Fan d’Issy Mixed-Use
Studio Libeskind, in collaboration with La Compagnie de Phalsbourg, is designing the flagship building for the Léon Blum district, adjacent to the future Line 15 of the Grand Paris Express. Issy-les-Moulineaux is transforming remarkably, positioning itself at the forefront of urban development. Central to this change is Issy station, which will soon be connected to the Grand Paris Express, catalyzing growth. This significant infrastructure project aims to enhance mobility for residents and workers, reflecting the City’s commitment to ambitious and sustainable urban planning.
The project features a mixed-use program covering more than 20,000 square meters, including a hotel, retail, office, and residential, a third of which will be social housing. Fan d’Issy will have a geometric shape with expansive green walls and slanted facade elements that appear to fan out. It was designed to be a landmark building in the ZAC Léon Blum eco-district, which is currently under development. Construction on the building will commence after the completion of the adjacent Issy station, which will serve the new Line 15 of the Grand Paris Express metro.
More about this projectAlbert Einstein Discovery Center
The Albert Einstein Discovery Center in Ulm is set to become a groundbreaking public institution celebrating Einstein’s unparalleled contributions to science, technology, pacifism, humanism, and international understanding. This immersive experience will bring his legacy to life through modern, interactive, and multimedia exhibits that invite visitors to explore his genius from every angle.
The center will showcase Einstein’s life and work in connection with Ulm’s history, demonstrate how his theories shape current technologies, and present hands-on experiments at a cutting-edge Science Center. Workshops, lectures, and experiential exhibits will highlight not only his scientific achievements but also his profound humanity and universal values. The bold design echoes the essence of Einstein’s physical theories with its flowing, curved lines. The building is anchored by the concept of a “saddle point” – a geometric form that is minimized in one direction and maximized in another – allowing the structure to organically connect with its surroundings.
The center’s dimensions are as impressive as its purpose. With a total floor area of 7,800 square meters spread across five levels, a height of 50 meters, and underground technical and parking facilities, the building makes optimal use of the site. Located at the former headquarters of Stadtwerke Ulm/Neu-Ulm (SWU), this landmark will transform the cityscape while honoring the birthplace of the world’s most famous scientist.
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Nokia Arena and Residential Towers
The Nokia Arena project is an ambitious urban renewal project situated at a pivotal location within Tampere, Finland. It stitches the urban fabric back together across an existing railway and connects East to West, creating a new vibrant hub of high-quality living, working, leisure, and culture for the city and Finland. The mixed-use program consists of a multi-purpose ice hockey arena with a hotel and five adjacent towers with a podium that includes residences, retail, and offices.
The arena, which occupies one-fifth of the complex, will have the capacity to accommodate 17,000 visitors. With its casino, bars, and restaurant at deck level, the arena redefines its pivotal function as a hub for diverse urban activities. There are approximately 82,000 square meters of mixed-use program, including 64,500 square meters of arena space, 5800 square meters for a practice hall, and 11,600 square meters of hotel with three rooftop saunas.
“My goal was to reflect a 21st-century sensibility of living within a high-density sustainable lifestyle. Each of the series of buildings has its own unique identity and, as a whole, creates a dynamic urban skyline that reflects light, color, and form. Like precious gemstones on a crown, the forms crystallize in a richness of contemporary urban living.” —Daniel Libeskind
The Nokia Arena opened in December 2021. The towers are currently under construction.
Awards
2022:Prix Versailles Sports Award
2023: Project of the Year, The Stadium Business Design & Development Awards
More about this projectMuseo Regional de Tarapaca
Studio Libeskind has designed a new museum building for the Museo Antropologico Regional (MAR) de Iquique (Regional Anthropological Museum of Iquique), which will display more than 6,000 years of northern Chilean history.
The design ‘El Dragon de Tarapacá’ was inspired by the stark landscape of the Atacama Desert, the giant cliffs, and the urban dune of Iquique, the ‘Cerro Dragon’. It consists of three pairs of parallel vertical walls that shape the major spaces of the museum. The materials reference the palette and textures of the surrounding natural landscape.
The new museum will have approximately 11,500 square meters of program area to display its collection, dedicated to the pre-Hispanic history of the Atacama Desert culture, colonial history, and the rise and decline of nitrate mining. The museum will also have educational spaces, classrooms, and an event theatre.
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Maggie’s Centre at the Royal Free
Maggie’s Royal Free brings Maggie’s expert care and support for people with cancer to north London, complementing Maggie’s in west London, at Barts, and at the Royal Marsden in south London. The 454 square meters (4,886 square foot) centre is part the Maggie’s visionary mission to bring world-class architecture and interior design to cancer support in the UK.
The core concept of the design is to create an intimate and warm space that invites visitors in with its unique visual identity. The centre contrasts with its hospital surroundings, drawing visitors in with an approachable and welcoming timber form. The exterior’s curves evoke a calm and peaceful interior space that offers visitors an inviting, private, and light-filled environment.
Clad in weathered timber panels that expand outward as the building rises. Double and triple-height glazing at the entry cut across the form ushering in light to the interiors. An elevated garden on the roof level creates a serene and private enclosure for visitors. Operable skylights flood the core stairs and central circulation area with light and allow for fresh air circulation.
Spaces flow freely from one program area to the next, enabling moments of quiet and repose and engendering dialogue and socialization with others. Both form and materiality embody a nurturing quality—one that provides a sense of calm and relief as visitors cross its threshold. A variety of spaces have been designed, some to enable moments of quiet and repose when needed in more private spaces such as the library and other spaces purposefully encourage talking and socialization like the kitchen. The ground floor forms the heart of the centre including the kitchen, library, and staff workspaces. Studio Libeskind worked in collaboration with Magma Architecture (Berlin) to realize the centre.
The building opened on January 31, 2024.
More about this projectRAI TV Daniel Libeskind at the Jewish Museum Berlin
Daniel Libeskind is interviewed in the Jewish Museum Berlin for Holocaust Remembrance Day. Film by Antonello Savoca/ Rai
More about this articleA short film on the Dutch Holocaust Memorial of Names
A video tour through the Dutch Holocaust Memorial of Names
More about this articleDreams of Freedom. Romanticism in Germany and Russia
Studio Libeskind was engaged by the organizers to create an exhibition design for the exhibition “Dreams of Freedom. Romanticism in Germany and Russia” that will be at the Tretyakoy Gallery in Moscow and the … in Dresden, Germany, respectively. The design by Architect Daniel Libeskind is a response to the masterpieces of works by the greatest artists of the first quarter of the 19th century: Caspar David Friedrich, Philipp Otto Runge, Johann Overbeck, Alexander Ivanov, Alexei Venetsianov, Orest Kiprensky, Karl Bryullov and others. A key idea was to create a space that will give a visceral sense of the Romantic artists and their quests through the way a visitor moves through the space.
As visitors enter the galleries, they embark on a journey through two interlaced spirals that create a series of oblique and intimate gallery spaces within the labyrinth. Libeskind envisioned an imaginary line between Dresden and Moscow to create a coordinated system of axes that gives the visitor a compass to orient themselves between the two cities—as well as between two analogous states of mind. The visitor has both clarity and uncertainty in navigating the exhibits, echoing the power and dynamism of Romanticism. Red passageways, black and grey blocks of color, and bold graphic lettering on the walls create a dramatic series of gallery spaces that guide and inform the visitor through the exhibition.
Visitors will encounter more than 350 works of art, including approximately 200 paintings, supplemented by archival materials and unique exhibits from dozens of German and Russian collections.
The exposition was developed by experts from the Tretyakov Gallery and Dresden museums and will be displayed in two installations, one in Moscow and the other in Dresden.
Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, Russia: April 23, 2021 to August 8, 2021
Albertium at the SK Museum in Dresden, Germany: October 2, 2021 to February 6, 2022
Studio Weil: A Discussion on Design Inspiration
Architect Daniel Libeskind talks about his design for the Studio Weil building in Mallorca, Spain. The project was completed in 2003.
See more here: Studio Weil
Forever Marked by the Day, Muscarelle Musuem of Art
The new World Trade Center is a space of remembering and healing, as well as a tribute to life and art. This place serves as a memorial designed to honor people and commemorate heroes and connects the past and the future to the present through architecture. The buildings and spaces designed by Daniel Libeskind, Michael Arad, David Childs, and Santiago Calatrava function as channels to find new purpose and peace after the attacks on September 11, 2001. Forever Marked by the Day pays homage to those architects, artists, designers, and photographers who made creativity triumph over destruction.
Daniel Libeskind Tries His Hand at Affordable Housing
Architecture critic Justin Davidson reviews the affordable housing project, The Atrium in Bedford-Stuyvesant, for New York Magazine’s Curbed.
“With the Atrium, Libeskind has given vulnerable people a place they can gradually make their own. He has also demonstrated that the daunting list of rules, requirements, prohibitions, and economic strictures that govern affordable housing in New York don’t have to choke off inventive architecture. The firms with experience negotiating those constraints don’t generally indulge in innovation, and those that prize capital-A Architecture avoid the long and frustrating gauntlet of New York’s housing bureaucracy. Getting this project finished — assembling the team, winning the job, completing the design, gathering the funding, and finally putting up the building — took seven years.”
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BBC Radio: In the Studio
Daniel Libeskind is one of the world’s leading architects. Amongst his many projects, he devised the masterplan for the re-development of Ground Zero in New York and designed the Jewish Museum in Berlin. He tells Samira Ahmed about the Albert Einstein House in Jerusalem, a new building which will house Einstein’s work and belongings, from his favourite novels, his letters as a peace campaigner, to his papers laying out his famous theory of relativity. He also talks Samira through the many other global projects he’s working on, including a museum of anthropology in Iquique, Chile.
Producer: Olivia Skinner
More about this articleArchitectural Digest: Is Daniel Libeskind’s Latest Residential Building a Blueprint for Affordable Housing?
A twisting façade of geometric windows and sharp angles emerges like a beacon in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Located on the campus of New York City Housing Authority’s (NYCHA) Sumner Houses, a 1958 affordable residential development, the building is a bright spot among the unadorned redbrick towers surrounding it. Sumner House Atrium, as it’s called, was designed by Daniel Libeskind and is the new blueprint for affordable housing in New York City.
Studio Libeskind’s sculptural Maggie’s Centre at Royal Free Hospital opens its doors in London
When the architect Charles Jencks’s wife, Maggie, was diagnosed with cancer, he wanted to channel his grief towards something productive that helped others with similar diagnoses. Shortly after, Jencks co-founded a charity, Maggie’s Centre, which sought to provide thoughtful healthcare architecture for cancer patients around the world. Since 1995, luminaries like Zaha Hadid, Steven Holl, Kisho Kurokawa, Richard Rogers, Frank Gehry and others have designed compact treatment facilities for the nonprofit.
More about this articleThe Danish Jewish Museum gets a new, intersectant entrance by Daniel Libeskind
The architecture of entrances rightly empowers the building they perform as portals to—ranging from ornate cathedral doors with gold inlays to a hole in the wall, entrances mark a threshold into spaces and ensuing behaviors. This is an architectural element of visual conjuncture that is perhaps inadvertently overlooked, despite carrying a substantial purpose of shifting perspectives, greeting and welcoming, embodying security, and at the onset, setting a structure’s first impression.
More about this articleDaniel Libeskind
An international figure in architecture and urban design, Daniel Libeskind is renowned for his ability to evoke cultural memory in buildings. Informed by a deep commitment to music, philosophy, literature, and poetry, Mr. Libeskind aims to create resonant, unique, and sustainable architecture.
Born in Lód’z, Poland, in 1946, Mr. Libeskind immigrated to the United States as a teenager and, with his family, settled in the Bronx. He received the American-Israel Cultural Foundation Scholarship and performed as a musical virtuoso, before eventually leaving music to study architecture. He received his professional degree in architecture from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1970 and a postgraduate degree in the history and theory of architecture from the School of Comparative Studies at Essex University in England in 1972.
In 1989, Mr. Libeskind won the international competition to build the Jewish Museum in Berlin. He moved his young family to Berlin and devoted more than a decade to the completion of this seminal design. A series of influential museum commissions followed, including the Felix Nussbaum Haus, Osnabrück; Imperial War Museum North, Manchester; Denver Art Museum; Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; Danish Jewish Museum, Copenhagen; Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto; and the Military History Museum, Dresden.
In 2003, Studio Libeskind won another historic competition—to create a master plan for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. In addition to a towering spire of 1,776 feet, the Libeskind design study proposed a complex program encompassing a memorial, an underground museum, the integration of the slurry wall, a unique transit hub, and four office towers. This plan is being realized today.
Upon his move to New York, Studio Libeskind quickly became involved with designing and realizing a large number of commercial centers, such as Westside in Bern, the Crystals at City Center in Las Vegas, and Ko-Bogen in Düsseldorf, as well as residential towers in Busan, Singapore, Warsaw, Toronto, Manila, and Sao Paulo.
As Principal Design Architect for Studio Libeskind, Mr. Libeskind speaks widely about the art of architecture at universities and professional summits. His architecture and ideas have been the subject of many articles and exhibitions, influencing architecture and the development of cities and culture. Mr. Libeskind has won dozens of awards for his work, including the Goethe Medal, the Hiroshima Peace Prize, the Dresden Peace Prize, and the European Union Prize for Civil Rights.
Mr. Libeskind lives in New York with his wife and business partner, Nina. He is a licensed architect in the State of New York.
Nina Libeskind
Carla Swickerath
Since joining Studio Libeskind in 1999, Carla Swickerath has gained diverse experience in cultural, civic, retail, commercial, residential, and planning projects around the world. She has led many of the Studio’s successful project teams from concept design through to completion—including the Crystals retail complex at CityCenter in Las Vegas, the Hyundai Haeundae Udong I-Park residential development in Busan, Korea, and the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.
Ms. Swickerath has also led the complex World Trade Center redevelopment process from the initial competition phase to the present. Today, her dual management and design skills come into play as she oversees all aspects of operations at Studio Libeskind. Ms. Swickerath leads many of the Studio’s projects, coordinating the design team and consultants, liaising with clients and client representatives, and managing project budgets and schedules.
She earned a Master’s in Architecture from the University of Michigan, following undergraduate studies in English and Art History at the University of Florida. She has taught at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee in Berlin and the University of Michigan. Carla speaks publicly on architecture, design, and planning.
Stefan Blach
Stefan has over two decades of experience managing some of the Studio’s most complex large-scale projects around the globe. Stefan has led design and consultant teams to reach these goals in various cultural, residential, and commercial developments. This includes the development and completion of the acclaimed Jewish Museum Berlin; the urban rejuvenation development of the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, and Grand Canal Commercial Development in Dublin; the LEED Platinum certified Kö-Bogen retail and office complex in Dusseldorf, Germany; and the award-winning MO Modern Art Museum in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Stefan looks at each project and reviews the complexity and nuances of the program and site to find creative solutions using simple and practical methods that deliver projects at the highest quality and on budget. He is currently managing the new museum design of the Museo Regional de Tarapacá in Chile, a housing development in Frankfurt, the urban development for the Central Deck and Arena and adjacent mixed-use in Tampere, Finland, as well as several ongoing commercial and cultural projects in Europe and Asia.
Stefan has previous experience working independently with renowned architects such as Tim Heide from Berlin and Salvador Pérez Arroyo from Madrid on projects like the Museo de la Ciencia en Cuenca before joining Studio Libeskind. He obtained a Diploma in Architecture from Technische Universität, Berlin in 1991. Stefan speaks German, and English and is proficient in Spanish.
Yama Karim
Yama Karim serves as a team leader on many of the Studio’s most complicated large-scale projects including the master plan and redevelopment of the former fairgrounds in Milan, CityLife, which is currently under construction; the World Trade Center masterplan; and Reflections and Corals residential developments in Singapore. He is leading the development of several high-rise towers including the Artery Tower in Vilnius, and the Baccarat Hotel in Dubai, as well as, the Albert Einstein Archives a cultural project in Israel.
Before joining Studio Libeskind’s New York office in 2003, Yama Karim had already collaborated with Daniel Libeskind for several years in the late 1990s in Berlin. He has brought extraordinary experience to the Studio, having served first as a senior designer at Polshek Partnership (now Ennead Architects) where he worked on the Brown Fine Arts Center at Smith College, Massachusetts, and the Sarah Lawrence College Monica A. and Charles A. Heimbold Jr. Visual Arts Center, New York, among others. He also worked at Reiser + Umemoto (RUR) in New York, where he served on the team for the Kaohsiung Port Terminal in Taiwan.
Yama has taught full-time at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich and as a visiting professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He graduated from Columbia University with a Master in Architecture in 1995 and from the University of California, Berkeley, with a Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Design in 1991. Yama speaks widely on architecture, design, sustainability, and urban planning. Yama speaks English and Farsi.