On Creating Sense Of Intimacy

SUBJECT 1:
HOME

Home should inter­est you in being there more than just being in a house. Home should inspire you, make you grow, give you some­thing, you’ve imag­ined, which is not just giv­en as a ready-made. Good inti­mate space that we know from his­to­ry is more than described by our words – it’s cre­at­ed by beau­ti­ful light, pro­por­tions, a con­nec­tion to nature, to the stars. That’s the beau­ty of human­is­tic design. There is no for­mu­la for cre­at­ing “a home”, it’s made to mea­sure. When Hei­deg­ger says “the cen­ter of the home is a heart”, it is con­nect­ed to the more pri­mor­dial forms of dwelling, not to the mod­ern urban world, where peo­ple rush to feed their fam­i­lies, to go to work… How can we accom­mo­date these hard­work­ing peo­ple in a world exposed to all types of media today and make sense out of it? There are many strate­gies of design, one of which I use is to nev­er do just the ready-made, nev­er just copy what has been already done. You have to tai­lor each sit­u­a­tion to a phys­i­cal as well as a cul­tur­al context.

For me per­son­al­ly, a home is about a good book. Actu­al­ly, Miguel de Cer­vantes Saave­dra was already say­ing, that a gen­tle­man shouldn’t own more than six books. Which I haven’t suc­ceed­ed so far! (laugh­ing) But any­way, I believe home should be full of things that I love, which is books, music and a game of chess. That’s my true cen­ter of an inti­mate space but, in gen­er­al, today’s home is a very flu­id con­cept. For many peo­ple it just means to have a phone or a tablet in their hands. It doesn’t have to be about walls or a cer­tain space any­more, it’s a ques­tion of con­nec­tion embraced by all kinds of real­i­ty today – phys­i­cal or virtual.

SUBJECT 2:
LUXURY

It’s not a ques­tion of mon­ey any­more. For me, lux­u­ry is the inti­mate con­nec­tion with peo­ple, it’s a ques­tion of cul­ture. Some­times that can be accom­plished by very hum­ble means, sim­ple mate­ri­als or forms. Lux­u­ry is tak­en as a com­mod­i­ty, but orig­i­nal­ly lux­u­ry is about build­ing a par­tic­u­lar­ly inti­mate envi­ron­ment and to cre­ate the right con­nec­tions to it. Espe­cial­ly when the plan­et is suf­fer­ing the notion of sus­tain­abil­i­ty and what is beau­ti­ful is no longer tak­en for grant­ed, that beau­ty is exploita­tion. Now beau­ty can be some­thing real­ly hum­ble, down to Earth or com­mu­ni­cat­ed more spiritually.

SUBJECT 3:
UNIQUENESS

Even when you’ve a mas­sive block of peo­ple liv­ing with­in a cer­tain econ­o­my of scale, a cer­tain econ­o­my of con­struc­tion, a cer­tain neces­si­ty in terms of how trans­porta­tion sys­tems work, still even in this large scale, with hun­dreds of units, you can cre­ate a sense of unique­ness. By shap­ing the entire project in a way, which is not for­mu­lat­ing but real­ly relat­ing it to the earth and to the sky, to the sense of who is gonna be liv­ing there, to the con­text of the neigh­bor­hood and most impor­tant­ly, to the human scale. And not just phys­i­cal scale as Le Cor­busier has always said “the ide­al French­man is 1.76 cen­time­tres.” That is not true, because true human scale is not just a height of a per­son, it’s the height of their aspi­ra­tions and dreams.

For exam­ple, when we’re speak­ing about office build­ings, there are many options for how we can deal with them. Every floor can work with slight­ly dif­fer­ent posi­tions and cre­at­ing the space. Thou­sands of peo­ple can work in such a build­ing but when you go to such a space, every new floor you’re in is a slight­ly new neigh­bor­hood, which is com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent from the floor above you and below you. I think this has a very big impact in giv­ing you a sense of dif­fer­ent con­text, that you’re not part of some­thing huge but you’re an indi­vid­ual. That unique­ness in the con­text of the struc­ture has such a huge impact on how you per­ceive the whole. You can cus­tomize every­thing from a small to a huge scale and it will have a big impact on peo­ple using the space.

SUBJECT 4:
SYMBOLS

There is noth­ing in the world that is not sym­bol­ic. Even a blank wall, as Leonar­do da Vin­ci rec­om­mend­ed to artists — go and look at a blank wall because if you sit in front of it more than 3 min­utes, you will see the most amaz­ing paint­ings ever imag­ined. We can’t escape mean­ings, it’s just a sense of being sen­si­tive to it, to engage with it and cre­ate out of it.

SUBJECT 5:
IDENTITY

Not only in muse­ums or memo­ri­als is it pos­si­ble to cre­ate a sense of pri­va­cy, even in a social hous­ing project or a res­i­den­tial devel­op­ment. Each win­dow is slight­ly dif­fer­ent, each place has its own iden­ti­ty. It’s not just a bunch of rooms of the same kinds repeat­ing them­selves. It is about try­ing to find unique­ness by the unique­ness of space by the unique­ness of the per­son who will be liv­ing there. Cus­tomiz­ing is giv­ing you a sense of place, it’s telling you that you aren’t just a num­ber, a sta­tis­tic, but an indi­vid­ual, a human being.

SUBJECT 6:
PRIVACY

In his­to­ry, the pub­lic space didn’t have such a huge bor­der of pri­va­cy — in Euro­pean cities the piaz­za used to be a kind of liv­ing room, where peo­ple lived. Today there is a huge bor­der between pri­vate and pub­lic spaces. It’s caus­ing con­tra­dic­tions – we either seek to escape home or seek unlim­it­ed pos­si­bil­i­ties in the com­mon space. Since the 19th cen­tu­ry, we’ve already known, thanks to Edgar Allan Poe and ​​​​The Man of the Crowd, that the best way to see pri­va­cy in a mod­ern city is to be inside of a large crowd. Today, in the pan­dem­ic, we’re real­iz­ing, that pri­vate space must also be a shared space and these two worlds have to be much more relat­ed. Home is not only about your­self any­more, but is also a social space.

The cell of a pris­on­er is not so dif­fer­ent from the cell of a saint. Both are sim­i­lar­ly closed envi­ron­ments, yet for the saint it is a tran­scen­dent envi­ron­ment, which stretch­es out of the place and goes beyond the worlds, while for the pris­on­er it’s just a hor­ri­ble mis­ery. But we must real­ly study the dif­fer­ence between those two envi­ron­ments. It’s not just about the phys­i­cal envi­ron­ment, but about what we bring to it and what the expe­ri­ences and design is about. It must be based on expe­ri­ences and not ide­ol­o­gy. We need a sense that we are con­nect­ed to the world around us and its beau­ty. Also, what are we look­ing at, which kind of day­light and what does its qual­i­ty have, how much nature are we able to bring in, that’s one of the impor­tant tasks of con­tem­po­rary architecture.

When you look at the etch­ing of St. Jerome and his study by Albrecht Dür­er, you can see a lion, books and all the things that sur­round Jerome of notions that go way beyond the lit­tle cell he’s sit­ting in. That is what is mak­ing a space an inti­mate space. The moment when you’re sur­round­ed not just with mate­r­i­al objects but with things that give you a sense of need.
When I worked on the Dutch Holo­caust Memo­r­i­al of Names, which is a pub­lic space on a com­plete­ly open piaz­za, I designed it in a way that peo­ple can find inti­ma­cy in read­ing a sin­gu­lar name on a brick of some­one, who was part of the city and was mur­dered as a result of incon­ceiv­able events that we’re rein­spect­ing today. In the cen­ter of a great pub­lic space I cre­at­ed a sense of pri­va­cy with a sin­gu­lar name, sin­gu­lar date, sin­gu­lar age of each per­son. On the oth­er hand, in the Jew­ish muse­um in Berlin I made the void by cre­at­ing the holo­caust tow­er. Any­one can enter and have a sense of one’s self, because you find your­self in a sit­u­a­tion that is not an obvi­ous one, in which you haven’t found your­self before.

SUBJECT 7:
CONNECTION

If peo­ple are sud­den­ly con­nect­ed with some­thing that is not just about the func­tion­al­i­ty or aes­thet­ic of design, but some­thing that has a deep­er lay­er of mean­ing, they’re often sur­prised, shocked, that it’s dri­ving emo­tions beyond the dai­ly idea of the func­tion. The cul­tur­al dimen­sion is so impor­tant because it rep­re­sents the spir­i­tu­al dimen­sion of archi­tec­ture that is not real­ly a theme today in design. Dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, peo­ple redis­cov­ered their mor­tal­i­ty, which had been sup­pressed among the soci­ety for decades. By see­ing the lim­its of human hubris, of con­trol, peo­ple opened up to a more philo­soph­i­cal sense, such as what it means to have an iden­ti­ty or a per­son­al space. Design should be holis­tic, it’s not just about the glossy pol­ished real­i­ty, but also about the gap in real­i­ty. To fill these gaps with the facts that caused them in the first place — we’re look­ing at the world as it is and not as a kind of illu­sion such as on the inter­net, TV or mass media — by doing that we’re return­ing to a sense of human­i­ty, that is real­ly the cen­ter of it all — the people’s nor­mal lives.

SUBJECT 8:
ATMOSPHERE

Peo­ple are far more cre­ative then they‘re giv­en cred­it for. We are usu­al­ly trapped in repeat­ing the same thing all over again because what you like, is giv­en to you, and what you don‘t like, is tak­en from you. In my mind we have to extend this world and give rid of this idea of that bub­ble. We should open to new ideas, new design, new mate­ri­al­i­ty, new sense of inti­ma­cy, new sense of con­nec­tion to indi­vid­ual liv­ing. Inti­ma­cy doesn‘t have to be some­thing frag­ile, some sort of a cloud, it can be very bold and con­nect­ed with strong geometry.

SUBJECT 9:
SPIRITUAL LINKAGE

A per­son doesn’t just have a body, man has a soul. And a soul isn’t some­thing, that is banal or a metaphor, it’s a real­i­ty. You have to con­nect your­self to the spir­it of a place, a genius loci, that’s irre­place­able. It isn’t the same place any­where in the world because it is just there, on this par­tic­u­lar spot. You have to imag­ine your­self in a sense of what is required by a per­son, what­ev­er their age, what­ev­er their reli­gion, what­ev­er their race, what­ev­er their gen­der. How to cre­ate a space that is not just com­fort­able in a sense of com­fort com­ing out of a com­mer­cial com­mod­i­ty, but is the spir­i­tu­al link­age of the space you’re design­ing to any dweller in a city or any dweller of a home. I think imag­in­ing a con­nec­tion like that is stronger than any kind of knowl­edge and help in the areas of design­ing that are not so obvious.

SUBJECT 10:
DIRECTION

Peo­ple under­es­ti­mate mem­o­ry. What is the design tool that you need the most? It’s not real­ly your ruler, a com­pass or geo­met­ric paper. Mem­o­ry can’t be accessed by a com­put­er, mem­o­ry is much deep­er. That is the ulti­mate dimen­sion of design, a true guid­ance in life. So if I could design what­ev­er was pos­si­ble, I would love to build a house just out of the poet­ic con­scious­ness of people.
 

Daniel Libe­skind. An inter­na­tion­al archi­tect and design­er of Pol­ish-Amer­i­can ori­gin, links the emo­tion­al charge of archi­tec­ture with phi­los­o­phy, art, lit­er­a­ture and music. He embraces the notion that build­ings are craft­ed with per­cep­ti­ble human ener­gy, thus address­ing the wider cul­tur­al con­text with­in which they are built. Libe­skind estab­lished his archi­tec­tur­al stu­dio in Berlin in 1989. He is best known for the Jew­ish Muse­um in Berlin and the mas­ter plan of the World Trade Cen­ter in New York. He is the author of sev­er­al res­i­den­tial and pub­lic projects and also a prod­uct design­er. Libe­skind is also part of the Lasvit fam­i­ly since 2014 with chan­de­lier Ice and Rosen­crantz and Guilden­stern objects for the Mon­sters collection.