Jewish Museum Berlin

The Jewish Museum Berlin, which opened to the public in 2001, exhibits the social, political and cultural history of the Jews in Germany from the fourth century to the present, explicitly presenting and integrating, for the first time in postwar Germany, the repercussions of the Holocaust. The new building is housed next to the site of the original Prussian Court of Justice building which was completed in 1735 now serves as the entrance to the new building.

Daniel Libeskind’s design, which was created a year before the Berlin Wall came down, was based on three insights:  it is impossible to understand the history of Berlin without understanding the enormous contributions made by its Jewish citizens; the meaning of the Holocaust must be integrated into the consciousness and memory of the city of Berlin; and, finally, for its future, the City of Berlin and the country of Germany must acknowledge the erasure of Jewish life in its history.

The visitor enters the Baroque Kollegienhaus and then descends by stairway through the dramatic Entry Void, into the underground.  The existing building is tied to the new extension, through the underground, thus preserving the contradictory autonomy of both the old and new structures on the surface. The descent leads to three underground axial routes, each of which tells a different story. The first leads to a dead end – the Holocaust Tower.  The second leads out of the building and into the Garden of Exile and Emigration, remembering those who were forced to leave Berlin  The third and longest, traces a path leading to the Stair of Continuity, then up to the exhibition spaces of the museum, emphasizing the continuum of history.

A Void cuts through the zigzagging plan of the new building and creates a space that embodies absence. It is a straight line whose impenetrability becomes the central focus around which exhibitions are organized. In order to move from one side of the museum to the other, visitors must cross one of the 60 bridges that open onto this void.

 

AWARDS
2010 – Buber-Rosenzweig Medal from DKR (German Coordinating Council of Societies for Christian-Jewish Cooperation)
1999 – The German Architecture Prize
1998 – The Best of 1998 – Art forum International

 

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Munich South Sportschule

The Munich South Sportschule is a specialized high school (grades 5-13) located in the Bavarian town of Geretsried in Germany. The 12,000 sq meter design blends into the surrounding city forest and employs a sustainable timber structure, rain-harvesting green roofs, natural shading and ventilation, and smart building technology to reduce water and energy use.

The program is organized in ‘pebbles’ around a central 3-field sports hall with a glazed vaulted roof. Timber facades with floor-to-ceiling glazing usher in daylight and provide views of the surrounding forest. Each sector of the pebble is dedicated to different programmatic requirements, with flexible learning spaces that are connected throughout the footprint. Each pebble is topped with a planted roof accessible to students and staff. Outdoor areas are used as ‘green classrooms’, for sport and recreation, and an outdoor ramp connects all levels with the roof. The new building will provide the community with a public forum space, cafeteria, sports facilities open to local clubs, and a public park.

Construction on the school is slated to start in 2025.

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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, 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 is 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 hotel with three rooftop saunas.

“My goal was to reflect a 21st sensibility of living within a high-density sustainable lifestyle. The series of buildings each has its own unique identity and as a whole create a dynamic urban skyline that reflects light, color and form. Like a 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.

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Baccarat Hotel and Residences

Studio Libeskind, in association with AECOM, has designed two high-rise towers in Downtown Dubai. Offering uninterrupted views of the Burj Khalifa, the Dubai Frame, Al Fahidi Fort, and the Dubai Creek, the Baccarat Hotel & Residences is situated in tower one and will host 144 rooms and suites, along with 49 Baccarat branded residences.

The crystalline-inspired towers rise in an intentional hierarchy and a shared architectural vocabulary. Tower one rises at 237 meters high (44 floors), steps forward towards the main road, and includes the hotel and residences, café, restaurants, bar, spa, and pool.

Designed as a cluster of prismatic crystals that soars upwards into four branches to disperse the overall mass of the building, the tower’s four massing branches culminate at different heights creating a slender proportion and a residential scale. The podium of the buildings will include restaurants and public spaces including a plaza, with trees and greenery for shading, and shaped benches for seating. There is a central landscaped plaza that is bookended with water features that assist with cooling during the summer. Additional cascading water features and green planting continue to the northern grand public stairs that provide barrier-free pedestrian access to the city sidewalks on the ground level. The design aims to meet the Silver Sa’fa rating, from the Dubai Green Building System.

The design team includes London-based design studio 1508 London for the interiors, and US-based landscape architecture firm EDSA.

 

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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.

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RAI 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

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A short film on the Dutch Holocaust Memorial of Names

A video tour through the Dutch Holocaust Memorial of Names

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Dreams 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.

September 10, 2021 – January 9, 2022
Muscarelle Museum of Art, Cheek, Graves & Burns Galleries
Curators: David Brashear and Adriano Marinazzo

Click here to book a visit

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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

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Architectural 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.

 

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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.

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The 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.

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Architectural Record: Daniel Libeskind First Architect Awarded the Dresden International Peace Prize

On February 19, Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind will be presented with the 14th Dresden International Peace Prize—or, simply, the Dresden Prize—at the Semperoper, an opulent 19th-century opera house located steps from the Elbe River in the war-ravaged-and-rebuilt core of the German city that shares the prize’s name.

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Daniel 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

Nina Libeskind oversees the management of Studio Libeskind, from financial planning and record keeping to day-to-day administration and human resources. She provides counsel on all aspects of the business and participates in public presentations, contract negotiations, and communications. In 1989, Nina co-founded Studio Libeskind with her husband Daniel, bringing with her a range of experience honed in labor negotiations and political advocacy in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain.

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.