Architecture is a Language: Daniel Libeskind at TEDxDUBLIN

I'm so happy to be here with so many distinguished colleagues, so many distinguished lecturers, and I love Dublin. I'd like to share with you what informs my work, what inspires me. Certainly, James Joyce's use of language, the complexity, the ambiguity, the meanings that model and modernize language are part of what I like to think about when I create plans, cities, buildings. And of course, this building is part of generating new energy for a social cultural space in this fantastic city. But just on the other side of this space, in the atrium of the office buildings, I think I built my second largest really homage to James Joyce. It's a thousand and one inverted letters that are based on his thunder words. The words of God. And I have to say, I built this without a commission for this. This is just part of a second memorial to James Joyce I built in Japan, on the Sea of Japan. But I think Joyce's use of language, his unfathomable aspiration to speak all languages to all people, is something that certainly inspires me in doing architecture and in creating cities. Now, I'd like to share with you thoughts that are part of what I do. And certainly, because in my former life I was a professional musician, I've always thought that architecture and music are closely related. First of all, emotionally, architecture is as complex and as abstract as music, but it communicates to the soul. It doesn't just communicate to the mind. When you listen to a Bach oratorio, it's about the soul. And so it is in architecture. Architecture is based on balance, and that balance is actually in the inner ear. It's not in the eye. And so, when I do drawings, these are abstract drawings, which I did before I had any commissions, because I'm a late bloomer. I think for half of my life I didn't build a single building. I thought about the fact that drawing is really a score. It's just like a piece of music. It has to be interpreted by a community. And of course, proportions, light, materiality, are all implicated in the drawing, which, when it comes to a building, of course, has to also present the space, present the atmosphere of a building. A drawing has to illuminate the practice. And of course, in our work, we have many computers. And of course, you couldn't do anything without a computer to be efficient on time, rational, and so on. Still, I truly believe that drawing is the source of architecture. It is really the source, because it's the hand itself, it's the eye, it's the mind, interconnected, and really sharing in that process, which is not purely intellectual, but is really spiritual, a kind of desire, a faith in something you cannot see. And it's a proof of something that is really there, but not purely visible. Now, one of the thoughts of my favorite poet is the fact that a building is not a repetition of another building. A building does not need to necessarily have the same formula. A building is not really built out of the same aspects of buildings that we have seen before. So, the notion of what is the tradition in architecture is something that has always interested me. And when I had a chance to design a small house, for two art lovers in Connecticut, I thought, how can a house really, in our time, really be a house of our time? And in that sense, my clients were very special. They're a couple who own works of art, they deal with works of art, and they asked me to design a house which would itself be a work of art, which would not have any sculptures, paintings, or anything. The house itself and its space should be the inspiring aspect. I thought that was really an amazing assignment. And of course, how do you do that? Well, first of all, one has to rethink, are there rafters in the house? What does the house need? Does it have walls? Does it have windows? Does it need windows? But of course, it has to be something really fantastic to live with, and something that really works for my clients' needs, which has to do with a bedroom, a kitchen, they love to cook, they love to have parties, invite guests, and so on. So really, the house is kind of a stainless steel folded space. It's a complex space to describe in a plan, which I showed before, but it's a house that really moves your vision through the interior and to the exterior in very, very specific ways. The interior is completely in real wood, it's not cladding, it's solid wood, it's kind of like a cave of wood, exterior is stainless steel, which of course always mirrors the colors of the sky and the landscape. And of course, it's a house that doesn't have the topography of a traditional house. It's not a box, it's not organized the way a house is normally organized in terms of where the kitchen is, where do you eat, where do you watch television, what you do, and it has a very, very specific and I think unusual relation to the landscape in which it's located, which is a fantastic landscape, which is full of light, full of liveliness. And again, just as that thought of Emily Dickinson, what makes, what gives a hope in life? It's not really necessary, the things we think are necessary to bring that reality onto the place. Now, certainly, I share the thought that history is not something which is over, it's not just something that exists in the past, it's something urgent, and it's something which is often hidden by traditions. So my interest in history has always been to address history, and every site and every place has a history. Sometimes you cannot see it, sometimes the voices are almost inaudible, sometimes the actions are invisible, and yet the history continues to cry out for justice. And when I was designing, when I won the competition to design a military history museum, which is actually the largest museum in Germany, in Dresden, a city that was devastated by the Allied bombings, I thought a lot about history, the past, the future. How do you take that history and create something that has a meaning? And you can see in the sketch, the building is this wedge-like volume that dramatically interferes with the old arsenal. By the way, this old arsenal built at the end of 19th century was always a military museum. The Saxony military museum, the German military museum, the Nazi military museum, the Russian military museum, the East German military museum. What do you do today? Well, I created this movement towards the city to show the newly rebuilt city, but at the same time to point to the self-similar triangulation in the bombing of Dresden within these three points. And of course, a building interrupts. I also restored the arsenal, of course, but it interrupts and it gives a specific direction to see the panorama of the city, which is of course now being rebuilt, and at the same time to present that history not as one more militaristic glorification of what a military is, but why do people participate in such histories? Why do they follow totalitarian leaders? And what is a military museum in Germany to say in a democratic society? There's the plan. You can see the U-shape of the old armory, restructured, and it's chronological. It's horizontal chronology from the 13th century German military history. And then you have this vector moving through the opacity and penetrating and going outside, and it disrupts the chronology exactly between 1914 and 1933. And there it is, a completely different space with oblique vertical vitrines, a totally different reorientation. And of course, the armory in itself is a very interesting building. It was really kind of almost vandalized by the East German government. I brought it back to its life and presented a building that isn't just one more military museum which shows hardware, but presents that point towards the city from which you can understand and towards which you can apply the fact that history has been disrupted. History is not just a story that has a good or bad ending. It depends on where we are, what we do, what we decide. And of course, it's a very raw building. You can see this incorporates... This is the other side of the building. It incorporates the old neoclassic stairs. So it preserves... Actually, the entire building is preserved. It's only cut in two lines from which the wedge appears. And of course, I worked very closely with the exhibition designer, Hagen Merz and Barbara Holzer, to create a museum which distances, which redefines the relation between equipment. Because this equipment is not to be seen as military equipment. How did people invent it? What did they want to do with these helicopters that kill? And how to display them? And it's, I think, an interesting lesson in how wars, how violence is actually perceived by those who perpetrate it and by those who experience it. Of course, at the end of this journey, you jut out to a dramatic, upward-moving wedge. And you see the rebuilt panorama of Dresden. You see the Frauenkirche. You see the glorious panorama. But just to your side, the wedge moves towards the point from which Dresden was bombed. And I wanted people to have that double, that complexity, that history has that past in a true way, pointing to the devastation, to the crimes of history, which can never be rethought, which can never be reversed. But at the same time, that there's a hope, that the city has a new light. And here, one of my favorite poets, German, I thought was so interesting. Because the thought here is, what do we remember in our lives? What do we remember? Complex ideas? We just remember something very, very real, like a brook or a window or a tree or a tower. So when I'm designing something, I think about it not just as an object, a functional presentation, a technological, even a culture invention, but something that has to do with memory, because that's what we are. We are oriented because we can remember. And so when I was designing a large-scale neighborhood in Singapore, I thought, how do you design such a high-density neighborhood that has an individuality? Because we are used to the fact that a house can have individuality and architect, but when it comes to high-density developments, this is one of the highest-density developments in the world. How do you give each occupant a sense of being, a sense of specialness? And in these towers, which are doubly curved, you can see that each of the apartments is just slightly off the apartment above and below. You kind of float in a space. And even the lower villas are related to nature in a very specific way in their complex geometries. And really, that is really that brook, that piece of that wall, that door, that image that I think is so important in high-density. And of course, high-density is sustainability. We can't afford just to build private residences. We can't afford just to build low-density places. So how does one activate that thought, that memory, and each individual should be given the opportunity of being free, of having a space, of having something that, at the end of the day, is something inspiring and something... So, of course, the high-level bridges with their greenery, which connect these high-density spaces, the entire topography of the place, the fact that it is really, really much higher than most of the buildings in the place, is part of it. Well, I come to, really, because it's the end of your day. Christopher Logue, in his brilliant translation of the Iliad, I thought, really, his reference is also to the city itself. Because the conflicts, the tensions in a city, the search for social justice, for opportunity, for diversity, that kind of vibrancy of what a city really represents as a creative entity, is there in the Greek notion of the archipelago. And, of course, the Greeks lived in the archipelago, those little islands that were connected to the mainland with the boats. And I thought, when I was designing, probably one of the largest projects in the world, in Yongsan, in Korea, how do you bring that nature of freedom and social space to heighten that city? We have, you know, millions of people will be here. This is the formal railway lands that were occupied by old infrastructure, you know, closing the waterfront. How do you bring the mountains to the waterfront? How do you recreate civic space with, what, 30 skyscrapers? And, what, half a million square feet of retail and museums, cultural activities, transportation. How do you really create it without just imposing on it some sort of artificial grid? So I took that grid, that implied grid, which really doesn't exist in historical cities in the same way, and adapted it to sort of neighborhoods which are connected by the green. And you can see kind of a sequence of images here that break up that homogeneous notion of the city into a city that has true diversity, even though, of course, it has so many high places. And to organize that city around nature, around public spaces, around where people are, where people shop, where people walk, where people go to the movies, to concerts, to museums. And there it is. Now, it's something very new because usually skyscrapers have been designed simply on the same streets that lower buildings were designed. They were just taller buildings, just got taller and taller and taller. So my notion here was, how do you design a city where the buildings are no longer just imitations of lower buildings, but have a spatiality? And of course, there are at least, I don't know, 20, 30 architects from around the world which are part of the scheme to design each building really as a kind of a unique work of art, not connected to the street in the same way as we have known it before. Of course, as an architect, you have to do it with very, often very physical means. Paper models. It's not just all computerized. It's not just statistical. It's not mathematics, although a lot of it is. It's really, how do you create that sense of space for each of these objects, which are so large? I mean, one of the tallest, maybe the tallest tower in the world is going to be there, but many, many other very, very tall buildings. And at the same time, the sense of what is tradition? What is history? What is the memory of a city as rich as Seoul, center of Korea, is? So there it is on the river, a kind of crown of possibilities that refers to its history. Now, of course, you can see here that the spaces are vast, that they are designed to give a new sense of feeling, new sense of activity. And you can see that this is really for millions of people. Again, designed as a intersubjective work with many, many different architects, but as a master planner, of course, my responsibility is to create the idea of how nature and that space can be brought together. And here is one of my own skyscraper office buildings there. And here is social housing on the waterfront, which is, again, low cost housing, because it's not only for the rich, it's not only for business, it's for all people that should share in this part of the center of the city. And there it is. It's, of course, just begun. The master plan has taken a few years. The architects have done their designs. The construction is beginning. It will take some time, even in Asia, to create a city. But that's really what it is. And I end here. I wanted to show that between the notion of a drawing, of a house, of a museum, of a neighborhood, and of a city, I rather erase the lines. Because a city is a museum. A museum is a drawing. A drawing is a neighborhood. A neighborhood is a house. So the old categories of what you have always considered sort of separate entities, really, in my view, coexist together as a singular world. And what I didn't manage to show, it was not here, is my last picture of Ground Zero, where I just came from, from New York, where there was so much controversy, so much skepticism, cynicism, so many fights, so many emotions. And I just wanted to show you the picture that it indeed is under construction. It has had more than half a million visitors already, even though it's a building site. The memorial is finished. The towers, the tower number one, Freedom Tower, tower number four, tower number three, are highly visible, almost completed. The museum is in construction, almost completed. Of course, one has to have patience. It cannot be done in a day. But I think what I've learned from all of this is when you live in a free society, when there is an openness, when we appreciate what freedom and liberty are, then we can really build a city for all. Thank you.