may have visited only once or twice.”
This is the central criticism of Libeskind, that his buildings are alien forms that ignore their context. In this sense, Libeskind is recreating a failure of Modernism: the inability to communicate anything meaningful to the local public. The International Style was underpinned by a noble philosophy of global egalitarianism: one world, one building. Shelter became a universal, Utopian idea. So a Mies van der Rohe tower in Chicago (the IBM buildings) would look like a Mies in Toronto (the Toronto-Dominion towers). The buildings were based on functionalism, an aesthetic that was devoid of ornament or any historic reference.
Libeskind has been lumped in with the deconstructivists, a category that includes Frank Gehry. Gehry’s famous deconstructivist Santa Monica house has been interpreted as representing the fragmented Californian culture that surrounds it. (Gehry himself says this isn’t necessarily the case.) Libeskind’s bold crystals stand alone, though he attempts to integrate them with a local narrative. He described the crystalline extension to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London as a dialogue between the old and the new, an aesthetic conversation. The jutting crystals of the Denver Art Museum reunite the city’s historical and cultural life. The crystals of the ROM in Toronto have a more mundane, though local provenance: the museum’s mineral gallery. The designs approach the sameness of Mies van der Rohe’s towers, but the narratives vary, each providing a hook for the local audience.
Libeskind’s narratives may be the natural result of twenty years spent in academia, immersed in architectural theory. “In architecture schools, you have to justify your building,” says David Janson of Adamson Associates Architects, in Toronto. “The defence is verbal; you have to justify it with a story. You learn to post-rationalize. It’s easier to draw first and come up with a story later.”
Words are integral to Libeskind’s work. His designs have rarely engendered immediate public sympathy (a survey conducted by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation showed Libeskind’s design for Ground Zero as the choice of 25 percent, with THINK’s design capturing 33 percent, and 42 percent liking neither), but he is tireless in breaking down resistance, and, eventually, he succeeds. He gave hundreds of lectures in Germany to build support for his Jewish Museum. In London, where he encountered fierce resistance to his design for the V&A, he attended dozens of meetings: the Georgian Society, Victorian Society, resident groups, heritage committees. At every meeting he waited until the last angry citizen, critic, and outraged dowager had expressed his or her view. “Daniel never sees it as an insult or an affront,” his wife Nina says. “He truly believes in a public process.” That his buildings get built is often the result of politics and sheer will.
His relationship to language is often intentionally baroque. (Of his Jewish Museum, Libeskind wrote, “The Jewish Museum is conceived as an emblem in which the Invisible and Visible are the structural features which have been gathered in this space of Berlin and laid bare in an architecture where the unnamed remains the name that keeps still.”) In the Architectural Review, Boaz Ben Manasseh wrote, “It is astonishing that Daniel Libeskind can write so much nonsense without endangering his reputation.” And in their essay, “Death, Life and Libeskind,” Brian Hanson and Nikos Salingaros observed that “One should be wary of drawing conclusions from Libeskind’s own words, because he is a master at producing a veritable fog of words on demand.”
Libeskind presents the engaging dichotomy of a deadly serious intellectual on the one hand, and a determined salesman on the other, a cross between Jacques Derrida and Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man. When he appeared at a town-hall meeting at Toronto’s St. Lawrence Centre last May, his speech had symphonic patterns, moving from the esoteric to the familiar. At times his words were as precise as his angled geometries; at other times, they appeared in an almost arbitrary jumble. He talked in breathless metaphors that linked T. S. Eliot and the Grand Canyon, and spoke about the “patterns of relationship that inscribe the city as a book of the future.”
“Buildings have always told stories,” Libeskind said. And if they don’t tell a story, one can be manufactured. Architect Jon Jerde, who has designed malls as well as Las Vegas hotels such as the Bellagio, has argued that the architect’s job is to design narrative experiences. Jerde is dealing with the masses, and his stories are blatantly commercial, bestsellers. Libeskind’s stories may be little more than marketing strategies for his esoteric shapes, but they serve another purpose. His buildings adamantly embrace the future, and stories are a familiar comfort when facing that cold, unknowable maw.
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