Daniel Libeskind

Home > People > Literature and the Arts > Architecture: Biographies

Daniel Libeskind 1946–, American architect, b. Łódź, Poland. He moved to the United States in 1959, becoming a citizen in 1965. He has held a number of teaching posts, notably at the Cranbrook Academy of Art (1978–85) and the universities of Pennsylvania and Toronto, and early in his career was known mainly as an academic and theorist. His first major building, the dramatic Jewish Museum Berlin (2001), has an angular titanium-on-zinc exterior, a floor plan reminiscent of the Magen David, and an empty, concrete-walled space (the Void) symbolic of the absence wrought by the Holocaust . His other designs include the Felix Nussbaum Museum, Osnabrück, Germany (1998); the Imperial War Museum, Manchester, England (2002); the Danish Jewish Museum, Copenhagen (2004); the Wohl Convention Center, Tel Aviv (2005); the Hyundai office tower, Seoul (2005); and the Denver Art Museum addition (2006). Libeskind became world famous in 2003 when he won the design competition for the master rebuilding plan for New York's World Trade Center site, but in the years since his role in the project has been severely curtailed. His books include Between Zero and Infinity (1981), Countersign (1992), and The Space of Encounter (2001).

Bibliography: See his memoir, Breaking Ground: An Immigrant's Journey from Poland to Ground Zero (2004).