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January 3, 2003/Tevet 29 5763, Vol. 55, No. 19
From Berlin memorial to Ground Zero
JULIA GOLDMAN
New York Jewish Week
If planners at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation aimed to generate excitement about the latest design study to rebuild the area destroyed on Sept. 11, they were wise to put Daniel Libeskind at the top of the line-up.
A small man with gray hair and rectangular glasses, Libeskind was a dynamo dressed completely in black at the recent ceremony where seven proposals were presented. At one point the former Bronx resident raised his fist in the air as he described a 1,776-foot skyscraper that would "reassert the preeminence of freedom and beauty."
Libeskind spoke with rushed excitement as he outlined his plan for a business, transportation and cultural complex that would "create a dense and exhilarating affirmation of New York." It seemed he was squeezing every second of airtime he could grasp to describe the Park of Heroes or the Wedge of Light, through which unobstructed sunlight would shine each year on the morning of Sept. 11.
First known solely as a conceptual architect, Libeskind is now most famous for his first commission, the Jewish Museum in Berlin, housed in a building punctured by symbolic voids. The museum opened in 1999.
"He has considered before exactly what it means to fill a space in with life and memory as a way to represent destruction," said James Young, an English professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and an expert on memorial architecture.
At the recent unveiling of proposals in New York, Libeskind was followed by several other architects who have grappled with issues of destruction and memory. The British firm of Foster and Partners designed the new Reichstag in Berlin. Another architect, Peter Eisenmann, designed the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, officially titled "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe."
Libeskind 55, currently lives in Berlin, but he was born in Poland and spent his teens and early 20s in New York. He first glimpsed the Statue of Liberty through early morning mist from the boat that brought his family to America. "I have never forgotten that sight or what it stands for. This is what this project is all about," he said, reading from a prepared statement that ended with the words "Life victorious."
That simple phrase captures Libeskind's philosophy of architecture. In person, Libeskind is passionate, thoughtful and infectiously joyful. Still, his attitude toward his work is surprising, given that many of his major projects so far have embodied one of the darkest chapters in modern history, and one with personal resonance for the architect.
Even before the Jewish Museum was completed, Libeskind had built a museum in Osnabruck, Germany, dedicated to the painter Felix Nussbaum, who was executed in Auschwitz in 1944. Just this summer, doors opened at the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester England, an aluminum-clad structure that has been described as "an exploding globe."
The son of Holocaust survivors who met in a displaced persons camp, Libeskind has said he sees beauty everywhere, "even those places abandoned by hope."
Thinking about rebuilding at the World Trade Center site, he stressed the importance of translating "memory and hope into physical materials and into architecture."
Libeskind was clearly moved by his experience standing in the chasm left by the fallen towers.
"It's the bedrock level, where New York was built from." The Sept. 11 explosions revealed the walls that reinforced the World Trade Center's foundations. "They are the silent heroes of the attack," Libeskind said. "They survived it, the whole trauma, and they continue to protect the site and keep the Hudson River from flooding Manhattan." Access to the buildings' footprints 70 feet below ground is an integral part of Libeskind's design for the site.
For many years Libeskind worked on designs that could never be built, and could be publicly viewed only in museums and gallery exhibitions.
That all changed with the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Libeskind titled the project "Between the Lines," a reference to one of a constellation of ideas that shaped his design. On a map of Berlin, he plotted out the actual addresses of Jewish and gentile writers, artists and thinkers who had lived in Berlin up to 1933. From these points he constructed what he called "an irrational matrix," which became the basis for the crisscrossing lines that cut through the building's walls.
His World Trade Center plan employs a similar conceit: a "Matrix of Heroes" that would radiate outward from a central plaza. Its lines would trace the routes taken by firemen, policemen and rescue workers as they entered the site on Sept. 11. But they would also extend upwards and out toward the horizon to include all citizens in "the matrix of life."
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