Product Description: The first book to get inside Libeskind's extraordinary world, The Space of Encounter eschews the traditional monograph format as it tracks the architect's life's work, pulling the reader back to the 1980s and guiding him through an often mesmerizing array of ideas and projects extending into the year 2005. By revealing for the first time in book form his project proposal texts, excerpts from lauded speeches and lectures, interviews conducted with international newspapers and periodicals, in addition to his poems and correspondence, this book captures Libeskind at a major turning point in his career. Here, we learn of Libeskind's experience of being a radical educator to becoming a high profile, convincing and inspiring architect. Complimenting his brilliantly insightful textual material are his forceful drawings and full-color images of his project models, finished projects, and projects in progress.
Amazon.com Review: In the (anti-)tradition of Rem Koolhaas's and Bruce Mau's S,M,L,XL, this volume is less a photographic tour through the edifices of maverick architect Daniel Libeskind than a fractured, sometimes frustrating and always compelling spin through a giant edifice of ideas. Though he has been a been a leading architectural professor and theoretician for some 20 years (Philip Johnson calls him "Quirky, maddening, but brilliant..."), Libeskind only showed up on the international radar as a practitioner a few years ago when his jarring, norm-busting Jewish Museum Berlin earned him a Pritzker nomination--and such high-profile new commissions as the Imperial War Museum in Manchester, England; the Jewish Museum San Francisco (JMSF); an extension to the Denver Art Museum; and, most sensationally, an addition to London's beloved Victoria and Albert Museum. This last is a giant tiled geometric phenomenon that spirals right up out of the sober nineteenth-century pile's courtyard into the sky. Nicknamed just that--"The Spiral"--it elicited a public furor in which no one in the monument-fetishizing U.K. hasn't had an opinion.
All told, though, Libeskind hasn't had that many commissions, and most of them weren't even completed at the time of the book's production--which perhaps accounts for why this nouveau monograph is really about seventy-five percent text, all of it set in various funky juxtaposed types and comprising a vast selection of Libeskind's speeches, lectures, interviews, project texts, and the like. (Libeskind has also attained considerable recognition for his quasi-experimental architectural models and illustrations, many of which are featured here.) Much of this text (almost all of which, save a few Dadaist forays, is vastly more linear and transparent than Libeskind's fascinating, challenging postindustrial architecture) pertains to his built or in-progress work, photographs or drawings of which are also included here--though never keyed to the same page as the text in which they are discussed. If that seems annoying, it sometimes is--though it's rather clear that Libeskind and the book's editor and designer did it intentionally to disrupt the conventional way we consume an architectural monograph, flipping through from A to Z, oohing and aahing over the color-soaked pictures, and grazing over their pert corresponding captions.
If you try to experience The Space of Encounter in that fashion, you'll get frustrated. Better to approach it the way Libeskind apparently wants people to experience his architecture--from many points in time, space, and human experience, in seemingly random, dissociated bits and pieces. Just like his signature windows, which look as though they were blasted onto walls by a not-very-good shot with a futuristic laser gun, they will, once you get close enough, afford a dazzling, if not wholly unified, vista out onto a new world of forms, language, and ideas. --Timothy Murphy
Why Bother ??? Impressionable, wannabe architects seem unable to distinguish between wholly pretentious writing and genuine architectural investigation. The black-clad, thick-glasses-wearing set fool themselves into believing that the most incomprehensible writing must therefore be the most important architectural writing. Such is the case of Daniel Libeskind, architecture's most pretentious poseur, who continues to dance pussy-like on the patch of self-delusion preferring fashionable balderdash to real intellectual inquiry.
`The Space of Encounter' is one of those annoying books that present oodles of jarring typefaces, contrived references to classical literature and obscure poets, among other ploys used by the author to imply erudition. Of course it is nothing of the sort. Unable to distinguish between name-dropping and the architectural design process, little of merit emerges. It is a simple gimmick that Libeskind exploits to confuse impressionable and gullible students, but only amuses the more capable, inquiring architect.
And more importantly, if Libeskind had to hire another architect to design his own home, (as he did!!), how seriously can he be taking himself anyway?
An American Architect??? The thing about Liebeskind, that is even more true in his followup book, is that as much as Liebeskind tries to pass himself off as an American, a refugee seeking the American Dream, he is yet another European fool. Full of his own absurd 'concepts' of architecture and devoid of the human experience, he is always singing his own praises, even if no one else is listening. If his perverbial tree fell in the forest, he would be the only one to hear it.
Architectural Merit The above critic has a deep seeded grudge against Libeskind and his work and has obviously not visited Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin. The museum offers some of the most dynamic and moving spaces in the contemporary architectural scene.
A Well Designed Ego It's very unfortunate that you cannot give a book zero stars or, better yet, minus 5 stars. The only interesting design that Daniel Libeskind has ever come up with is his own ego. That is truly a work of art! The book is a hollow attempt to be clever, the way a teenager (or adolescent) who thinks he knows it all would try to be clever. I was actually embarrassed for him after reading it. Now, tell me again, how did someone of such little consequnce and talent "win" the the LMDC competition to redesign Ground Zero?
Million Dollar Genius They say that `Real artists don't know they are artists". Usually, the corollary is also true: those arrogant enough to make the claim of greatness for themselves are typically judged otherwise by history. Not willing to allow posterity the final judgement, Daniel Libeskind and wife/partner Nina recently demanded (under threat of lawsuit) an additional $1 million dollar `Genius Fee' from Ground Zero Developer Larry Silverstein, who replaced the pouting designer with another firm. Add to this that Daniel and Nina hypocritically sub-contracted the design of their New York City apartment to another architect (evidently they weren't able to do it themselves, or - more interestingly - to let anyone in their office handle it), and you can see why they are the laughingstock of the architectural profession. Libeskind's meritless fame owes more to outrageous and clownish antics, than designing buildings of long-term merit. A dab hand at slick images, his few built works already have the depressing aesthetics of run down bunkers. Understandably, he would not to want to live in one himself.
Great cities, (Paris, Rome, Barcelona come to mind) are marked by a consistency of character, the architect's inventiveness displaying itself in subtleties and refinements to the dominant harmonious qualities. Streets in particular benefit from commonality of scale and materials that develop a strong sense of place. The skillful designer learns to be spectacular while not destroying what is already in place. (Think of Carlo Scarpa's work in historical centers, and you'll see what I mean.) - Not so for Libeskind, who offers disharmony, disjunction, destabilization, crass geometry and historical ignorance as though it were a way forward for the urban problems we face today. A disrespect for context and regional character marks the diagrammatic formalism of his lumpen and unsophisticated modeling.
This tedious volume chronicles in amusing and nonsensical prose, the unverifiable suppositions that underpin Libeskind's anti-urban, anti-architecture, anti-human designs. It is dressed up in fanciful, glossy graphics of course, but these are the gimmicks that impress (as magpies are attracted to any bright and shiny thing), juvenile, but unrefined minds. If the Libeskinds deserve a `Genius Fee', it should be for the PR exercise that enabled them to promote this aesthetically illiterate foolishness for financial gain, (now marketed at $1 Million Dollars). But this latest cocky arrogance draws attention to them for the skilled commercial opportunists they are. In Europe, Daniel and Nina managed to fool some of the people for some of the time. Thankfully, more savvy Americans were not so easily deceived by the Libeskinds' entertaining but ultimately laughable circus act. If you must see this show, please remember to throw some peanuts to the monkeys.
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