Daniel Libeskind

Portrait by Luca Vignelli

The Jewish Museum, Berlin

He has been called the “world’s most radical working architect.” He designed the spiral addition to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Jewish Museum in Berlin, and lately, the new buildings for New York City’s World Trade Center Plaza. His buildings stand out in shape and material: they are anything but ordinary, and more than a few of his creations have made people angry because they are so different. This is his innovation and his art.

Spiral Extension to the Victoria and Albert Museum

Born in Poland, one year after the end of WWII, Daniel Libeskind came to America as a teenager. The family moved to New York. Libeskind attended Cooper Union, in New York City, where he learned from a very famous architect, John Hedduk. This was where he began to develop his style, which is heavily influenced by cubism, an art form in which one experiments with fitting unlike forms together. He went to Essex University in England for graduate school. He is knowledgeable not only about the art of designing buildings, but also about the history and theory of Architecture. He finally settled in Germany, although he continues to lecture and teach at universities throughout the world.

A sketch

Most architects receive big contracts to design buildings only through competitions, and Libeskind was no exception. His career took off in 1989, when he won a competition to design the Jewish Musem in Berlin. The museum opened in 2001. Currently, Libeskind teaches at the University of Toronto, the Hoschschule fur Gestaltung in Germany, and the University of Pennsylvania. He is working on designs for buildings in Germany, Mexico, Spain, Israel, Switzerland, and the United States.

Libeskind has been recognized for his work in many important ways. He has earned at least four honorary doctorates from universities in the United States and Europe, and was admitted to the European Academy of Arts and Letters. He has won many awards, and perhaps most significantly was that he was the first architect ever to receive the Hiroshima Art Prize, which is given to artists who promote world peace through their work.

A computer-generated impression of the new World Trade Center Plaza buildings.	This is what the Manhattan skyline will look like when the buildings are finished.