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The Lunch

Daniel Libeskind, whose bold designs span from Berlin to Busan, on the need for old cities to reinvent themselves

The first time I met Daniel Libeskind, the "starchitect" behind the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the emotive crystal atop the neo-Romanesque Royal Ontario Museum, was in late 2014 in King Abdullah Economic City in Saudi Arabia, of all places. His appearance there was odd because KAEC, as it's known, offers nothing fresh on the architectural front – the sprawling $100-billion (U.S.) development is more sand than brick at the moment – and Mr. Libeskind has traditionally steered clear of totalitarian regimes.

But there he was at the Cityquest new cities conference at KAEC, burbling away about the "identity and memory" of cities and chatting up everyone who approached him, including the Saudi sponsors of the event. Mr. Libeskind was merely being practical. Big-name architects are nothing unless flesh is put onto their designs and, increasingly, the givers of the flesh are emerging economies, few of which are democracies and many of which are keen to use innovative designs to put their cities on the global map.

"I do prefer working in emerging democracies," he told me in Milan, his European base, in mid-April. "But architecture has become a global profession. It used to be you grew up in one town and built in that town. Now almost all architects in the last 20 years owe their careers to working in China and other spots that I once would not dream of working in. For a while, I didn't feel comfortable working in China."

Indeed, the centre of Mr. Libeskind's architectural gravity is shifting from North America and Western Europe to Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. He has projects contemplated or under way in Iraqi Kurdistan, Kenya, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Albania, Lithuania and Kosovo, with Sao Paulo thrown in for good measure. He is also shaping a few projects in old European cities, notably Rome and Milan, that have traditionally resisted modern architecture, especially of the high-rise variety.

I gasp. Is my beloved Rome, my home since I left Canada in 2007 and the only European capital without a skyscraper, about to get the Dubai skyline treatment now being inflicted on London? Don't worry, he says, Rome's historic centre will remain intact. His project, known as Tor di Valle, a soaring, three-tower business centre that will be placed next to the new stadium for the AS Roma soccer team, will rise on the outskirts of Rome, although still very much within the city proper.

Old cities have to reinvent themselves, he says, or they risk turning into outdoor museums for the cruise-ship crowd. "Sometimes cities lose momentum and they then realize they don't want to become like Venice, where the whole economy disappears to the point they become artificial cities," he says. "Cities at some point have to compete."


Scroll through a selection of Mr. Libeskind's designs


Mr. Libeskind and I are seated alone in the elegant, woody Caffe Spadari di Vazzana Davide in the heart of Milan, maybe a three-minute walk from the Duomo – Milan's glorious Italian-Gothic cathedral that was started in the 14th century and not completed until the 1960s.

Both his Milan office and the apartment he shares with his wife, Nina Libeskind, are within a short stroll of the Duomo, which does not surprise me. The Duomo, with its flamboyant, angular style, is somewhat reminiscent of Mr. Libeskind's own creations, which can come as a shock to the viewer, as the Duomo did when it was erected. I wonder if he draws inspiration from the Duomo's shape and geometry (though obviously not its fussy façade) and get ready to ask the question.

No luck. Mr. Libeskind is a motor mouth who leaps from one thought to another, often without finishing his previous sentence and I don't get a chance to squeeze in the question. In the space of a few seconds, topics as diverse as the recent death of Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi-born architect who was a good friend of his, and the 18-location "One Day in Life" concert he is staging in Frankfurt over 24 hours in late May, can pop into the conversation. I am overwhelmed but love his enthusiasm. He is 69 and has the energy of a teenager.

Mr. Likbeskind is dressed tip to toe in black – his trademark uniform ("I do love black. It's very practical"). The jacket is from the Japanese fashion brand Comme des Garçons. He wears a black scarf with small splashes of grey. The retro-nerdy eyeglasses are black too. We had agreed to meet at 10 in the morning, but construction noise outside his apartment kept him up much of the night, so he had begged to sleep in a bit. He arrives 45 minutes later, led by Nina, who, to my surprise, promptly disappears. The two are considered inseparable and travel everywhere together. They met as teenagers at a Jewish camp in upstate New York. She is the manager of Studio Libeskind, which she co-founded with Mr. Libeskind in 1989 after careers in political advocacy and labour relations in Canada, United States and Britain.

Mr. Libeskind in downtown Toronto in 2007.

Mr. Libeskind in downtown Toronto in 2007.

Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail

Over cappuccino – we both had eaten breakfast and it was way too early for lunch – Mr. Libeskind explains that, in effect, he is nothing without Nina. Not an architect, she handles the financial planning, record keeping, administration and HR for the entire Studio Libeskind operation, which is based in Milan and New York. She is the sister of Stephen Lewis, the former Ontario NDP leader who later became the United Nations' special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa.

"You know there is a door handle named after her – the Nina," Mr. Libeskind says, a remark that demanded several probing questions, like: Did she find the comparison to a hardware item flattering?

"Let me explain, there was a client who wanted me to design a door handle," he says. "'I asked why; I'm an architect.' Then I went away and asked myself why I was so against it. I use a door handle every day and mostly don't love them. So I designed a beautiful door handle and I called it the Nina, because my wife opens doors."

The door handle commission is how design came to supplement architecture in Mr. Libeskind's world. His studio now designs everything from wall-mounted heating radiators and chess sets to chairs and chandeliers. "It's so much fun, because you don't have to wait 10 years to see your creation," he says.

But it is Mr. Libeskind's architecture – love it or hate it – that sets him apart, not the furnishings. The ROM crystal still divides Torontonians.

Mr. Libeskind was born in Poland in 1946. Before they were married, his parents, Polish Jews, fled Poland at the start of the Second World War and reached the Soviet Union. When they returned after the war, they learned that nearly all their relatives – 85 in all – died in the Holocaust. Mr. Libeskind has only one relative left in Poland, a second cousin. After a stint in Israel, the Libeskind family emigrated to the United States when Daniel was a teenager and landed in the Bronx.

CURRICULUM VITAE

Born: Lodz, Poland, May 12, 1946. Holds American and Israeli citizenship.

Education: Graduated in 1970 from Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York; Masters in Architecture from Essex University, England

Family: Married to Nina Libeskind (née Lewis) manager of Studio Libeskind; three children, Lev, Noam and Rachel. Lev is manager of Studio Libeskind’s Milan office.

Homes: Apartments in Manhattan and Milan, but says “I live on airplanes.”

Favourite film: Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest

Book: Ulysses by James Joyce

Cuisine: Japanese and Chinese

Fashion designers: Comme de Garçons, Armani, Yohji Yamamoto

Leisure: Listening to classical music for one hour each morning before work.

Quote: “There has always been a backlash [against bold architects]. It’s a permanent situation. When Frank Lloyd Wright built his buildings, there was a backlash. When Mies van der Rohe built the Seagram building in New York, there was a backlash. I think good buildings, interesting buildings, just don’t align themselves with the common thinking of the time. That’s what makes them good, they break the pattern.”

At the time, Daniel was obsessed with music – he played the accordion – but could not see his life spent as a performer. He loved drawing and ended up studying architecture at the Cooper Union in New York. He briefly worked at architectural firms, dismissed them as uncreative and found solace in academia, teaching architecture at schools and universities in Toronto, London, Michigan and Milan. A late bloomer, he did not see his first architectural work, Berlin's Jewish Museum, completed until 1999. He was 52 at the time.

The museum captured the tragedy of the banishment and murder of millions of European Jews and received critical acclaim. Newsweek called the building "a slash, a wound in the cityscape – a zinc-covered zigzag, its windows diagonal slits. Inside, the spaces are haunting and disorienting."

Its success put Mr. Libeskind on the global architecture map, where he competed with the likes of Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, Rem Koolhaas, Richard Meier, Norman Foster and Ms. Hadid. His biggest win was the commission to create the master plan for Ground Zero, the Manhattan site where the twin towers stood before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The plan was an endless tug of war. Still, Mr. Libeskind's vision emerged more or less intact. The deep holes that had housed the bases of the twin towers were left as sunken memorials to the victims, as he had wanted.

About the same time, he won the competition for the architectural overhaul of the ROM under the museum's then new CEO, William Thorsell, a former editor-in-chief of The Globe and Mail. Mr. Libeskind's design was dominated by the deconstructivist crystal, made of aluminum and glass over a steel frame.

I ask him how he ranks the crystal among his creations. "Oh my god, it's one of my favourite buildings," he says, enthusiastically. "It's the wildest museum, you've got dinosaurs, incredible things from Asia. It's a voyage of permanent adventure and discovery and the building matches it."

The crystal triggers heated debate almost a decade after it opened. James Bradburne, the Canadian director of Milan's Pinacoteca di Brera museum, home of some of Italy's finest Renaissance art, thinks the fortunes that were funnelled into new museums and modern extensions to old museums, including the ROM, would have been far better devoted to the permanent collections. "You spend hundreds of millions in the physical plant," Mr. Bradburne says. "You don't invest in the curators, you don't invest in the collection, you basically bleed the whole thing and then you are stuck with a white elephant."

Mr. Libeskind would disagree, of course, and the many commissions he is picking up around the world for new museums and galleries suggest cultural institutions think the Libeskind treatment can work some magic. Just shy of his 70th birthday, he may be just hitting his stride. Retirement? Forget it, he says. "You have to love what you do and I love what I am doing. If you're just doing a job, it's not worth it," he says.