LIBESKIND, DANIEL

LIBESKIND, DANIEL (1946– ), U.S. architect. From Lodz in Poland, where his parents bought their seven-year-old boy an accordion because they did not think a Jew should be seen with a piano, the family moved to Israel in 1957. There, he won a music competition. One of the judges was violinist isaac stern , who urged him to switch to the piano. Two years later, Libeskind and his family moved to a one-room apartment in the Bronx. Libeskind soon tired of the piano. "Music was not about abstract intellectual thought – it was about playing … I couldn't see spending my life on the stage," he said. After attending the Bronx High School of Science, Libeskind went to Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York, where he became a prize student and was offered a job with architect richard meier . He quit this firm after seven days, complaining that Meier's style was a high-class form of standardization. In 1969, he married Nina Lewis, who became his organizer and together the team became known as "Studio Libeskind." To pursue architecture, Libeskind went to the University of Essex in England, where in 1971 he earned a master's degree in the history and theory of architecture. After a few years of teaching, he accepted a job as head of the elite school of architecture at Cranbrook Academy in Michigan, an astonishing appointment for a 32-year-old. After seven years, Libeskind and his wife left Cranbrook for Milan, Italy. His theoretical drawings for a housing project in Berlin won a prize in 1987. These drawings caught the attention of architect Philip Johnson, who included them in an exhibit called "Deconstructivist Architecture" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His career was made. In 1989, while he was a Getty Scholar in Los Angeles, his design for the Berlin Jewish history museum won the open competition. In 1991, before exhibit installations, the museum became famous for the way Libeskind incorporated the tragedy of German Jewish history into the structure of the building. There were slanted walls, a dark tower, slits for windows, and an empty space, a void, running through the whole construction, all designed to create anxiety. In 1998, the Felix Nussbaum Haus opened in Osnabruck, Germany, a Libeskind design, which was a small museum built by the city to memorialize the tragic fate of the painter whose life was cut short by the Holocaust. When in February 2003, Studio Libeskind won the competition for the design of the World Trade Center in New York, immediate conflicts occurred with the owner of the building, who wanted his architect, David Childs, of Skidmore Owings & Merrill to do the design. Childs and Libeskind worked out a compromise. Libeskind buildings have been built in Mallorca, London, Copenhagen, Seoul, and Tel Aviv. At least 11 more were being designed in 2005. In 2004 Libeskind was appointed cultural ambassador for architecture by the U.S. Department of State. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: D. Libeskind, Breaking Ground (2004); B. Schneider, The Jewish Museum Berlin (1999). (Betty R. Rubenstein (2nd ed.)