Building resolve

“We’ve decided to stay,” Nina Libeskind said.

This was Saturday, two weekends ago, when she and her husband, architect Daniel Libeskind, had been scheduled to fly back to Berlin, where their daughter, Rachel, was due back in school. But the afternoon before, they’d met with officials of the Port Authority and the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., who asked for modifications to Libeskind’s plan for ground zero, a design that would leave the excavated basin in its exposed state while building the world’s tallest tower alongside, with a garden inside.

The competition for the most high-profile architectural commission in recent memory was down to two proposals, his and one from a group called Think. And though Libeskind could have made his revisions at the home office in Germany, one thing he had learned, with the help of his wife, was that if you really want the job, you don’t leave. If you care about making a project a reality, you stay and fight for it. “Well, I definitely care,” Daniel Libeskind said. So they canceled their flight.

How they learned this lesson dates to July 4, 1989, when Libeskind won the competition to design the Jewish Museum in Berlin. He already had earned a reputation in his field through his philosophical writings and high-concept designs, for things like his Architecture Machines, one each for reading, writing and memory -- an amalgam of Leonardo’s imaginings, medieval craftsmanship and Rube Goldberg devices accompanied by Libeskind’s reflections on architecture in its “end condition.”

He had earned a series of plum teaching jobs too, at places such as Harvard and Yale, which provided adoring audiences of students and health insurance, as well. But what he’d never done, at 43, was get anything built. Though he might have been “pretty famous,” as he put it, he had not a building to his name when he was anointed the architect for the new museum proposed for the German capital. Perhaps not everyone understood his design, which included a walkway that led to a dead end -- what he called the Holocaust Void -- but he was the man of the hour.

“And I’ll never forget,” Libeskind says, “they gave the prize, local politicians were there, ‘Bravo!’ -- and then as we were leaving, Nina turned to me, cars were whizzing by, and she went, ‘Do you realize what this means?’ ”

As she recalls, he said, “I know exactly what it means.”

He explains, “I realized that if we were serious, we can’t leave Berlin. To build a Jewish museum in Berlin, you’re going to have to be there every day.”

Never mind that they had been due to head for Los Angeles, where he had gotten his cushiest appointment yet, as a senior Getty scholar. Never mind that their possessions were on a boat from Milan -- where they had been living -- toward the Panama Canal....

Six years later, they were still in Berlin -- still fighting to get the museum built -- when Libeskind entered another competition for an emotionally charged project. The Felix Nussbaum Haus was to be a small museum in Osnabruck, Germany, honoring a Jewish artist killed at Auschwitz. Libeskind proposed that its front be a bare concrete wall with no door, “absence itself -- an empty canvas of Nussbaum’s martyred life,” and he won.

By then, though, he sensed that competitions could be “a ticket to oblivion.” So it shouldn’t have been a total shock when they feted him at a luncheon and then the city’s building director “got up, he shook my hand and he said, ‘Mr. Libeskind, you’ll never build this building in my town. This is my town.’ Just smiling. ‘This is my town.’ ”

Before the man was this cutest of couples, the architect and his wife, both pixieish characters, she 5 foot 2, he just an inch or two taller, a matched set with their short spiky haircuts, he in black, she favoring gray. Then the little woman stepped forward and shook the hand of the building official who swore it would never happen.

“I said, ‘Do you want to make a bet?’ ” Nina recalls.

Today, her husband is no longer an architect without a building. The Osnabruck power broker was out of his job in a year or so, and Nussbaum Haus became his first, in 1998. The Berlin museum was finally completed the next year -- opened to the public before there were any exhibits in it -- and last July saw the opening of his Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, England, which Libeskind designed as if the planet had exploded into three shards, one of air, one of earth and one of water.

Now the couple was staying here to revise Studio Daniel Libeskind’s proposal for a far more ambitious project in lower Manhattan, where a decision is expected this week from the agencies pondering how to rebuild the site where terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center towers and killed 2,800 people.

On that Saturday, the Libeskinds also were trying to figure out five things that are “cool.”

Rolling Stone magazine had asked Daniel to come up with a list. That’s what happens in this era of the architect-celebrity. One day you’re basically unknown to the public at large, and the next you’re “pretty famous,” far beyond the ranks of fellow architects. It happened with Frank Gehry after his Bilbao museum, then to Rem Koolhaas.

Now Libeskind, at 56, finds himself being asked to direct operas, and has the New York Times doing separate features on his cowboy boots and his eyeglasses. The New Yorker wants to photograph him down by ground zero with the leader of the Think team, Rafael Vinoly, and here’s the Los Angeles Times asking about him and his wife, and how they seem like two sides of one brain.

She does have thoughts on that “cool” business.

“We already had a list, but it was too abstract,” Daniel explains. “I had ‘fusion.’ ” He listed Emily Dickinson, whose poetry he carries, and considered the Bible, “but I was thinking if I said that the Bible was cool, people would take me as a freak. I really do think it’s cool, but I don’t want to be misinterpreted. I have to find out who’s their audience, Rolling Stone.”

He floated another idea.

“The Bronx is cool.”

“Well,” says Nina, “I wouldn’t agree with that.”

Coming to the U.S.

The Bronx was the third place he lived. First was Poland, where he was born in 1946 to parents lucky to be among the several thousand Polish Jews to survive World War II, both having escaped to the Soviet Union only to wind up in internment camps. Between them, they’d lost 85 relatives. The family fled totalitarian Poland for Israel in 1957, then two years later migrated to the U.S., where Daniel’s mother worked as a seamstress -- making furs -- and his father in a printing plant and where the teenage Daniel proved a whiz at music and math and ended up in the Bronx High School of Science. He’s not sure why he chose to study architecture at Cooper Union after that, way downtown in Manhattan, about the time the World Trade Center was being built.

He met Nina, who was from Toronto, at a summer camp for children of Holocaust survivors. She wasn’t one herself, but had a best friend who was and who persuaded her to become a counselor, and told her she needed to meet the arts and crafts director. “She said, ‘There’s this really incredible guy, all he does is draw,’ ” Nina remembers. “I said, ‘Is he a nerd?’ I was very skeptical.”

She left college, at 20, to marry him. But she would joke later that she earned an advanced degree after all, a “PhD in packing,” they moved so often.

Nina had studied politics and found jobs in a congressman’s office when they lived in Lexington, Ky., and in the “Citizens Advice Bureau” when Daniel’s work took them to London. One thing she learned from politics, she says, is “it’s not a genteel world.” Only when they decided to stay in Berlin, to try to get the museum built, did Daniel ask her to run his office. Today she supervises more than 115 employees, and when potential clients ask Libeskind, “Who’s negotiating, who’s your lawyers?” he says back, “Lawyers?”

Daughter Rachel, the youngest of their three children at 13, says, “My mom is the practical one and my dad is the thinker. He’s very, very passionate. He kind of gets all excited. My mom’s more reserved.”

They compromise at home. He likes to listen to his Bach, so she turns off the sound while she watches her hockey or football. He says she calls out the penalties “before the referees.”

In a relationship like this, in which one person is the “name,” or the “talent,” there’s a tendency of outsiders to question the legitimacy of the other spouse when they, too, try to be a player. It’s easy to imagine that being the case when Nina met England’s Lord Rees-Mogg, whose ranting critique made her husband an overnight celebrity in that country in 1996. Libeskind had design a proposed extension to the esteemed Victoria & Albert Museum that he called “The Spiral,” a metaphor for history as “an ever-evolving and dynamic process.” The lord, however, offered another view of it in the Times of London: “a disaster for the V&A; in particular and for civilisation in general.” The lord warned his countrymen, “We are all being invited to take a walk in the desert with the Devil.”

The piece gained Libeskind “a million invitations to speak,” and they inevitably ran into Lord Rees-Moog. Nina saw he was a proper fellow, Oxford from head to toe, the sort who “thought Daniel and I were from another planet.” That’s when she mentioned that her own father had gone to Oxford, as Canada’s first Jewish Rhodes scholar, and, by the way, “he was president of the Oxford debating union....”

But if it’s easy to misperceive her, so it may be with her husband, if one assumes he’s not competitive himself, or just the smiley face in one of those good cop-bad cop pairings. That he can play the game too becomes clear when we head from their hotel to the Winter Garden, just west of ground zero, where large models of the two finalists are on display.

They are the survivors of a competition that began after a series of disappointing models was unveiled before a mass audience last July. The Port Authority had insisted that the initial planners restore the 11 million square feet of office space destroyed on Sept. 11, 2001, and the results were predictable clusters of office towers. After the public effectively booed those off the stage, officials invited seven teams -- including some of the world’s best-known architects -- to submit more inventive plans for the site.

Libeskind says he came up with his idea of preserving its hollowed-out “bathtub” the moment he saw the exposed slurry walls that help hold back the waters of the Hudson River. “Right away, he said, ‘Nina, we’ve got to get some cameras,’ ” his wife recalls.

His only concern was that this was too obvious, “everybody will do the same thing.” But they didn’t -- his was the only plan to maintain that reminder of the devastation. He envisioned a cube-like glass museum leaning precariously over the 70-foot-deep pit, and a jagged office building around the sides, with one tapering silver tower rising 1,776 feet above the ground, its upper stories given over to gardens symbolizing -- out of destruction -- “life victorious.”

After years of teaching Ivy Leaguers the tongue-twisting tenets of postmodernist philosophy, Libeskind somehow has found a feel for such simple metaphors the average man can grasp. His design also envisions a “Park of Heroes,” marking the routes taken by rescue workers, and a “Wedge of Light,” where each year on Sept. 11 the sun would shine without shadow between 8:46 a.m., when the first airplane hit, to 10:28 a.m., when the second tower collapsed.

The plan he calls “Memory Foundations” was recognized as a serious contender -- by critics and the public -- from the day the new submissions were unveiled in December. Now, on this afternoon, a cluster of spectators gathers in front of his glassed-in model at the Winter Garden. Nearby, banners describe the other semifinalists whose models had been removed.

“Nostalgia,” Libeskind quips as we pass it. Too bad for the losers.

But the Think model is still up, drawing a crowd equal to his. Called the “World Cultural Center,” it would replace the original twin towers with two soaring tubes of steel latticework rising ghostlike into the sky. As we pass quickly by, Libeskind can’t help himself.

“What do you think of their title?” he asks, then answers himself: “World Cultural Center” reminds him of the buildings he most hated growing up, the “Palaces of Culture” in every Eastern European capital, “those Stalinist things in the middle of the city.”

He can’t get over the name of the competing group, either. “How do you call yourself Think,” he asks, “which to me is so Orwellian? It’s not the name of a person who takes responsibility. It’s Think!”

He did care, he certainly did. He wanted it.

Irritable competitors

Competitions like this are “a high-stakes poker game,” says architect Peter Eisenman, who was part of a group that didn’t make the final two. “You need to play hard. It’s an expensive night out. If you’re not prepared to lose, don’t play.”

And part of the game is that, while you whisper about the competition, they whisper about you.

Eisenman won’t discuss Libeskind by name, but there is no love lost there. He says the New York competition was set up with too much public input -- from families of the victims, the Port Authority, the trade center leaseholder and from the man in the street.

“You can talk to the public, but I don’t think they should say what books should be read, or what is good art or music,” Eisenman says. He has seen the designs sent to him by “Joe Everyman,” and they’re as heavy-handed as the artwork after Sept. 11 that depicted a crying Statue of Liberty, a reminder of why you should “never pander to popular taste.”

“You’re dealing with an important memorial,” Eisenman says. “How do you make those decisions so you don’t get kitsch banality?”

It’s a dig at Libeskind, of course, who has made himself accessible to everyone, and who has said, “The public is always right.”

So others whisper that he sells too much and compromises too much and wants it too much -- look at that pin on his lapel showing the twin towers and an American flag.

But if Libeskind quipped that his rival’s name is “Orwellian,” perhaps that was because the word had just been used against him, in a review that had him fuming. The New York Times’ Herbert Muschamp branded Libeskind’s design a “war memorial” and, echoing Eisenman, “predictable kitsch,” with its tower a patriotic 1,776 feet tall.

Other critics still favored Libeskind’s plan, and soon New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, would say that he did too. But the Libeskinds thought the New York Times’ critic had crossed a line to become a “campaigner” for the rival Think team, and a staffer in their Berlin office e-mailed dozens of fellow architects, urging them to write the newspaper to “Please get rid of this guy.” Then that e-mail got leaked, making the squabble a public one.

A few days later, Libeskind says, “When you’re in a highly charged situation like this one, sure, a lot of people want you to fail. A lot of people would try to demonize you. You know, that’s democracy.”

His wife says, “I think Daniel is probably more ecumenical than I am. I’d kill him on the spot.”

We were back near ground zero, where Libeskind had another meeting with the officials who will make the decision this week. Seated at a Starbucks table, he was sketching the site on a napkin, figuring out another angle from which to show his project.

“Let people call it cornball,” he said, not about to apologize for the touches that speak to a mass audience. If he gets on CNN and quickly tells the audience how he came here on a ship and saw the Manhattan skyline not as steel and concrete, but “the substance of the American Dream” ... well, “that’s true,” he says. If his tower is 1,776 feet, that’s because it is “a meaningful number.”

Will he compromise? Of course. His Berlin museum once was about to be scrapped for being over budget. His design called for slanted walls. “I said, ‘Nina, we’re going to just straighten the walls.’ ”

He knows his bid for the New York project may be in vain. The Think design may win, or neither get built.

In either case, they’re staying -- the Libeskinds are moving here. Their mission in Berlin is completed, after all, and it’s a good time, with Rachel entering high school. Their sons are grown, one an astrophysicist, the other pondering graduate school in philosophy, religion or art history.

For an architect who didn’t have anything built until a few years ago, Libeskind is not doing badly. He has offices in Denver, where he’s designed an addition to the art museum, and in Toronto, Tel Aviv and Switzerland, where they are developing his “shopping city.” There’s a Libeskind office on the island of Majorca, another coming to Hong Kong, and he may need one in San Francisco if its Jewish Museum can raise $100 million to build and endow his design for a Yerba Buena site. And he’ll definitely need workspace here in Manhattan, where his name is among 15 on a list of possible new deans for Columbia’s architecture school.

But where to live? Nina asks everyone for ideas, so I suggest Central Park West, with its grand apartments and spectacular views, a world apart from the garment union housing where Daniel’s parents lived in the Bronx.

“Will you lend us the money?” she asks, insisting that’s out of their range.

“I like it!” her husband says.

“The only thing that I can think of, we have to find a medical plan,” she says. “This is pragmatic.”

*

From Libeskind’s gallery of designs

Three of architect Daniel Libeskind’s notable recent works deal with war, Jewish heritage and the Holocaust. Critics have consistently noted their powerful emotional impact.

‘Conflict and harmony’: Libeskind’s design for the Jewish Museum San Francisco, to be built in the city’s Yerba Buena Center cultural district, calls for the building to be constructed around a former power substation. The plan “expresses conflict and harmony in equal measures,” wrote Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff.

Project in Germany: The Jewish Museum in Berlin has at its core a three-story void. Victoria Newhouse observed approvingly in her book “Toward the New Museum” (1998, Monacelli Press), “From the moment one enters, there is a feeling of dislocation.”

A power to disturb: The Guardian newspaper said the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, England, has “the power to disorientate and disturb visitors, encouraging them to reflect on the perils, the mechanics and ... the human cost of war.”