Daniel Libeskind

Daniel Libeskind (1946- ), Polish-born architect who emerged as one of the most controversial talents on the architectural scene at the end of the 20th century. Initially trained as a musician in Israel, he subsequently studied architecture in the United States and Britain. A draughtsman of extraordinary power and inventiveness, Libeskind quickly attained prominence in the sphere of architectural theory and debate. In 1988 he was represented at the Deconstructivist exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, confirming his association with an aesthetic of disruption and dislocation. Libeskind spoke of 'liberating' architecture from the art of building and the science of engineering.

Libeskind's theoretical concerns brought him teaching appointments in a number of countries. His desire to put his theories into practice was, however, apparent. He produced radical proposals for reconstructing the centre of Berlin (1991). His first realized structure was a pavilion at the Osaka Expo of 1990. In 1988 Libeskind won the commission for a new Jewish Museum in Berlin. The project began on site in the early 1990s and was completed in 1999, finally opening to the public in September 2001. It embodies Libeskind's passionate emotions about the fate of the Jewish people under Nazism; two of the three routes through the museum end in semi-sculptural features, a large empty room known as the Holocaust Void and an outdoor cluster of pillars called the Garden of Exile. Similar concerns are reflected in the Felix Nussbaum Museum in Osnabrück, completed in 1998.

Libeskind's concern with geometry and complexity and determination that architecture should not become a mere palliative underpinned his 'spiral' scheme for London's Victoria & Albert Museum (won in competition in 1996, although plans to build it were abandoned in 2004) and a branch of the Imperial War Museum in Manchester, which opened to the public in 2002 and was designed to reflect the theme of fragmentation in conflict and the contexts of earth, air, and water. In 2003 his design for a collection of angular towers and a 451-m (1,776-ft) spire won the selection process to replace New York’s World Trade Center.