Daniel Libeskind
Daniel Libeskind was a musician and theorist before he built anything. The Jewish Museum in Berlin, with its voids and zigzag form, became his first building and made him world-famous.
Daniel Libeskind was born in 1946 in Łódź in Poland. His parents had survived the Holocaust. The family emigrated to Israel in 1957 and to New York in 1959. As a young man he was an accomplished accordionist. He studied architecture at Cooper Union in New York and architectural history at the University of Essex. In the 1970s and 1980s he taught and made theoretical drawings and projects, but he had built nothing when in 1989 he won the competition for the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
The Jewish Museum, completed in 1999, made him famous. It was followed by the Felix Nussbaum Haus in Osnabrück, the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, an extended Military History Museum in Dresden, where a wedge cuts through the old building, and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. In 2003 he won the competition for the master plan for the World Trade Center site in New York after the terrorist attacks of 2001. He has also designed housing, shopping centres and towers in many countries.
Libeskind was counted among the deconstructivists, who were exhibited at MoMA in 1988. His sharp, wedge-shaped buildings have been both praised and criticised for repeating the same expression regardless of the brief. The Jewish Museum in Berlin is regarded as his foremost work and has influenced how museums and memorials are designed. He runs an office in New York.