Interview with Daniel Libeskind

December, 16
Visentin: Nice to meet you, Mr Libeskind. I read that for you sometimes architecture is done by connections, by strange coincidences: you saw Michelangelo's Pietà Rondanini and then you might see something like the shape of your skyscraper in Milan, later on. This is extremely interesting. Do you think that, inside us, we have, in our inner space, any forms or symbols, memories, that we then will find unexpectedly outside?

Daniel Libeskind: Well, it is a definition of life! Life it is not just a series of calculations and a sum total of statistics, it's about experience, it's about participation, it is something more complex and more interesting than what is obvious.

Visentin: I know that you were in Milan in 1988 with your wife and children and you spent a lot of time with Aldo Rossi. What do you that Rossi would think about your project for Milan Fair. He was so Milanese…

Daniel Libeskind: Milanese? Well, so is the project, you know… Absolutely, because the project is not about some fashion, some style: it's about how architecture communicates in its spaces and in its own spirit and how it relates itself to the city at large. It's about the civic notion of architecture and not just about big development or about more boxes on the horizon.

Visentin: So the city, for you, is the civitas and not the urbs… By that I mean the city is the community of the citizens and not the city of stones, of buildings.

Daniel Libeskind: Well, you know, you have to be able to connect the two, because you have people but people have to live somewhere, and where they live is not made out of people but is made out of materials. How can you humanize architecture, how can you make it part of a democratic ideal and not simply a merchandising or stylistic feature: that's really what the city of art is about. It's about how to develop a city, spaces for the public and of course how to integrate the history and the memory of that history into something which is also opening a new stage..
It continues on Floornature.com