Architect Daniel Libeskind on Working Unconventionally

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Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Greene Carmichael. Architect Daniel Libeskind is known for taking on high-profile, emotionally intense projects. He redesigned the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the reconstruction of Ground Zero in New York. Today, he leads a practice of 50 employees working on architectural commissions all over the world. But he didn't start doing this kind of work until the middle of his career. He was an academic until he was in his 40s. He spoke about his unusual career path and unorthodox leadership style with Harvard Business Review senior editor Alison Beard. She started by asking him about that fateful career turning point when he won the competition to design the Jewish Museum in Berlin at the age of 43.

It's just luck, I would say, that changed my direction in life because I started my own kind of architecture institute in Milan, and then I enrolled in a competition. And lo and behold, that whole path opened to me. And of course, you know, I never really worked for other architects. I, you know, I tried it, but I didn't find it fulfilling. So I thought I would try another path.

And what about that competition called out to you? Had you applied for others or?

No, I never applied. It was because it was in Berlin and because I have someone whose parents were Holocaust survivors and who grew up in very close to Germany, Poland. I thought that, It was a competition where the wall still stood in Berlin in 1987. And I thought, that's so interesting. Why don't I sort of respond to this call for housing at the edge of the wall?

And did it ever feel daunting when you won the competition to move from this very academic world where you'd been focused on theory and making drawings, but never building them into sort of physical things. Were you overwhelmed by that jump?

No, no, on the contrary, I felt that having no experience gave me an advantage. You know, if you have too much experience, if you have any experience, you already kind of know where you're going. Without the experience, you're free to think in a different way. And also, I think able to convince people that there are other ways of doing things and other ways of building things.

But it must have been hard to convince people that you could do it when you hadn't built something before.

Oh, yes. I remember the first One time I stood in front of the Senate of Berlin's administration with a plan of the building for the Jewish Museum, and one of the technocrats said to me, "Okay, Mr. Libeskind, draw us the basement plan." And I said, you know, this must be a trick question because the building is a zigzagging building, very complex. So I figured, okay, obviously I cannot draw that plan. I should just draw a rectangle, and I did. Everybody said, "Yes, this man really knows." So sometimes it's just, you know, a matter of dialogue understanding of the situation.

Right. And how else did your time in academia, sort of away from the nitty-gritty of working on projects, how else did that influence your work?

Tremendously. You know, because I did not work in offices of other architects, because I found it didn't suit my temperament, it wasn't interesting, I forged a way through what I would say classical love for architecture. The amateur, you know, the lover, you know, Jefferson was an amateur and he constructed fantastic campus. You know, Alberti was an amateur. You know, most of those architects were not, you know, the profession of architecture is relatively new. So really I discovered that the liberal arts, you know, geometry, astronomy, the stars, poetry, literature, archaeology are really the path to architecture. And how amazing that that sort of intuition is true. In my own life experience. That's exactly what I'm doing.

So it's almost as if you never experienced the grind of working your way up.

No, how lucky. I rejected it because I thought it was boring, and I said, if I ever am lucky to build a building, I'm going to do it in a different way. And the different way, really, I'm lucky to be part of it because of course I work with a lot of architects today from around the world, but how lucky it is not to have gone through that routine by starting with a small project and then a little larger project. And, you know, I always think my life was lived in reverse because most people start with projects small, larger, larger, and then towards that, you know, when they're older, they have the time to reflect on what they've done. I had the reflection before I built anything.

Hmm. So the Jewish Museum, when you did win the competition, it then took over a decade to come from plan to fruition.

Yes.

The Ground Zero reconstruction was a similarly long, very bureaucratic process. Yes. So how do you maintain your patience and motivation through those experiences?

I think you have to be a believer. You have to have faith. You have to not fall into the world of cynicism and skepticism, which is all around one in those situations, where people say, "Well, this museum will never be built. You might as well give up or go to California as you were planning to and let somebody else take care of it because, you know, it's never gonna happen." Or at Ground Zero, people were saying, you know, "All these stakeholders, you know, nothing will ever come out of it. It'll be just nonsense." But I think you have to have tough skin. You have to truly have belief in what you're doing in terms of the spirit that it represents. It's not for yourself, it's for those who you are building for. In Germany, it's the Jewish culture that was murdered. And in Ground Zero, it was— I started with the families of victims, those thousands of people now who lost their loved ones. I guess you have to be a believer.

Were there times that you ever lost faith?

No.

Or felt yourself losing faith?

No, I never lost faith. No, it might be that some clients lost faith. You know, when I was doing the Victoria and Albert Museum, you know, the clients just, you know, didn't have the stamina to, you know, because a lot of funding had been cut back and so on, to go with it. You know, it's about the marathon, I would say. You need to have the patience as a virtue in anything you do, but especially in architecture, because most of these ambitious projects will take more than a decade.

Yeah. They also— those kinds of projects require intense collaboration with, you know, not only government officials and clients, but often other architects. So how do you get very strong-minded, talented people to work together and keep the faith together?

[Speaker:GHION.AI] Great question. I think first of all you have to believe in the collaboration. You have to believe that what you're doing is not just for you. It's not about your ego, that you want to involve the talents of other people in your work. And so when you approach others in a spirit of camaraderie or solidarity, it's not a conflict. It's in fact kind of an open door where people share a common cause or share a common idea. I remember that in Berlin as well. In the beginning of course, really no one wanted a building. But if you forge alliances, forge with even one person in a technocratic administration who believes in you, believes in the idea of the project, it just expands over time. And of course it takes time and there are, I cannot say there are bleak distances in between where you are sort of in a quandary or in a dilemma or an aporia where you think maybe this will not happen. But you always have to believe it will happen. I think that's the only condition for me.

And when things get particularly contentious, as they did at Ground Zero, for example, what do you take away from the experience? Do you learn anything from it?

Yes, I learned from this that if you stick with it, you will succeed. And I have, you know, despite the odds. And of course there are necessary compromises since I'm just a master plan architect. I'm not the architect of any, you know, that's another issue. Who is the architect of each of the buildings? But to create a master plan that is an architectural document, which provides scales, proportions, technologies, spatial concepts, even technical concepts. Yeah, you have to stick with it and go through the thick and thin. And if you have the tough skin, which you need to have, I think the design today is, when I look at my early sketches, where I started, you know, 6 weeks in the competition and then, you know, 15 years later, it's pretty close.

Yeah. How do you decide which projects to take on? Do you try to balance sort of the high-profile, sort of very politically, emotionally fraught projects with sort of commercial commissions that might be less so?

No, I take any project that comes through. You know, where there's an interesting, where the client, somebody is interesting. Sometimes I don't take a project because, you know, you have to, you look into the client's eyes and you have to know, is this a person I want to work for the next 5 years or whatever it is? So other than that, I have no, I'm very humble. If somebody comes with a shack, can you build us a shack and we have only $10, I'll take that just as much as I would take a grandiose project, you know, in the center of Paris. And I think that's true. I think in that sense, architecture is a social profession. It's not inventing, you know, castle in the sky. It's responding to people's needs.

Well, if I would pay you $100, would you build me like a mildly nicer shack?

Well, whatever, you know, you would ask me to do if it's realistic. If it's realistic.

I feel like you're opening yourself up to a lot of odd requests.

No, the truth is that, of course, you know, even building a small humble building, it takes a lot of expense. But, you know, because I come from a working class background, and my parents were workers in factories, I never thought that architecture is about how much money you have. It's, you know, and quite frankly, most of the architects I know, my colleagues, come from wealthy backgrounds. The affluent people become architects, and they build their first house for their uncle or for their cousin or for their parents. But, you know, if you come from a working-class background in which you don't know any professionals at all, I never knew a lawyer or an engineer or a doctor or an architect You approach architecture in a different space. And even as Adolf Loos, the great architect, said, if you gave me gold, I would still build a building out of wood. I identify with that.

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You start by immersing yourself, by putting your head into the earth, so to speak, by listening to the, you know, to the inaudible on the side, by looking at what is not being shown on the side, but the less visible aspects of history, for example, of tradition, by sort of getting into a wavelength with something which doesn't appear to be there. And yet it is the spirit of the place, the genius loci as it is sometimes called. So that's number one. You have to sort of reincarnate yourself in a new world, not as a tourist, not as a voyeur, but as being part of it. And then you have to be struck by an idea. You have to be struck by a sketch, by something that you can produce with your hands. Because it's not about words, it's not about concept, it's something that just would emerge out of your sense of reality. And then from that sketch, you would make a better sketch and maybe a paper model, and then of course you would utilize technology with computers and other things to verify and to transform and kind of engage in a logical process. But I would say the origins are sort of sort of crazy.

And at what point do you bring in other people, you know, the clients, your teammates, you know, how much of your work is solitary in the beginning versus soliciting information from others?

It has to be solitary until you believe that you have captured that place and that program in a way that, that, that is true. Now at that point, you might not even know how to build a building. You know, I don't start with engineering, you know, can this be built? You know, it might be something that appears unbuildable even, but I think at that point you bring your colleagues, experts, and you, it's a quest. It's an adventure. Can such a thing be done? Can it, at ground zero, can you leave half the site, 8 acres out of the 16 acres, and not build anything on it and still fulfill, you know, 10 million square feet of office space and 5 million square feet of, and 5 more million of culture and can you do it? It's an intuition I had, but you need then to develop it with many, many collaborators.

How would you describe your leadership style?

Anarchic.

In what way?

I mean, people say, you know, you've just contradicted yourself. Yesterday you said that, but now you said the exact opposite. I said, that's true. It's true. It's not linear, definitely not linear. It's very focused, but it's more like a sort of configuration that doesn't have any beginning or an end, but it has a focal point somewhere. So how can I say it? It's very informal and it's very rigorous at the same time. It's very disciplined, but it's also very open to possibilities.

Do you still feel like you're a teacher?

Often yes, especially when people quickly look up something on Google and I point to them that Wikipedia really doesn't have the correct facts at all. And they stand amazed that there should be other sources of knowledge other than the screen. And so of course, you have to share your knowledge and also you have to share your ignorance. At the same time, and to admit you don't know and you have never found out and you know, you're in the same situation as an office. And that's, by the way, very important. You know, I've noticed that, you know, the more knowledge you gain, you become an expert, and how do you get rid of that expertise in order to have the kind of naivete, but in a good sense, a knowing naivete, that still can open new doors.

[Speaker:MEGAN] So how do you get rid of that expertise? By listening to those who don't have it?

[Speaker:GHION.AI] One way is by listening to those who have no idea that that particular thing is gonna cost incredible amount of money if you do it that way.

[Speaker:MEGAN] Right.

[Speaker:GHION.AI] And it's not really possible. But on the other hand, you can be very pragmatic and think of other solutions, other senses of relating the data together. So yeah. It's a multidimensional task, I would say. You have to do many things at the same time. You have to be able to dictate a letter at the same time as you're making a drawing, at the same time as you're correcting a novice's approach to a model, at the same time as you're discussing something about how much the building is costing, at the same time as you have to get on a video conference with a client in Paris and tell them, "No, no, it cannot be done. It's against the law." So you have to sort of, you know, and at the same time you have to be able to Powerade kids running around, and it's kind of medieval, I would say.

Sounds fun.

And fun, absolutely. The fun is, I think, often misunderstood because it looks banal, but I think if you don't really enjoy in a true sense, in a deeper sense, if you don't enjoy what you're doing and if other people are not infected by your enthusiasm you might as well go and do something else.

And in those contest settings, or when you're pitching for something that's very important and that lots of architects want to do, how do you make your case? What is it that sort of sells you over someone else?

Great question. Here I think of Lao Tzu, the Chinese masters of Tao. Act without doing work without effort.

Okay.

You know, in other words, don't try to sell things to people. Don't try to convince them that you're the best. Don't try to, you know, do any of those things. Just show them what you're doing, what you're capable of, and sometimes you don't succeed doing that, but that's fine. That's fine.

Right. So my last question was going to be about whether you ever consider retirement. You're almost 72, but you seem so energetic that it seems like a silly question to ask now.

I never considered it, you know. I never considered it. It's not a field, you know, I don't even feel that I'm working, although I work very hard because I do what I love. And if you do what you love, I think that's true for anybody, you don't feel the passage of time. You're completely gripped, you're in it, you're immersed in a flow that has no chronography to it. And I think that gives you kind of the beauty of, as long as you're sane, as long as you're not insane, as long as you're conscious, you will always do that. But luckily, I feel that, It takes time to be young.

Well, thank you so much. This has been a fabulous interview, and I feel like I want to come work for you now, but I'm not an architect.

Well, you know something? You don't have to be an architect. I always say to people, unless you're already 95, that all you need is 5 years to do something you want to do. You know, you can become a musician in 5 years. You can become an architect in 5 years. You can become a writer in 5 years. You know, so the 5-year plan, which, you know, some of these countries had, like China and Russia, has a value. Commit you to it, because in 5 years, you can do a lot. So 5 years, you can be an architect. Well, it was a pleasure speaking with you.

That's architect and urban designer Daniel Libeskind. He was interviewed by HBR senior editor Alison Beard. His interview is in the July-August 2018 issue of Harvard Business Review and on hbr.org. This episode was produced by Curt Nagish. Adam Buchholz is our audio product manager. And we get technical and production help from Rob Eckhardt. Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I'm Sarah Greene Carmichael.