In architecture, at least, the future has arrived. There are paperless offices now, where all design is done in three dimensions on the computer. There are software programs that reduce months of engineering calculations tomere days. New materials and new heating and cooling technologies all allow for experimental forms: sculptural, geometric, soaring, organic. “We can build anything we want to now,” says Michael Miller. “The question is: Should we?”
Libeskind is among the generation of architects who disdain contextualism, whose buildings look to the future rather than the past. Museums have been the vanguard for this new architecture, though the futuristic shapes are filtering down to libraries, office buildings, churches, houses. The external transformation of museums from efficient boxes to exhibits themselves has been prefaced by internal transformations. In the past two decades even state-run European museums have been slouching toward a business model. Directors will tell you that they are competing with baseball, hockey, cable TV, with malls and Britney Spears for the consumer’s attention and money. The need to reconcile scholarship and entertainment, to find a balance between science and showmanship, has been an ongoing experiment in museum circles. Curators have been told that they need to tell stories rather than simply put the wares out for display. William Thorsell’s predecessor, Lindsay Sharp, was accused of trying to “Disnify” the ROM, and of doing a poor job of it. Sharp talked of “edutainment” and “infotainment.” And now into that club comes “architainment.”
Iconic architecture has produced some extraordinary buildings, but as an ad hoc school, what kinds of cities will it produce? Will they begin to resemble World Fairs, an assembly of startling, unrelated structures designed to bring customers into the tent? “Buildings are citizens,” one Toronto architect said. “They have a responsibility.” All architectural movements evolve or die, and most of the deaths aren’t pretty. Modernism left banal mirrored towers scattered through the world’s downtowns, the pomo graveyard is littered with childish metaphors, and deconstructivism has saddled us with Toronto’s CBC building, Philip Johnson’s sullen cartoon.
World fairs open with such optimism, exuberantly embracing a mediated, hopeful future, but they often end sadly. Montreal’s Expo ‘67 was a glittering success but it left Buckminster Fuller’s burned-out dome, and the French pavilion converted to a casino. Appropriately, the site was used for Robert Altman’s dystopic 1979 film Quintet, which was set in a barren, survivalist future. Our own future could present a stark, Darwinian landscape where everything is run on a business/entertainment level: sports, schools, churches, museums, marriage.
Libeskind sees a happier future, one where his crystalline shapes are welcome and enduring. “A good building has enough depth to recreate itself,” he says. “Look at antiquity, look at how many times those buildings have been reinterpreted. These are directions: as white, as colourful, as scary, as inspiring, as timid, as pure, as brutal, because they have a lot of substance. Any work of art, or any city – Rome, New York, or even Toronto – it keeps evolving.”
Still, if the future of architecture is unclear, Libeskind provides a glimpse of what the successful twenty-first-century architect may look like: fluidly international, a multilingual salesman who brings celebrity, drama, and a kind of political shamanism to the built form.
Architecture, Goethe once noted, is frozen music. In the case of Libeskind’s buildings, it might be the music of Arnold Schoenberg, whose unfinished opera Moses und Aaron was an inspiration for the Jewish Museum. Before going into architecture, Libeskind considered a career in music. “Ihad the fatal history of starting on the accordion,” he says, perched on a sofa in the lobby of Toronto’s Four Seasons Hotel. “The accordion is one of those strange instruments that crosses boundaries, folk, ethnic, a small baroque instrument that is portable. In a way, it’s not a bad analogue for my life.”
Libeskind grew up in post-war Lodz, Poland, and moved to Israel as a teenager to study music, through the America-Israel Cultural Foundation Scholarship. “Itzhak Perlman said to me, ‘You should have played the piano. Why the hell did you ever play this instrument?’ Because that was my fate.” Libeskind went on to study piano, and moved to New York in 1960, where he eventually switched to architecture. He studied at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and did postgraduate work at Essex University, then taught at several universities, an itinerant, sought-after intellectual. He remained an academic until 1989, when he won the competition to design the Jewish Museum in Berlin. The cultural politics of that job were labyrinthine and protracted, and Libeskind moved to Berlin to address them. “I moved out of naïveté,” he says. “But I think it was because of this naïveté that the building got built. This project was scrapped by the board of the senate, there was no money for it, no one wanted to do it. It took ten years.”
That it got done was due in part to the political efforts of his wife, Nina Libeskind. In the preface to Daniel Libeskind: Jewish Museum Berlin, Libeskind thanks his partner, who “steered the project across the unsettled waters of politics and public opinion.” Nina Libeskind is the daughter of the late David Lewis, who was head of the New Democratic Party, and the sister of Stephen Lewis, now a UN Special Envoy, and she grew up with a refined sense of politics (as well as a fanatical devotion to sports). “We won the competition in 1989,” she says, “and in ‘89, of course, the wall fell, and with that came the realization that a huge amount of money would have to go into infrastructure, especially in the east. And there were a large number of people who wanted to take the money out of the museum and put it into an Olympic bid.” Her husband campaigned tirelessly, taking his case to the people. “He went to four or five hundred German cities, towns, talking to groups, any group.”
The political and funding battles for the Jewish Museum went on for a decade, a delicate subject that opened wounds. A legislator who supported Libeskind was killed by a letter bomb. When the Jewish Museum opened in 1999, it was widely acclaimed, and attracted 250,000 visitors before it contained any exhibits. The building itself was a star. It had accomplished, presumably, what the proprietors wanted: instant recognition. But exhibitors had trouble working in its jagged spaces, and there was criticism from architectural traditionalists that the building competed with, rather than accommodated, the exhibits: they were both art.
