Latest news with #DanielLibeskind
Sydney Morning Herald
2 days ago
- Business
- Sydney Morning Herald
He designed the new World Trade Centre. Now this superstar is building a Caulfield school
A Melbourne private school has snared one of the world's top architects to help design its new 'mega campus' on the site of Caulfield Racecourse in the city's inner south-east. Daniel Libeskind – who drew up the masterplan for rebuilding New York's World Trade Centre after it was destroyed in the 2001 terrorist attacks – will be announced on Friday as part of the design team for Mount Scopus College's new Caulfield campus. The private Jewish school kick-started its ambitious plans for an early learning to year 12 campus, a sports precinct and a centre for Jewish life last year with a $195 million deal to buy a large tract of the racecourse from the Victoria Racing Club. There are currently 1210 students enrolled at Mount Scopus' three campuses, in Burwood, Caulfield South and St Kilda East. Annual fees are more than $42,000 for students in its senior levels. Loading The school has dubbed the build 'Project Generation,' and says it is not only one of the largest educational developments under way in Australia, but also among the biggest projects ever undertaken for the nation's Jewish community. The project team will announce the design coup on Friday – with Libeskind, who shot to international renown with his design for Berlin's famous Jewish Museum – considered by some as the No 1 global contemporary architect. He has designed landmark buildings around the world, including Dublin's Grand Canal Theatre, the Royal Ontario Museum as well as the Berlin museum project, which electrified world architecture when it was built in 1999. University of Melbourne associate professor of architecture Rory Hyde was excited by the appointment, describing the 'hugely influential' Libeskind as the 'real deal' among the giants of modern architecture and a perfect fit to design a new centre for Australian Jewish life.
The Age
2 days ago
- Business
- The Age
He designed the new World Trade Centre. Now this superstar is building a Caulfield school
A Melbourne private school has snared one of the world's top architects to help design its new 'mega campus' on the site of Caulfield Racecourse in the city's inner south-east. Daniel Libeskind – who drew up the masterplan for rebuilding New York's World Trade Centre after it was destroyed in the 2001 terrorist attacks – will be announced on Friday as part of the design team for Mount Scopus College's new Caulfield campus. The private Jewish school kick-started its ambitious plans for an early learning to year 12 campus, a sports precinct and a centre for Jewish life last year with a $195 million deal to buy a large tract of the racecourse from the Victoria Racing Club. There are currently 1210 students enrolled at Mount Scopus' three campuses, in Burwood, Caulfield South and St Kilda East. Annual fees are more than $42,000 for students in its senior levels. Loading The school has dubbed the build 'Project Generation,' and says it is not only one of the largest educational developments under way in Australia, but also among the biggest projects ever undertaken for the nation's Jewish community. The project team will announce the design coup on Friday – with Libeskind, who shot to international renown with his design for Berlin's famous Jewish Museum – considered by some as the No 1 global contemporary architect. He has designed landmark buildings around the world, including Dublin's Grand Canal Theatre, the Royal Ontario Museum as well as the Berlin museum project, which electrified world architecture when it was built in 1999. University of Melbourne associate professor of architecture Rory Hyde was excited by the appointment, describing the 'hugely influential' Libeskind as the 'real deal' among the giants of modern architecture and a perfect fit to design a new centre for Australian Jewish life.
Times
20-05-2025
- Business
- Times
David Childs obituary: designer of One World Trade Center
After the twin towers of the World Trade Center were destroyed in a terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, there was widespread clamour for a so-called starchitect to design a building that would soar in its wake and represent hope and renewal in New York City. Daniel Libeskind was a popular choice when he won a design competition staged by the city's authorities to plan the rebuilding of the 16-acre site in Lower Manhattan. The Polish-American architect had recently designed the Jewish Museum in Berlin — a much-acclaimed paean to memory and humanity. The centrepiece of his work was expected to be a tower that would utilise Libeskind's deconstructivist aesthetic of fragmentation to become a metaphor of healing, albeit in an edgy, asymmetrical and avant-garde building. There was one problem. The person paying for the reconstruction was Larry Silverstein, a tough-as-teak Brooklyn-born billionaire property developer who had signed a 99-year lease with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey on the World Trade Center complex of buildings only two months before 9/11. Given Silverstein held the strings of a purse that included a $3.5 billion insurance payout, no architect, however starry, could credibly get to work at their drawing board without the developer's say-so. On the day after the attacks, Silverstein rang an architect called David Childs, of whom few people had heard. His first words were: 'Now I want you to rebuild these towers.' In Silverstein's mind, whatever replaced the twin towers had to exploit the commercial value to the maximum and there was no better exponent of that than Childs, a veteran designer of tall buildings in New York at the corporate practice Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), whose oeuvre was more inspired by the boxy, pared-back modernism of the German-American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Libeskind pressed on, exhibiting his masterplan for the site, which he called 'Memory Foundations', in 2003. In it he envisioned a large memorial in the footprint of one of the towers to honour the 2,977 people who died in the attacks. At the centre of a spiral of tall buildings at the site would be One World Trade Center: an asymmetrical skyscraper designed by Libeskind himself and topped with a spire that would be a nod to the Statue of Liberty nearby. In an office not far away, Childs was overseeing the design of a rival and very different tower, a monolithic and symmetrical structure that would maximise floor space. Mammon won, but in Childs Silverstein had no better emissary to mollify Libeskind and the New York authorities who had hired him. Described by Chris Fogarty in Building Design magazine as 'tall and bespectacled, affable, urbane, and the Ivy League embodiment of a virtuoso architect', Childs navigated a difficult path. Silverstein insisted that Childs's design would 'reflect the spirit of Dan's plan'. Libeskind was described as a 'full member of the project team'. By the end of 2003 an impasse had been reached and both chose their words carefully. 'We both have strong opinions about design,'' said Libeskind at the time. 'Nothing worthwhile was ever created without some conflict, and what emerges from a collaboration should be even greater than the sum of its parts.'' The design went through five iterations before Childs revealed the final plans in June 2005. The tower, which was completed in 2014, is the tallest building in the western hemisphere and the seventh tallest in the world. A muscular servant to capitalism, it may lack the full power of Libeskind's design philosophy and elegiac memorialising instinct, but there were clear signs of collaboration in the sculptural form of the glass skyscraper that effectively becomes octagonal at midpoint and tapers towards the top where a mast brings the height to 1,776ft, signifying the date of the US Declaration of Independence. Opinions remain divided in the architecture world, but Childs emerged from the process with his reputation enhanced. In explaining his approach, Childs, who cut a patrician figure and cared deeply about the urban context of his buildings, made a backhanded criticism of the type of branded buildings that 'starchitects' come up with. 'At SOM, you don't know what my next building will look like,' he told The New York Times in 2003. 'You know what a Richard Meier building will look like; there's a style. I'm more like Eero Saarinen, whom I revere. His buildings all look different.' David Magie Childs was born in 1941 in Princeton, New Jersey, to Alton Childs, a classics tutor at Princeton University, and Mary (née Cole), a director of the Children's Book Council. He was educated at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts and went to Yale to study zoology. Attending a lecture by the architectural historian Vincent Scully changed his life. He switched to architecture and qualified in 1967. His first job as a shape and place maker was as a junior member of a presidential commission to transform the run-down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC. Nathaniel Owings, a partner in the already well-established SOM in Washington, was impressed with the cerebral and scholarly looking young man. In 1971 Childs joined the practice and became schooled in its collegiate approach to corporate architecture. He worked on Washington projects including the headquarters for National Geographic. The practice had boomed after the Second World War, picking up lucrative commissions during a wave of commercial construction inspired by the Miesian glass curtain-walled skyscrapers that became the house style of postwar capitalism. When that was replaced with the playful historicism and pastiche of postmodernism in the late Seventies, Childs performed the architect's version of the reverse ferret. He moved to the New York office in 1984 and helped to add a postmodernist twist to the skyline himself in 1989 with 1 Worldwide Plaza, a 47-storey office tower west of Times Square. A company man, he twice served as chairman of SOM from 1991 to 1993 and from 1998 to 2000. He is survived by his wife, Anne Woolman Reeve, whom he married in 1963, and by their children Joshua, Nicholas and Jocelyn. Childs declined Silverstein's offer to design all the buildings at the World Trade Center site because he believed that diversity was vital for creating a rich urban grain that would attract tourists wandering through while laptops and machines whirred in the towers above. Other architects brought in included Fumihiko Maki, Jean Nouvel and Britain's Lord (Norman) Foster, who is designing the 400m Two World Trade Center — yet to start construction. Childs did consent to design 7 World Trade Center, a parallelogram shape, which was completed in 2006. His collegiate designs for tall commercial buildings continued to add to the Manhattan skyline in later years. He retired in 2022. Childs liked to say that experience teaches you to discern which clients to turn down, a skill at least as important as nurturing new relationships. When once told that Donald Trump was on the line to discuss a potential project, he chose not to take the call. David Childs, architect, was born on April 1, 1941. He died of Lewy body dementia on March 26, 2025, aged 83
Irish Post
10-05-2025
- Politics
- Irish Post
The danger of forgetting - and the risk of remembering
IF YOU travel around some areas of Belfast you'll see wall murals celebrating the IRA and other paramilitary groups. They provide one of the simplest ways of letting you know whether you are in a nationalist or a loyalist area. You may feel safer in one than the other. Clearly some people are concerned to preserve a memory of the troubled period, basically the last thirty years of the last century, the destruction and the thousands killed. There is an extraordinary similarity between how the rival cultures commemorate. The murals depict men with guns, or revered cultural symbols. The symbols vary: gravestones, crosses, the Bible, the crown, the familiar interweave of Celtic design as if lifted from the Book of Kells. With so much interest in marking the past you would think that the case for a museum of the Troubles would be easily made but the difficulty is that there are two distinct rival narratives of that past. One says that terrorist insurgents, murderers and saboteurs, attacked the state, gratuitously and fruitlessly, affecting to be fighting a guerrilla war for the self determination of the Irish people and the expulsion of British imperial forces who were oppressing them. The other says that political deadlock over British management of Northern Ireland through its client unionists left decent people no choice but to take up arms and gun down the neighbourhood bobby on patrol. I'm being a little sarcastic about both visions. But the point is that we do not have a museum of the Troubles because the nationalist and unionist versions of history cannot be reconciled. There was to be a Peace Centre on the site of the old Maze prison. This was the prison which housed republican and loyalist militants who'd got caught and a few innocents caught with them, and, in the early days, men interned without trial. Ten men died on hunger strike in that prison, claiming rights which they argued would amount to political status. Our power sharing government had agreed that the Peace Centre would be built but then the Democratic Unionist Party pulled out of the deal, anxious that the centre would become a shrine to the dead hunger strikers and a monument to the republican cause. That was twelve years ago and there has been no development on that site since. The designer of the aborted Peace Centre, was Daniel Libeskind who also designed the Ground Zero memorial in New York city. He has been arguing for the parties to end the deadlock and build the centre and use it as an opportunity for dialogue and reconciliation. Another group operates on the same motivation. Irene Boada, is campaigning to create a Troubles museum in Belfast, preferably in the historic Assembly Building in Waring Street which is currently disintegrating through neglect. She also believes that a museum dedicated to recalling the Troubles would be a focus for meeting and discussion of the past with a view to healing old enmities. But it is the very division she wants to address though the museum which makes it so difficult to get it established. The separate narratives in Northern Ireland are not amenable to being merged into one story that all can agree on. So I have an alternative idea. We shouldn't even try to find common ground between unionism and nationalism. Neither side will give up its history. They went as far as they could in that when they reached the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, though unionists prefer to call it simply, The Agreement. I think we should give up on the idea of a museum being a peace centre. We should give up on it expressing any objective at all. We should just have somewhere that provides the best and most sophisticated chronology of the Troubles, representing every viewpoint - there aren't so many that that would be a problem. Unionists fear that tourists walking into preserved prison cells that had housed republican martyrs would be moved to honour those dead men, perhaps leaving flowers or other tokens. And that appalls them. Organisations representing the concerns of victims of violence are particularly concerned about that prospect, that the men who indulged in sectarian slaughter would be revered as heroes. The prison site provides a possible platform for the stories of most participant groups, for the republicans, loyalists, prison officers, soldiers were there. But most of the killing and the suffering of the innocent happened elsewhere and one can see the danger that their grief and grievances would be overlooked. Yet without a museum the record of the Troubles will be those wall murals and memorials and the rebel songs and the propaganda passed on to another generation which already understands only a simplistic account of those days. Of course, there are others who don't want to remember, for whom it was all just too ugly and bothersome and they have the right to live their lives undistracted by painful reminders. So I'm for having a museum that they can stay away from if they wish and then for wiping the walls free of the garish propaganda that already must make many tourists think that Belfast is proud of its those who once wrecked the city. Malachi O'Doherty's latest book How To Fix Northern Ireland is published by Atlantic Books See More: Belfast, Northern Ireland, Troubles
