From the surprisingly Spartan 19th-floor conference room of Studio Daniel Libeskind, near the southern tip of Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty rises from the mouth of the Hudson River, a majestic beacon. Almost incongruously, a six-inch model of the same icon – one of those cheap souvenir replicas hawked in Times Square and elsewhere – sits perched on the firm's boardroom windowsill. Neither its presence here nor the panoramic view of New York Harbor are an accident.
Almost 50 years ago, a ship called the Constitution sailed through these waters into port. Among the passengers, arriving from Israel, was an immigrant family of four that included a 12-year-old accordion prodigy named Daniel Libeskind. His parents, Polish Jews from Lodz who had lost 85 relatives in the Holocaust, woke him at dawn to behold the lady with the lamp – symbol of American freedom and possibility.
“I have never forgotten that sight or what it stands for,” Libeskind later wrote. “I saw that statue and the skyline not just as a representation of steel and concrete and glass, but as, really, the substance of the American Dream.”
Today, 61-year-old Daniel Libeskind is arguably the world's most famous architect. And his career, which he took up in his early 20s, has been a fulfilment of that dream, a story that, if submitted as a script for a Hollywood biopic, would be rejected on grounds of incredulity.
It's the story of a man whose parents survived the Second World War eating bugs and boiled weeds, and who remembers his own childhood years in Lodz chiefly for its anti-Semitism, chased and beaten through the streets. “It was as if the Holocaust had not yet been finished,” he recalls. “It's why I studied the accordion. My parents were afraid to bring a piano into the courtyard for fear of offending the neighbours. Pathetic.”
The story continues as Libeskind matures into an academic, brilliant but obscure. He enters design competitions but never wins. Until he builds his first building at the age of 52, he has spent no more than three weeks working as a professional architect. A theorist, he conceives of beautiful but commercially improbable, ostensibly unviable buildings – ostensibly, because some of the same mad designs he once scrawled in his basement office are now the toast of the architecture world.
Indeed, from nowhere, Libeskind vaults into the rarefied world of celebrity. People accost him in restaurants, take his picture on subway platforms. He is lavished with prizes, commissions, money. He designs furniture, grand pianos, opera, becomes a media darling and a household name.
On June 2, dressed no doubt in a black Armani suit and cowboy boots, he will be in Toronto to help celebrate the opening of his latest achievement – the $135-million Michael Lee-Chin crystalline addition to the Royal Ontario Museum (which is currently undergoing a $270-million reconstruction). The jury remains decidedly out on the 80,000-square-foot structure that promises to spur a renaissance within the ROM and throughout its urban environs – a colossal gamble by one of Canada's premier cultural institutions.
His goal, Libeksind says, has been to create something grand, a civic presence on an incredibly important Toronto corner that would generate excitement for the ROM's collections. His controversial cantilevered, glass-and-aluminum design was initially sketched and submitted on 11 paper napkins FedExed from Berlin, where he was then based. They were, recalls ROM CEO William Thorsell, “so wonderfully amusing, creative, spirited and cheeky.”
Libeskind won the competition over 51 other submissions – not just for the boldness of his vision, Thorsell says, but for a dozen other reasons, too, including a meticulous attention to detail. (One of Libeskind's first questions was where schoolchildren would go after depositing their jackets in the cloakroom.)
“He'd call me up on a Sunday morning and we'd have hour-long conversations about the most minute details,” says Thorsell. “For a big thinker, he is very practical. But it's not just about talent and vision. When you choose, you're also choosing a relationship. You're married to this person for five or six years and you have to ask, ‘Can I work with them as people?' and on that issue, I was very keen on Libeskind. We hit it off right from the beginning. He's a very eclectic guy. His subject matter ranges from literature to music to philosophy, ideas – bang, bang, bang. Some people find it a bit disorienting. I do not.”
