A leading young American architect, whose work is very striking for its novel use of angles and planes twisted around, overlapping, and exploding. His major completed work is the Jewish Museum in Berlin, opened in September 2001.
His major upcoming work is an extension to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, called The Spiral, which is comparable in effect perhaps only to Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim Museum. (Argh, update late 2004, those stingy philistine bastards are going to cancel it!) Another is the Trafford branch of Britain's Imperial War Museum, to be opened in 2002.
Libeskind, one of the finalists for the competition to design a replacement for the World Trade Center in New York, was selected on 27 February 2003. His winning design features a thin glass shard of great height, and a typically complicated profusion of open features below it.
There is very little on the Web about Liebeskind, unfortunately. There's an article in Danish on his V&A extension at
Editor-cum-noder's note. There is a lot about him if you spell his name right and ignore those sources that spell it wrong. Let this be a lesson to us all.
Libeskind was born in Poland in 1946 and now works in Berlin.
Picture and discussion of Jewish Museum at
www.architectureweek.com/2001/1107/today.html
An interesting drawing by him, apparently a sort of fantasy in the style of a blueprint, at
shop3.webmailer.de/cgi-bin/ePages.storefront/DE/Product/114114-1559226
which is part of a series called Micromegas, briefly discussed at
www.cmoa.org/html/media/press107.htm
Virtual reality models at
www.ooo.nl/royal/libeskind/home.htm
Statement of ideals and intentions by the architect at
www.daniel-libeskind.com/
The magic of architecture cannot be appropriated by any singular operation because it is always already floating progressing, rising, flying, breathing. Whatever the problems - political, tectonic, linguistic which architecture exposes, one thing I know is that only the intensity and passion of its call make it fun to engage in its practice. My work address a multidimensional problematic which - at least in retrospect - seems to have the logic of a certain path. It is this path which is the most engaging construction rather than any particular project found along its way. The exhilarating aspect of such a trajectory, at least for those engaged in it, is that its goals are unknown and its ends indeterminable and uncertain. The path itself substantiates that which is only imagined and forms the evidence of that which is not yet built.