Filling The Voids

By Richard Lacayo

When Daniel Libeskind was invited last summer to submit ideas for rebuilding the area around the World Trade Center, he flew from his home in Berlin to visit the site. He descended into "the bathtub," the vast concrete basin in which the foundations of both towers once rested. As the street-level sounds of the city fell away, the primeval depths of Manhattan filled his view. "At that bedrock level you can see the indelible traces of the towers," says Libeskind. "These were walls that had withstood the trauma of the attack. I thought to myself, There is something very significant here--the voice of the site itself."

What did it say? Something about how to reconcile life and death. Libeskind's design for the site, unveiled along with eight other proposals at a press conference in New York City in December, preserves the entire 70-ft.-deep basin as a kind of primordial imprint of the towers. Part burnt offering, part wailing wall, the basin testifies to calamity, but it stands--muscular proof that New York lives and life prevails. Libeskind's plan would surround that pit with a force field of angular towers at street level. The workaday world could carry on its business without trampling the memory of the dead.

The tallest of the towers would be a spire that climbs 1,776 ft. (The Fourth of July altitude is no accident; and, yes, the building would be the world's tallest.) As it rises, it would echo the lines of the Statue of Liberty just across the water, a sight that Libeskind, the Polish-born son of Holocaust survivors, first glimpsed as a teenager when he arrived in the U.S. by boat with his parents. In the scheme's subtlest gesture, that tower's upper elevation is given over not to offices but to "sky gardens," whole floors of plant life high above the city. This is architecture that is both cerebral and emotional. The scheme moves vertically from grief through commerce to spirit. Burdens are acknowledged. Burdens are released into the air.

Libeskind's design, along with most of the designs submitted for the competition--buildings that swoop and stride--tell you again what Frank Gehry first made plain with his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. In architecture, the old world is dead. And with the exception of Gehry, there's no more powerful emblem of that change than Libeskind, 57, who was thrust into fame three years ago with his first building. In the late 1980s, when he won a competition to design the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Libeskind's name was known only to people who followed architectural theory. Though he was a respected teacher and thinker, he had never built anything. But when the Jewish Museum opened in 2000, with its broken-thunderbolt design and the shock-cut diagonals of its windows, it instantly made him one of the most sought-after architects in the world.

These days, Libeskind has commissions that include major additions to museums in London, Toronto, San Francisco and Denver; a university media center in Hong Kong; and a shopping and housing complex in Switzerland. That Denver, let alone the staid, pragmatic Beijing government that rules Hong Kong, is welcoming some of the most radical design ideas in the world is another sign of how much change is in the air. Libeskind is happy but not surprised. "People want to see something that reflects the excitement of life," he says. "If you look at how much is happening in the sciences, in business, people expect the same intensity in their apartment buildings, their shopping centers."

And in their architects. Libeskind and his wife and partner Nina--she also manages his practice--are recognizable specimens of the global cultural elite. As a rule, they dress all in black and gray, the International Gothic of metropolitan chic. Nothing else about them is dour. His conversation, in particular, is a series of sharp, rabbity observations on history, music and architecture, punctuated by bursts of laughter. He reminds you of a cross between Martin Scorsese and Tickle Me Elmo.

When Libeskind began studying architecture at Cooper Union in New York City, he was just 19 years old, but it already represented a career change for him. For years as a teenager he had been a concert pianist and--why not?--an accordionist. He says merely that his interests shifted. All the same, he found time last year to design and direct Messiaen's opera St. Francis of Assisi at Berlin's Deutsche Oper, and he is working on sets for a full cycle of Wagner's Ring at London's Covent Garden. But Libeskind rarely touches the piano anymore. "It's hard just to play for yourself," he says, "when you used to play for a big audience."

Sound--"the voice of the site"--is still crucial to his design work. The emotional climax of the Jewish Museum is a trapezoidal room that signifies the catastrophe of the Holocaust. Visitors enter an angular, concrete cell in which the only light comes from a narrow slot high above. When the heavy door is closed behind you, you are simply there in the dark, confronting the desolation of history at one of its bleakest dead ends. You can barely hear the street traffic outside; the world cannot hear you.

Libeskind's parents, Polish Jews, met for the first time in Kyrgyzstan, bordering China, to which they had separately made their way after escaping the Nazis in Poland and subsequently being arrested at the Soviet border, sent to Siberia, then released. Both lost most of their families in concentration camps. When they returned to Poland, they were trapped under the communist regime until the late 1950s, when an opportunity came for them to immigrate, first to Israel, then to New York with Daniel and his younger sister.

Libeskind is playing for a big audience again, so he is planning to return with his family to New York. It was probably an advantage to have lived so long in Berlin--a city that is everywhere a reflection of its own near extinction--as preparation for the World Trade Center project. Aside from any specific monuments, every neighborhood remembers in its bones the catastrophe of World War II. Long streets where no old buildings survived lead to others where a single Wilhelmine facade is wedged between stretches of postwar Housing Emergency Modern. Every inch of the city tells you what happened there. Libeskind says it also teaches another lesson: "You can fill in all the sites, but that doesn't mean you've filled the void." Libeskind moves a lot, but that's a lesson he carries with him everywhere.