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March 7, 2003/Adar2 3 5763, Vol. 55, No. 28
New life will soar from Ground Zero
TOBY AXELROD
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Daniel Libeskind is coming back to New York to help heal the wounds created on Sept. 11.
He won't be working with words or medicine, but with stone, cement, glass and steel.
"My hopes are that out of the tragedy that happened, from the depths of the ground, something will soar into the life of New York that reaffirms the values we share: democracy and family and freedom and indepen-dence," said Libeskind, whose architectural designs were chosen to replace the World Trade Center, which was destroyed in the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
The decision, announced Feb. 27 in New York, means both a homecoming for Libeskind and the weaving together of themes that wind through much of his work: openness, contrast of dark and light, the interplay of memory and dreams for the future.
While Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin is a sprawling zigzag that hugs the earth, his main tower in Manhattan would soar toward the heavens.
Yet the two designs have something in common: Both contain elements of sadness and hope.
"I have learned many things" through working in Berlin, including that "one has to believe the future holds something better than the past," Libeskind, 57, told JTA.
Like his Jewish Museum, which contains a space for meditation on the destruction of European Jewry, the design for lower Manhattan includes a memorial at the original foundation of the World Trade Center, where some 2,800 people were killed.
Relatives of some victims already have said they appreciate the fact that Libeskind did not want to build over the pit.
Libeskind was born in Poland in 1946 to two Holocaust survivors. He became an American citizen in 1965, and studied music in Israel and New York.
He earned degrees in 1970 from New York City's Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and in 1972 from the School of Com-parative Studies at Essex University in England.
Libeskind said it was essential that people feel comfortable going to work again at the former site of the World Trade Center.
"It should not be just a symbolic entity. It should affirm that people work every day at a height that is safe," he said.
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