Daniel Libeskind’s Proms Lecture

It’s a real challenge to take notes while listening to Daniel Libeskind’s Proms Lecture 2002 (RealAudio stream; listed in BBC’s Architecture on 3 program archive). You just can’t keep up with him; he not only talks fast, but spurts interesting ideas, so you have to rewind all the time. I guess it would be better to just relax and listen, and pause in five-minute intervals to dump thoughts.

I don’t recommend reading these notes instead of listening to the actual lecture. He is immensely inspiring and I can’t anywhere near do him justice, but I want to write this down here anyway. Also, I feel I need to listen to this a few more times to be able to process everything.

The theme of the talk is music and architecture, and he ad libs from a list of questions given to him in a sealed envelope by his coworkers. That makes it all the more interesting, because he never hesitates or never slows down for the entire 45 minutes.

The first question was about whether he had ever been inspired by a piece of music in designing a building. He said that when working on the Jewish Museum in Berlin, he was inspired by Arnold Schönberg’s opera Moses and Aaron. He said that it wasn’t used as metaphor, but that he was inspired by its structure. Apparently, near the end, one of the characters ceases to sing, and begins to speak instead, while all musicians in the orchestra plays the same note, continuously. This inspired a part of the building which Libeskind calls “The Void”. He seems to describe this in the description on his website.

Then he said something about how architecture (and music) requires memory, to relate the present to the past and the future. I’m not sure I understood it, but it sounded interesting.

Another question was what effect his musical background (as a pianist) has had on his practice as an architect. He said that music is about discipline and rigor. You can’t approximate music, he said, it must be played correctly, with precision. And he said it’s the same with architecture. He mentioned drawings, as the architectural drawings compared to the musical scores, but I didn’t quite get it.

In this context, he also mentioned a work he calls the Chamber Works, a set of 28 drawings that in some way resemble preludes and fugues. Apparently, they were made for an exhibition, but he has used them in some way in some architectural design. I understood it as an exploration of ideas which couldn’t be expressed in any other way than by drawing them.

He continued to mention Bach’s Das wohltemerierte Klavier, which has been called “the Bible of music.” He said something about structured, evocative possibilities, and then mentioned pianist Glenn Gould, which once had a revelation that Bach’s piece wasn’t about how it sounded, but how the fingers were placed on the keyboard. Libeskind said this reminded him of architecture, and he said something about the drawing not being the building, similar to the placement of the hands of the keyboard not being the music, but still relevant. (I think Gould tells this story in the book The Glenn Gould Reader, which seems interesting.)

Then Libeskind read a question about the link between music and architecture, and he said that there’s a spiritual relationship, but that they aren’t similar, but almost the opposite of each other. Here he quotes a poem by Giacomo Leopardi about a house suspended in the sky. Whereas music is light, architecture is heavy. He said something about harmony and how that is what you see with your eyes. Anyway, his conclusion was that both architecture and music are vibrations of life, but it didn’t sound that banal when he said it.

He also said something which I don’t remember if it was in answering the same question, but it was about how the building process was musical, because you can’t define its proportions. He continued to talk about quality in a way that reminded me of the quality without a name.

A part of the answer to this or a similar question was how, after having played a musical instrument for a long time (he was some kind of prodigy), you treat tools as instruments as well. Then he said that architecture is about giving yourself over to technology, and mentioned how Glenn Gould suddenly announced, at the end of a concert, that he would never again play his music publicly, but only release recordings (he gave himself over to technology).

Another question was about the similarities between composing music and designing a building. I didn’t get everything, but he said that architectural designs are static creations, on paper—documents, often legal documents—and how it’s about creating something moving and dynamic from this. (I might have gotten this all wrong.) Moving in the sense that it moves the soul. In this sense it’s, he said, the opposite of music, but I didn’t understand that.

Also, in music, he said, you can’t find the difference between idea and material (the music). It’s “simultaneously compressed within a unified entity.” This is true of architecture as well, to the point that if you can see the idea, it’s bad architecture.

He went on to say something that I really liked, about how composing music is finding it in an infinity of sounds. He quoted Mozart as saying something about how all music can be found in the sound of glass breaking on a hard floor.

During the Q&A session, he got a question about what a building, if he based its design on Bach’s Das wohltemerierte Klavier, would look like. He said that you can’t quite do that, transposing the means from one art form to another. You can do analogies, though. He pointed out that some architects believe that you can do that; for instance, Eric Mendelsohn, who used to design by listening to music (for instance his Einstein Tower in Germany).