Daniel Libeskind

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 29 June 2003

⏱️ 38 minutes

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the architect Daniel Libeskind. Daniel Libeskind's parents were Polish Jews. Daniel himself was a prodigiously talented musician, but the family couldn't afford the attention a piano would draw to them and so he learned the accordion. In Israel he won a prestigious music scholarship - Daniel Barenboim and Itzhak Perlmen were other recipients - and the family moved to New York. In his teens Libeskind dropped music suddenly and completely and turned to architecture:

In 1989 he won the commission to build a Jewish Museum in Berlin and it opened in 2001 amid much controversy. Closer to home he has designed and built the Imperial War Museum North at Trafford, Manchester - its design based on a shattered globe to reflect the themes of conflict. One of his most controversial designs in this country is the proposed V&A extension known as The Spiral. It has been variously described as 'a public lavatory', 'a pile of boxes' and 'quartz crystals'. His most recent commission and his biggest project to date is the complex to be built at the site of the destroyed twin towers in New York.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Aria from Goldberg Variations by Johann Sebastian Bach Book: The Prisons (Le Carceri): The Complete First and Second States by Giovanni Battista Piranesi Luxury: Pencil and paper

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2003, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is an architect, he might have been a musician or a mathematician or a philosopher,
0:29.0	but architecture has become the chosen form through which he expresses the ideas contained in all these different disciplines.
0:36.0	He was born in Poland into a Jewish family devastated by the Holocaust,
0:40.0	and after an academic career won an architectural commission to design a building that evoked that heritage, the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
0:48.0	This jagged inspirational building put him in the front rank of modern architects helping him to win
0:54.0	commissions in this country for the Imperial War Museum in Salford and the extension to the
0:59.1	VNA. Then in March this year he won the competition to design the scheme that will replace the Twin Towers in New York, the Phoenix that will rise from ground zero.
1:09.0	Architecture, he says, is the one profession in which you can't be a pessimist. He is Daniel Leibeskind.
1:16.4	What do you mean by that, Daniel? By inference, that means that you're an optimist, huh?
1:21.7	You have to be, if you're going to be an architect, because architecture is always
1:24.4	doing with something constructive.
1:26.1	It's about construction.
1:27.3	It's about making life better.
1:29.1	It's about the future.
1:30.3	If you didn't believe in the future, you couldn't build, you would just withdraw, you could write, you could sing, but you could not build.
1:36.0	It's too permanent, too physical.
1:38.0	It's permanent physical and, well, the very word construction means that one is endeavoring to make something
1:44.8	that will create foundations for the future.
1:47.2	On the other hand people might look at your Jewish museum in Berlin and say what an incredibly sad building you know it's sink and concrete it has
1:55.7	staircases that lead to blank walls it's unheated light just manages to peep
	...

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