Daniel Libeskind

Daniel Libeskind. Photo: Stefan Ruiz

Daniel Libeskind was born in Poland in 1946 and moved to the USA as a teenager, where he became a musical virtuoso before deciding to study architecture at Cooper Union in New York. His work is now world renowned, and includes the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the masterplanning for rebuilding the World Trade Center site. His architecture aims to be ‘resonant, unique and sustainable’ and is informed by his deep love of music, philosophy, literature and poetry.

I read a fantastic piece in the Harvard Business Review that attempted to ask the question and define innovation and it came to a formal conclusion that is very much my own: that there is no way you can define innovation, but there is a way to define the exact opposite of innovation, which is imitation. We don’t know how exactly to define innovation, but we know the very opposite is to imitate, and I think these thinkers were very smart because it’s exactly what I feel. Innovation is not mimetic, it’s about invention, creativity and thinking outside of the box. It’s something unexpected.

With my work it may seem like I’m pushing against the context, but I’m using some other aspects of it. I never think that I’m trying to go against it but there are many aspects of the context that are not apparent, and anyway context is a living thing, not something frozen and finished, it’s a being. So my notion is to find something interesting in the context that is not just a commodity, but something forceful that can be used as an Archimedean point for a project.

It all starts with drawing. For many years I just drew, I didn’t have any architecture and I didn’t even draw ideas that looked like buildings or cities, I did Chamber Works [28 drawings he created while he was head of the architecture department at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan] that don’t look like anything but they were, in my view, structures.

They’re in MoMA as art, but they’re architectural drawings - they don’t look like architecture, but they are. So drawing to me is the source of everything, and whether you draw on your iPad, whether you draw with pencil, whether you do water colours, it’s just a means of coming close to something that has to do with a place, with connecting you, your eyes, your mind.

It’s an exploration and that’s my vehicle for innovation. You don’t try to be different. I don’t think it’s where you sit down thematically and think, I’m going to do something different. You just have to develop it through the drawings, and sometimes the drawing tells you things that you’d have never known. I think always if it’s a good project it’s the drawings doing something that is unexpected, that you would not consciously have done that line and thought that was going to be the wall.

Various images from Libeskind’s Chamber Works Drawings. Courtesy Daniel Libeskind

I studied mathematics but that’s not my interest. I’m definitely not a parametricist. I never have been. It’s not even my interest to generate interesting forms, but instead forms that I think are specific enough for what I’m trying to do, in space, in light and in the material.

People like imitation, though. Clients prefer imitation, even my own clients have said: “I thought you were going to do something like this and you did something like that.” So there is always an expectation of the imitation, and if you want to be innovative it’s a creative struggle. You have to be able to convince people with your drawings, with your models, with your presentation, even with your words that it’s worth building.

But it’s not an easy process. That said, I think the world has changed. I think people are thinking more innovatively. I think authorities have changed, even in places like Ground Zero - which was so controversial at the beginning, so many voices against. And you know, life changes, people think differently, people learn things, people are innovative. So I think it’s not just me, it’s innovation around you which permits you to do things.

I think innovation comes in poetry, it comes in music. When you play a musical instrument well, it isn’t about thinking. First of all you have to have real discipline to play, to be a virtuoso. You have to have a lot of training, every note has to be correct and there’s not approximation, it’s got to be right or it’s wrong - so I think it’s very similar to architecture. You have to have the technical ability, and then music and architecture are very similar in the fact that they connect directly to the human being.

They don’t connect to the mind or soul, they connect to everything. It’s like great performances: you’re involved in it totally and that’s like architecture, because it’s not an abstraction, even though there are a lot of abstract things like maths and science. Just like music, [there are] a lot of abstract things that you don’t need to know about to enjoy it. JT