Libeskind sees architecture as 'spiritual domain'
Celebrated architect to lecture at UB

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
News Services Editor

Daniel Libeskind is a celebrated and influential theoretical postwar architect who only recently has seen his work become flesh. His exceptional and stunning buildings, he has said, are a declaration of the failure of reason to produce fundamental insight into human "being."

Unique and often startling, they are, he said "a clarion call to those who create anything to reinvent the human relationship with the spirit, and thus open the door to a new era of creativity and invention." His controversial but brilliantly conceived design for the Jewish Museum in Berlin, in fact, led one critic to dub him "the mystic of Lindenstrasse," the street on which the museum stands.

Libeskind will present a lecture sponsored by the School of Architecture and Planning at 5:30 p.m. tomorrow in 114 Wende Hall on the South Campus. The talk is free of charge and open to the public.

It will take place in connection with "Marginal Space: A Précis," a symposium organized by the UB Center for the Study of Space, directed by Henry Sussman, professor of comparative literatures, and Mehrdad Hadighi, associate professor of architecture.

In Libeskind's view, such horrors as the Holocaust, Hiroshima and the many genocides and brutally enforced diasporas of millions of refugees on three continents over the past few decades are the result of rationalism, the assumption that reason and experience, rather than the nonrational, are the fundamental criteria in the solution of problems.

"From now on," Libeskind has written, "every human creation will have to come about in a totally different manner. Another way of thinking needs to be started, constructed with different methods and based on different principles.

"Our relationship with the spirit should not be reinstated," he said, "but reinvented from a different point of view, bearing in mind the experiences of the 20th century. Although times are dark and complex, there is hope and we might be at the verge of a tremendous creative era."

The "mystery" of architecture occupies an important place in Libeskind's work. He considers architecture to be a spiritual domain, a realm of invisible presence that deals with the unspeakable. This sensibility is very much in evidence in the architect's first completed building, the Felix Nussbaum Building in Osnabrück, Germany, which opened in 1998. An extension of the city's Museum of Cultural History, it is dedicated to the life and work of Nussbaum, a major 20th century German artist.

The museum design is based on a system of interrelated lines symbolizing Nussbaum's restlessness, exile and his search for orientation. The maze-like building uses wood, concrete and zinc sheeting, and incorporates a 17th century bridge uncovered during construction.

The interior space is a moody and visually arresting series of corridors and spaces whose unusual shapes and sacred aura are produced, in part, by unusual natural lighting. In fact, the building itself has an aura of presentiment that recalls the light-infused paintings of Mark Rothko. It reflects the architect's contention that "without spiritual content and without a contribution to a deeper understanding of our being there can be no significance in any building."

Libeskind won first prize in the international competitions for Berlin's Jewish Museum. Derived from the architect's controversial and eccentric design, the museum is one of the most celebrated new buildings in Europe. From the perspective of the street, it can take on different shapes, but to many it resembles a massive, broken ship, aground in the alien corn. Its interior is a series of tortured, oddly shaped corridors and arcane visual references, illuminated by the light from a thousand windows, all but five unique. The result is a sense of mysterious but sacred space.

Libeskind has been said to have a profound desire to represent an experience of architecture aimed at the liberation of space. The task of architecture, he has said, is to map the sensibilities of literature, mathematics, music, astrology, philosophy and other fields, and to add something else-something new, fresh, previously unknown.

He has received such awards as the prestigious First Prize of the Leone di Pietra at the Venice Biennale, 1985. In 1987, he was invited to the last urban design competition of the International Bauaustellung (IBA) in Berlin, and his scheme for the "City Edge"-a unique way of pointing people from one to another section of the old city within its modern counterpart-was subsequently unanimously selected and recommended to be built.

He also designed the "Spiral," an spectacularly innovative addition to London's Victoria and Albert Museum that will open in 2002, and other award-winning structures, including the San Francisco Jewish Museum, scheduled to open in 2000.

He has published in many journals and is the founder of Architecture Intermundium, which, he says, "functions as a laboratory for those interested in the life of architecture, independent of office routine and institutionalized curricula."