Against interpreting Libeskind - continued

John McKean considers Daniel Libeskind, on show at The Space of Encounter: The Architecture of Daniel Libeskind , 16 September 2004 to 23 January 2005 at the Barbican Art Gallery. Does the V&A spiral, or ORION (the Holloway Road extension to the London Metropolitan University), really result from their grand symbolic stories?

In Space of Encounter, layers of text often approach the same material in ways as different as those in Queneau's Exercises du Style, from the most direct project description to the most baroque curlicue. Sometimes, reading Libeskind, I meet a particularly melodious phrase whose meaning then summersaults on a banana-skin leaving me gasping on the floor, unsure whether to laugh or be furious. (There is a deep strain of life-affirming humour which understands the utter seriousness of his enterprise. Mozart would have appreciated Duck Soup and The General, two of Libeskind's, and I must say my, favourite movies.)

To my surprise, no-where have I seen him refer to Sam Beckett. Libeskind believes architecture has entered an end condition. I read this - as I do Beckett - as a Modernist concern.

His extraordinary word-pictures (found in Countersign, 1991 and Space of Encounter) are Modernist after Joyce and surrealism, just as his utterly original, 1970s, Micromegas drawings (in the exhibition) were Modernist after synthetic cubism and constructivism.

In the early 1980s - when toy-town classicism and nursery colours were considered revolutionary, AA Files 6 was flooded with the 'dynamic' wallpaper of Zaha Hadid who was later to be filed alongside Libeskind under 'deconstruction' by those one-eyed critics with a blind public. But Libeskind had already broken entirely from such reference, and the same Files issue showed his 1983 Chamberworks (also in the Barbican exhibition). Here was something else.

The Chamberworks set was recognised as brilliant, unique, disturbing: it had critics scraping for words to weave over their clear sense of its importance - there was Jeffrey Kipnis' baffled fury and, particularly, Bob Evans' wonderful essay against trying to see what was beneath the surface. Forget 'what do they mean?' or 'what do they represent?' Much more interesting to ask 'what do I see?' and 'how can I encounter them?'

In Libeskind drawings one can feel trapped. He has said that '... these works hide the place of escape'; while one of his few completed buildings (in Osnabrück) is 'A Museum without Exit.' The issue is not exiting, though, but entrancing. Unwilling just to experience, we are entranced to interpret, to force sense rather than to listen, and are lost when we find no exit: within the planes of Berlin which refuse to offer any traditional clues for our safety in comprehension, or as we explore the lines of Chamberworks (the real works, on the Barbican walls, quite different from their reduction in publication).

Libeskind engages us while refusing to become easily consumable.

'There are some architects, I am one of them, who would choose to remember and choose to define as beautiful that which is in fact vacant and absent; that which by its sheer historical momentum has wiped away and sheered away from reality,' he eulogised Potsdamer Platz for the BBC a decade ago. 'One has to be an inventor, detective, poet, mystic, and also a mad person in order to make sense out of these discontinuous threads… they are both close and very remote - this contradiction makes it for me a sacred place… it resists interpretation, resists the nostalgic postcard sellers and it resists an architectural and futuristic perspective as well, bringing to focus the unexpected…'

Here, in talking about a wilderness since consumed by capitalist greed, was Libeskind's credo for his own work.

But other things have changed too.

Since he started building, a dozen years ago, Libeskind's themes have narrowed as he seems to have welcomed rather than been pushed into 'an architect of trauma'. In his texts even before 9/11 the words "void, trauma, time obliterated, and gap" predominate; his responses are "shards, splinters, hollows, fractures." The Jewish Museum was his ideal programme.

But today, at the WTC site, all the symbolic site planning (sunlight on the plaza from 8.46 am - 10.28 am on that 9/11 date) and the loaded names ("Edge of Hope", "Wedge of Light" etc) lets Hal Foster suggest it '... talks out of both sides of its mouth, and much of its stagecraft is hokum or worse.'

LIBESKIND : GENIUS OR CHARLATAN? howls the headline we are forced to address. Perhaps there has never been an architect with an intellect like Libeskind's, with its comprehensive embrace of western civilization. As a fellow student, he offered no recognition that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was unusual bed-time reading; his originality is of a different order from that of anyone I have come across, and that now includes a fair number of fine artists and thinkers.

In the 1970s, if asked who I rated, I would describe Libeskind as a genius, (actually still the only one I have ever met); in the 1980s I saw him as the architect of the new millennium; in the 1990s one sensed it being realised in Berlin.

And yet, today?

Space of Encounter, the book and new exhibition, show an extraordinary thinker, fashioner, writer of the concrete culture… But is there not a sense that Berlin trickles, diluted, into its myriad descendents? That as symbolic threads weaken, we might have a Libeskind house-style?

Does the V&A spiral (far less ORION, the Holloway Road extension to the old North London Poly) really result from the grand symbolic stories?

The rich cultural odyssey is certainly clear; the V&A would be an extraordinary place, certainly; but the voice is of the form-giver rather than of the sage. 'Picasso,' said Braque, 'used to be a great painter; now he is just a genius.' Perhaps Libeskind used to be a genius; now he is just an architect. But don't be lulled by that. The reality, as Libeskind says, is in '... the unpredictability of drawings, the instability of objects or whatever else one strives for in architecture.' John McKean 3 October 2004

Libeskind's Orion

ORION - the spatial emblem of the Northern sky - is the guiding light for developing a unique icon for the London Metropolitan University on Holloway Road, says Libeskind.

The Orion project provides a landmark attracting visitors to the cultural program within by its articulated forms. The Orion project has an enlivening impact on the wider urban context and particularly on the image and accessibility of the University.

The three intersecting elements that form the building strategically emphasise certain relationships: one creates a connection between the public, the new building and the university behind, one form gestures from the university toward the tube connection to the city and one more regular form stitches the new building into the context of Holloway Road. A small plaza at the entrance provides an accent and an engaging gateway.

The ORION building is composed of three intersecting volumes with a distinctive presence on the street and unique interior spaces. The building is clad entirely with embossed coloured stainless steel panels creating a shining and ever-changing surface. Windows are conceived as large geometrical cuts providing accentuated natural light for the café, galleries and seminars. The interior spaces are simple, bold volumes which provide multi-purpose flexibility for programmatic events.

The design accommodates the public functions of the building, while securing the more private University functions. The entire building or parts of the building can be separated to be used for public events. At the same time, the new building is integrated into the circulation patterns of the University and if need be can be totally closed off to the public.

ORION is a contribution to the intense urban life on Holloway Road and to the graduate students of the University of North London.

The interior and exterior provide a unity of composition and a magnet to the facility. Daniel Libeskind

This website is maintained by abley@audacity.org and all material is Copyright © 2004 Audacity Limited where not copyright of the originator.