This will be one album I am very proud to present as well as very apprehensive. I have been a great admirer of the architect who builds his museum. While walking around and taking pictures at the limited time I had at my disposal, I was very afraid of what the outcome will be: What message I will give out: It took me a while to present this, took me a while to gather enough courage to present it to you. This work has been documented and photographed by many eminent photographers.
The kind of energy levels I could feel when I was in this museum was phenomenal. The architect has done a fabulous job of convoying the message he was given.
The architect Daniel Libeskind called his design for the Jewish Museum Berlin “Between the Lines”. The floor plan is shaped like a zigzag line and is intersected by a straight line. Empty spaces called voids extended the height of the building at the interface. The zinc-clad façade is covered by diagonal slashes – the window openings. Three paths cross on the lower level: the Axis of exile, the Axis of the Holocaust, and the Axis of Continuity, which leads to the museum’s upper stories. Daniel Libeskind says: “What is important is the experience you get from it. The interpretation is open.”
Libeskind founded Studio Daniel Libeskind in 1989 with his wife, Nina, and is its principal design architect. His buildings include the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Germany, the extension to the Denver Art Museum in the United States, the Grand Canal Theatre in Dublin, the Imperial War Museum North in Salford Quays, England, the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada, the Felix Nussbaum Haus in Osnabrück, Germany, the Danish Jewish Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark, and the Wohl Centre at the Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel. His portfolio also includes several residential projects. Libeskind’s work has been exhibited in major museums and galleries around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Bauhaus Archives, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Centre Pompidou. On February 27, 2003, Libeskind won the competition to be the master plan architect for the reconstruction of the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan.
Born in Łódź, Poland on May 12, 1946, Libeskind was the second child of Dora and Nachman Libeskind, both Polish Jews and Holocaust survivors.
As a young child, Libeskind learned to play the accordion and quickly became a virtuoso, performing on Polish television in 1953. He won a prestigious America Israel Cultural Foundation scholarship in 1959 and played alongside a young Itzhak Perlman.That summer, the Libeskinds moved to New York City on one of the last immigrant boats to the United States.
In New York, Libeskind attended the Bronx High School of Science. The print shop where his father worked was on Stone Street in lower Manhattan, and Libeskind watched the original World Trade Center being built in the 1960s.
Libeskind became a United States citizen in 1965. In 1970, he received his professional architectural degree from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art; he received a postgraduate degree in History and Theory of Architecture at the School of Comparative Studies at Essex University in 1972.
In 1968, Libeskind briefly worked as an apprentice to architect Richard Meier. In 1972, he was hired to work at Peter Eisenman’s New York Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, but he quit almost immediately.
Daniel Libeskind met Nina Lewis, his future wife and business partner, at the Bundist-run Camp Hemshekh in upstate New York in 1966. They married a few years later and, instead of a traditional honeymoon, traveled across the United States visiting Frank Lloyd Wright buildings on a Cooper Union fellowship.
Since then, Libeskind has lived, among other places, in New York, Toronto, Michigan, Italy, Germany, and Los Angeles,[9] and has taught at numerous universities across the world, including the University of Kentucky, Yale University, and the University of Pennsylvania.[7] Since 2007, Libeskind is visiting professor at the Leuphana University Lueneburg, Germany.
Nina and Daniel Libeskind have three children, Lev, Noam and Rachel.
AG Studio 