Life’s Work: An Interview with Daniel Libeskind

From the Jewish Museum in Berlin to the Ground Zero reconstruction in New York, high-profile, emotionally charged projects have made Libeskind’s reputation. An academic until age 43, he now leads—with help from his wife, Nina—a practice of 50 employees working on commissions around the world. HBR: What prompted your late-career move from academia to practice? LIBESKIND: While teaching, I was always doing creative work: drawings, models. What the world might have considered very abstract was to me still architecture. But I changed my direction because I enrolled in a competition. Since my parents were Holocaust survivors, the idea of building in Berlin, at the edge of where the wall still stood, was very interesting to me. I won, and lo and behold, a whole new path opened. Did your lack of experience ever feel daunting? I thought having no experience gave me an advantage. If you have too much—or any—experience, you already know where you’re going. Without it, you’re free to think differently and to convince people that there are new ways of doing things. I chose not to work in the office of another architect, because it didn’t suit my temperament, and I found what I would call a classical love for architecture. I discovered that the liberal arts—poetry, literature, archaeology, geometry, astronomy—are really the path. How lucky is it to not have gone through that routine of starting with a small project and then a little larger one and so on? I always say my life was lived in reverse. Most people start young and when they’re older have the time to reflect on what they’ve done. I did my reflection before I built anything. The Jewish Museum took more than a decade from plan to fruition. The Ground Zero reconstruction was a similarly long, bureaucratic process. How did you maintain your patience and motivation through those experiences? You need to have faith, to not fall into cynicism, which is all around. People say, “This museum will never be built. You might as well give up.” Or “With all these stakeholders, nothing will ever come out of it.” But you’ve got to have tough skin and belief in what you’re doing and the spirit it represents. It’s not for yourself. In Germany it was for the Jewish culture that was murdered. In New York it was for the families of victims—those thousands of people who lost their loved ones. You need patience as a virtue in any job, but especially in architecture, because most of these ambitious projects really will take more than a decade. They also require intense collaboration with government officials, commercial clients, and often other architects. How do you get strong-minded, talented people to pull together? You have to want to involve others. And when you approach in a spirit of camaraderie, there’s no conflict. If you forge an alliance with even one person, that expands over time. At Ground Zero, though, things got contentious. What did you learn from that experience? That if you stick with something through thick and thin, you will succeed despite the odds against you. Of course, there are necessary compromises. As the master-plan architect, you just create an architectural document that provides scales, proportions, technologies, a spatial and technical concept. But when I look at my early sketches, which I started six weeks into the competition, and compare them to the design today, 15 years later, they’re pretty close. How do you know when to compromise versus stick to your guns? There’s some threshold beyond which you don’t want to go. For example, do you think it’s no longer your idea? It’s like a trench, and beyond it you get killed. I think every artist, architect, and writer probably knows where that is. How do you decide which projects to take on? I take any that seem interesting. I also have to look in the client’s eyes and think, “This is a person I want to work with.” Other than that, I have no rules. If somebody comes in and says, “Can you build a shack for $10?” I might take that just as easily as a grandiose project in the center of Paris. Because I come from a working-class background, I never thought architecture should be about how much money you have. It isn’t inventing castles in the sky; it’s responding to people’s needs. Most of the architects I know, my colleagues, do come from wealthy backgrounds; the first house they built was for their uncle or cousin or parents. But I approach architecture differently. Adolf Loos, the great architect, once said, “If you gave me gold, I would still use wood.” I identify with that. Given your background, what made you want to be an architect? As a boy, I was actually a professional musician. But I played the wrong instrument: the accordion. So I drifted away from it into mathematics and painting and architecture. I went to the Cooper Union School of Architecture at a time when, if you got in, you could also study to be an artist. I thought I might want to be a painter or a sculptor. But it was my Hasidic mother who said, “You shouldn’t be an artist, because you’ll be very poor. If you’re an architect, you can still be an artist.” Architecture seemed to be a nexus of my interests, and I’m lucky I fell into the field. Tell me about your creative process. When you’re presented with a potential project, where do you start? You start by immersing yourself in the site, putting your head into the earth, so to speak, listening to and looking at what is there but also the less visible and inaudible aspects: history, tradition. You get on a wavelength with the place. You reincarnate yourself in this new world, not as a tourist but as part of it. And then you have to be struck by an idea. You make a sketch and maybe a paper model, then utilize technology to verify that it can be done and engage in a more logical design process. But the origins are sort of crazy. You moved to Berlin to oversee the Jewish Museum and lived in New York for the Ground Zero project. Why did you feel the need to be on-site in those cases? And with other projects all over the world, how do you manage from afar? I don’t put architecture on automatic pilot. I travel a lot. I get on a plane to go to Kenya, Poland, China, wherever. It’s all-involving. You have to commit yourself, to be present in and part of the place where you’re building. You can’t just do a sketch and send it somewhere else in the world. When you build, it should be with care. If you aren’t there, it becomes careless. You have clients around the world—what have you learned about working across cultures? All people are the same: No matter where they live—Berlin, Beijing, New York—they think it’s the center of the world. Somebody must be wrong! So I think you have to be a citizen of the world and not get caught up in a provincial outlook. But how do you balance the need for some delegation with your passionate, detail-oriented nature? I work very closely with my wife, who is my partner but not an architect. I would never be able to do what I do without her. I mean, I don’t interview people for jobs in this office. I don’t organize how it’s run. I wouldn’t even know how to pay so many people. I was in a meeting recently and heard the word “business” being bantered about. I said, “Whose business are you talking about?” And I was shocked that it was ours. So how lucky am I to work with someone who can do the things that I can’t? I would also say that our office often does not run like a normal one. It’s more like a creative laboratory with very little hierarchy. Of course, we have partners or senior people I’ve worked with for 15 years or more, but also young people from all over the world, and we have a collaborative spirit of adventure. I don’t have an office where I disappear. I’m parked alongside my colleagues, so there’s no apparent difference between an intern out of high school and myself. When you erase those distances, you get to have fun. It doesn’t matter what your background is, how much education you have, how old you are—everyone has something to share. Nina has obviously played an important role in your success. I have to make this very clear: I would never have become an architect if she had not joined me. After I won the competition for the Jewish Museum, we got a little certificate. At the time, in a way, it was a ticket to oblivion, because nobody had any intention of building it. I had an offer to go to the Getty Institute in California. Nina said, “What do you want to do?” I said, “Let’s stay in Berlin, under one condition—that you become my partner.” She said, “But I’ve never in my life been in an architect’s office.” And I said, “The same applies to me.” That’s how we started. We rented a room; I had a desk, pen and paper, and she had a telephone. In the beginning, when I showed her plans, she would ask, “What is it?” At first I was kind of annoyed, thinking, “Am I not the authority here?” But then I realized that a normal person knew nothing about these elevations and abstractions. I would have to change myself to be more open to a nonprofessional view of the field, because I’m not working for architects—I’m working for people who use the architecture. How would you describe your leadership style? Anarchic. My thinking is definitely not linear. It doesn’t have any beginning or end, just a focal point. It’s very informal but very rigorous; very disciplined but also very open to the possibilities. Do you still feel like a teacher? Yes. Especially when people look up something on Google and I point out that the internet doesn’t always have the correct facts. They seem amazed that there are other sources away from a screen. You have to share your knowledge but also show your ignorance—admit when you don’t know. I’ve noticed that when you become an expert, the question is: How do you get rid of that expertise to be creative? One way is by listening to people who have no idea what things cost. Maybe what they suggest is not possible, but you can think of other solutions. What makes a great architect? Being multidimensional. You need to be able to dictate a letter at the same time you’re making a drawing at the same time you’re correcting a model at the same time you’re discussing costs at the same time you’re getting on a video conference with a client. You also have to really enjoy it in a true and deep sense. If you don’t, and if other people are not infected by your enthusiasm, you might as well go and do something else. When you’re pitching to design a coveted project, how do you make your case? I defer to Lao-tzu, the Chinese master of Tao: Act without doing; work without effort. In other words, don’t try to sell things to people. Don’t try to convince them that you’re the best. Just show them what you’re capable of. Sometimes you don’t succeed by doing that, but that’s fine. As someone who works in a soulless office building, I’m interested in your views on what makes for good, energizing workplace design. First, people must be rewarded for long hours and great effort. They must be paid well and given generous health plans. There must also be a sense of family. No one is coming in and punching a clock. Everyone has a name, and you know about their lives. You care about them on every level, not just for their talent. The work must also have an ambition that goes beyond material values. Of course, it should be a nice environment, too. For that, you start with people, not walls. How do they move around? What do they think about? They’re not just users. In fact, I think that kind of extreme functionalism has led to very poor results. I’m designing office buildings that have a very different quality. For example, in a project in Düsseldorf, I have large green cuts coming into the offices to disrupt the elegance of the facade and the orderliness of work with a shock of nature, visible from inside and outside. You’re almost 72 now and obviously still energetic. Do you ever think about retirement? Never. Although I work very hard, I don’t even see what I do as working, because I do what I love. And when that’s true, you don’t see the passage of time. You’re completely gripped, immersed in a flow. I have to emphasize, too, that I work with fantastic people. I look forward to seeing them. I wouldn’t want to retreat and be on my own.

Life’s Work: An Interview with Daniel Libeskind

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