Episode 31: Architecting Greatness

HOST: JENNIFER  (00:01):

Welcome to episode 31 of the Going for Greatness podcast. There's a new name on this show, and that reflects the new direction of this podcast, which is sharing personal stories, emphasizing the nuances of how to reach your full potential, and discovering how people push themselves toward greatness. Today we're talking about the greatness of creation and how that affects the world. My guest is world-class architect, Lev Libeskind.  His focus is on creative greatness through architecture. 

GUEST: LEV  (00:34):

Hi Jennifer. Nice to be with you. Architecture impacts the world in many ways. In many ways it's political, it has to do with power, with money, building huge monuments to governments and to private actors. It's also culturally crucial. But beyond all of that, how could architecture not impact the world? Because it's about space. It's about what we all travel through. I'm often surprised by how architecture is not appreciated in the sense that movies are, for example.  People are so into movies, which they'll see a couple of times, in a theater or on a streaming service. But they will live or work in a building their whole life and never really question it. And architecture is really a civic art.  It has to be less about government, less about the powerful rich developers, and I think more democratic and more conscious to most people if that makes sense. The awareness of it should be greater. I think architects have an obligation to bring our art -- the art of architecture to everyday people. Because as I said, everybody lives in space. You don't need to watch a movie. You can be blind, but you're still going to need to be in space.

HOST: JENNIFER   (02:14):

When you're hired by a client to create a building. How do you start that process?

GUEST: LEV  (02:22):

It depends a lot on what you're doing and who the client is.  But the basics are that you wanna listen. You wanna listen to the client.  Hear their wants and needs for the project, and you wanna listen to the place. You want to go there in person, and listen to the people who live there, and listen because every place is different. Every neighborhood, even in the same city is different. And so it's never about imposing a kind of style or architectural ideology on a place. But going there and trying to make something special that fits in that place, that fits the way the people have a rhythm.  How people work in the way that people wake up in the morning and walk their dog, or if they don't have a dog wake up and jog or whatever it is in that particular culture.

GUEST: LEV  (03:19):

I've worked on almost all the continents on earth, and everybody is different, but what unites everyone is their sense of home.  You want to make architecture, which appeals to that sense of somewhere, which is home. And home is both inspiring and new and creative, but it's also somewhere comfortable and somewhere that you’ve always been and you know. And so you never want architecture to break that sense of tradition and that sense of what makes a place home, what makes a place itself through history.  I've worked in Italy, I've worked in the States, and I've worked in Africa. And you have to respect every place for what it is in itself. And I think that's kind of the key to the design.

 

HOST: JENNIFER  04:15):

When building something maybe not be so personal: for example an office building or a planned community, do you follow the same protocol where you go and you invest your time and figure out what the rhythm is in that place? Or do you listen more to what your clients are asking for? Or is it a blend of both?

GUEST: LEV  (04:38):

Well, look, without a happy client, you don't get to be creative. You don't get to do anything. So, a good architect has to always respect the client's wishes, listen to the client very carefully, and balance that with the need to be creative. I mean --- not to sell out. And that's not the simplest thing to do because sometimes there's a lot of money on the line.   It’s easy to just do something cheap and, and impersonal. But a good client and I'm very privileged to be working with some really great clients. A good client will understand creativity and understand the need for a building to be personal, emotional, be something that touches people. And, which is by the way, good for business because it means that people want to live there, people wanna rent there, people wanna work in that office building, people want to visit that museum.

GUEST: LEV  (05:48):

So I see architecture as a kind of both the art of compromise, but also an art of ensemble. So you are never alone, like you are as a writer, for example, I love to write, I love to draw, excuse me, but it's not the same as a painting or piece of music or a piece of writing in that you have to work with a client. You're both together in this with the developer, with investors, you have other architects like a landscape architect, you have engineers, you have a whole gamut of consultants. Of course, the general contractor, the construction company. So it's really a huge ensemble, like a theater or a movie, as I said before. It's similar to that. And you have to kind of work with all these people to create a vision that appeals to the ultimate client, which is the general public. You know, even an office building or even a private home, in some ways, you are gonna need the municipality to sign off on it oftentimes because it has to be part of the neighborhood. So you're gonna need to have this kind of appreciation, not just for art, but for realism, for how the community sees your work and how it fits into that community.

HOST: JENNIFER  (07:17):

How do you approach sustainability?

GUEST: LEV  (07:18):

There’s Leed Certification, which many clients ask for buildings I've worked on. And the buildings I'm working on right now are usually Leed gold--- which is the second highest classification after platinum. Sustainability is obviously an incredibly important part of the building, whether it's in cities or in rural places. It's really necessary for the architecture of the future. Having said that, I also think that there's a kind of spiritual sustainability, cultural sustainability, which is important but is often neglected. So a building can be very green, let's say, but it also has to be spiritually green in the sense that it has to be sustainable over time as an idea and as a style, as an aesthetic. Something that's not gonna be seen 20, 30, 40 years from now as a kind of part of the past and something to be demolished or something that was just cheap and made for sustainability points. It has to be something that has a kind of long-term spirit, and it's almost like you're treating it more like a, I know this sounds strange, but like a person rather than just a bunch of steel and concrete and glass, if that makes sense.

HOST: JENNIFER  (08:46):

Can you expand on how it's more like a person? What do you mean by that?

GUEST: LEV  (08:52):

Buildings have emotion and buildings have personality and buildings are expressive. That expressiveness should be something that is not just about flashy colors or nice LEDs.  It’s about the actual architecture, which has to be something done with passion, done with great care to detail, and something which really appeals to people.  It is beyond the price for a square foot. It has to be something that is born and has a long life. And that's kind of what I mean by personality. That it has a feeling of vibrancy being alive and also longevity. It's something not just thought of in the short term but thought of for the future.

HOST: JENNIFER  (09:55):

You come from a family of very talented architects. What has been the hardest part of making your way in the world as your own architect?

GUEST: LEV  (10:13):

It difficult question because to be honest, it hasn't been that difficult. I can't pretend it has.   My father Daniel  Libeskind is a very famous and world-changing architect.  He was, for example, the first to kind of break the city block. Daniel was one of the first to have Non-rectilinear windows diagonal and strange unusually shaped windows. He was the first architect, I think, since the pyramids built a building without a ground floor door, which is the Jewish Museum of Berlin, which I call my younger brother, cuz I literally grew up with it. Having come from that, I kind of grew up breathing this architectural air. My difficulty is how to push the boundaries on that without betraying the values of that architecture that are part of my soul, part of my DNA, and something that I love and cherish. And yet not to be derivative or not to be duplicative, but to kind of push it in new directions while still having the same kind of emotions, values, and spirit of my father's work.

HOST: JENNIFER  (11:48):

I'm sure that it's not easy being in the same profession as a famous father. If you're in the movie business and your father was Marlon Brando, is that tricky or helpful? Your dad is a famous world-class architect as you pointed out. So were there challenges for you to chart your own path as an architect?

GUEST: LEV  (12:11):

My biggest challenge is really stylistic. Honestly, it's a pleasure to work in this field that I've always loved and grown up in. There's no nepotism involved because we have different offices. We don't share any of the same clients. We don't give each other clients or anything like that. I try my best to do work that I hope that he would agree is of a certain level and, and shares a certain kind of passion and values of architecture. And I'll say this--  the tradition that I try to work in is my father's tradition, but it's an ancient tradition. In other words, the tradition of architecture is to do something new, which is always new for each generation.

GUEST: LEV  (13:11):

So something which has never been seen before, and brings forward all that history of architecture. So in other words, for example, I live in Italy.  You look at the architecture of Michelangelo or Bernini and you see these great architects such as Brunelleschi, and at the time they were working, they were incredibly innovative and incredibly new. It's only now in retrospect that they look old because they've been copied over and over again, so many hundreds of thousands of times. So that we're used to their style, it’s no longer new. And it seems to our kind of traditional when you were there when you were, you know, the Bauhaus is a good example of this. When Louis Kahn first started doing his buildings in Vienna, or the rationalist architects in Italy, like Terragni started working, people were shocked. I mean, this was completely alien architecture, but today it looks totally normal because it's become part of the culture and part of the tradition. And so when I say traditional, I kind of mean avan-garde in a strange, paradoxical way.

HOST: JENNIFER  (14:32):

Avant-garde for that time, but mainstream for today.   

GUEST: LEV  (14:37):

Exactly.

HOST: JENNIFER  (14:37):

I understand what you're saying. What's the most challenging part about being an architect?  

GUEST: LEV  (14:43):

Let’s put it this way.  In Architecture,  unlike a painter, a painter can draw on canvas. And this is what painters usually do.  They draw and redraw and do studies until they get the final artwork. A musician or composer does the same thing. They can play music, and write down notes until it's perfected. But an architect is different.  You can do only a limited number of sketches. I love to draw, so I do a lot of sketches, plans, and renderings, but you never know how the building will look in reality. So there's always a risk, a kind of a gamble, a kind of throwing of the dice into the future of what is this building gonna look like.  How is it gonna feel to the people who live there and work there and visit it?

GUEST: LEV  (15:40):

And I think that's the most challenging part, is to have that kind of ultimate imagination and to say: look I will take that risk and I have to trust myself. I have to trust the people I work with. And this whole, as I told you earlier, this whole kind of ensemble of a team that creates a huge building, and we're talking about tens and often hundreds of millions of dollars, but you never know what the result will be until it's built. And that to me is the biggest challenge.

HOST: JENNIFER  (16:13):

I'm gonna play a game with yoName your favorite building in the world. Go.

GUEST: LEV  (16:19):

Okay. Up until recently, I used to say the Pantheon.  But a few months ago, I was privileged enough to go with a Turkish friend of mine to Göbekli Tepe a Neolithic archaeological site in the Southeastern Anatolia Region of Turkey,  This is a recent discovery in Turkey, which has completely upended the history of civilization. And I'll explain to you how.  Göbekli Tepe is 20,000 years old predating Stonehenge by 6,000 years. It is this monumental, I mean, it makes Stonehenge look like it was done by toddlers, this monumental complex of gigantic statues and reliefs and, and, and buildings in Central Turkey. And it's upended the whole theory of the world of civilization in the following way. So it used to be thought that we were nomads, we were hunter-gatherers. And then for reasons of food scarcity and efficiency, we started agriculture. And then that led to cities and architecture. But Göbekli Tepe has proven beyond a doubt that the people who created it were hunter-gatherers.

GUEST: LEV  (17:32):

So in other words, architecture precedes agriculture. And actually think some scholars say that the reason that humans started farming and shepherding is due to architecture. So the nomadic tribes that hunter-gatherers would keep on coming back to this place to build it. And because they were building it, they had to be sedentary and had to have food. So to me was very inspiring that architecture precedes even food as kind of a spiritual nutrition for humanity. And so I think that's my favorite architectural place in the world. 

HOST: JENNIFER  (18:23):

You did some interesting sort of avant-garde things in your past, right? What is your background?

GUEST: LEV  (18:31):

I studied ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics from the Middle Kingdom, and I was about to go to Egypt in 1997. My academic career was cut short because there was a terrorist attack in Luxor, which killed 30 or 40 tourists. Terrible tragedy, mostly Swiss and French, and German tourists. And that really kind of changed my life.  Because of that attack, UCLA, which is my alma mater, canceled the dig, which is right next to where the attack happened. And so my life went in a different direction. I subsequently got a degree in architecture from Cambridge University in England. I studied under Peter Carl and Dalibor Vasely, who are some of the great scholars of modern architecture.

GUEST: LEV  (19:32):

In 2008 I got an MBA at the University of St.Gallen in Switzerland. And that was pretty funny because when I got into the program a couple of months later, the Lehman Brothers crashed and the whole world was upended by the whole financial crisis. And so my teachers literally said, okay throw away your textbooks, like Black–the Scholes model. Forget it. It's just worthless now. And we spent a whole year kind of trying to figure out what this new global economy was.   It didn't get me a job, but I made some good friends. So that's my background.

HOST: JENNIFER  (20:23):

That's awesome. Lev Libeskind, thank you for joining me today on the Going for Greatness Show. This was very enlightening and greatly inspirational.

GUEST: LEV  (20:31):

Jennifer, I am so happy to be on your show, which I love, and I hope to talk to you again.

HOST: JENNIFER  (20:37):

Today Lev Libeskind shared how creativity breeds greatness in our own lives. I thank you for listening to the Going for Greatness podcast. This was episode number 31. I'm Jennifer Weisman. Please share this podcast with a friend.