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Daniel Libeskind is an architect and artist of international renown. He has designed buildings and other projects in cities throughout the world: New York and Berlin; Dublin, Denver and Dresden; Copenhagen and Manchester; and many more. Daniel kindly agreed to do this interview for normblog, and I’m honoured to be posting it here today.

1. Your parents were Holocaust survivors. Can you tell us a little about what happened to them and to your wider family during World War II? Do you see any large parental influence on the course of your life and on your artistic work?

My parents lived for the first few months of the war under the Nazi occupation of Poland and then, separately, escaped to Russia. They were immediately arrested; my father sent to work camps on the Volga and my mother to the Gulags of Siberia. When the Russians were forced by the Allies to release the Poles who refused to take Russian citizenship, most Jews, amongst them my parents, fled to remote provinces of the Soviet Union – as far away as possible from the war zone. My parents met in Samarkhan, married, and made their way to Kirgistan, where my sister was born in 1943. At the conclusion of the war in Europe, my parents journeyed by slow train back to Lodz in Poland, having little to no knowledge of what had transpired over the previous three years. I was born in post-war Lodz in 1946. My parents discovered that virtually all of their family had been murdered in the Holocaust.

Growing up in Communist Poland as a Jew, with parents who were not assimilated or Communist, was not easy. And of course, my sister and I had no grandparents, aunts, uncles or cousins. Our life was culturally vibrant but, in terms of extended family, desolate. For sure, this environment had a great influence on both my parents and me. Memory and history formed the basis upon which I thought about architecture and realized architectural projects. When I began to study architecture in New York at the Cooper Union, I realized how important those formative years in Poland were to the outlook and direction of my work.

2. How important to you is your Jewish heritage? Has it had a significant influence on your work?

I have never felt that I could divide who I am from what I do. Those years in Poland, followed by two-plus years in Israel and then New York City, are all framed by Jewish thinking, Jewish tenets and Jewish heritage. I often wonder if there’s such a thing as ‘Jewish architecture’. The conclusion for me, at least, is that it’s not just about a building housing a Jewish organization or synagogue or college with a sign above the door. It is more about how one approaches a project and how to incorporate, within the built form, ideas about remembrance, history, aspirations, optimism and hope. That is why, I guess, many of my buildings are so fully expressive; whether they be cultural, public, residential or commercial ones. Each project site tells a story and even if the history of the ground is not self-evident in its real estate, I try to ‘listen’ to the site; listen to those who had been there before and listen to those voices that will come after.

3. You have said more than once that a spirit of optimism is essential in creating new buildings. Could you enlarge on that?

By its very nature, architecture is an art of optimism. Music can be written in a minor and melancholic key; writers can write of despair and tragedy; film-makers can produce films which are dark and apocalyptic; but the mere act of constructing a building is one that propels you into a better future. As I draw and sketch, and then see physical models and computer renderings emerge, I am constantly reminded of how consequent every line must be. Before millions of dollars are committed, and years of many people’s lives, you have to know, really know, that the building that results from all the money and effort will be worth the investment, will be a source of pride, and will far outlive you. In the end, architecture, in a way, is built on faith.

4. Must there be an ethical dimension in architectural creation, and if so how would you characterize it?

Of course there has to be an ethical dimension – in all areas of life, including one’s work – in my case, an architectural practice. I am not a moralist, but I do believe that one has to stand up for what one believes, within a political context. I have chosen to work in certain countries and not in all countries. Personally, I am particularly interested in emerging democracies; those countries which may be struggling, but are nonetheless aspiring to create a society with democracy, liberty and social justice. I would find it very hard to stand up and describe a project and advocate for a project in a country which did not share certain fundamental values which I believe in. That is not to say, of course, that political systems can’t change or that any country is perfect. But I think that everyone has a choice that they can make.

The Jewish Museum in Berlin

5. You were trained as a musician. Do you think this has affected your approach to architecture?

I never really thought that I ever left music! Music and architecture are so integrally intertwined; the composition of music has a score with lines and notes which are completely precise. Similarly, architectural drawings are a kind of score with lines and points and openings; these, too, have to be completely precise and accurate. Both music and architecture need a large group to make them possible; to bring music to the ear and architecture to the sky. Architecture is, of course, also sensitive to acoustics and to balance, which, we all know, comes from the inner ear. I have always been intensely interested in the sounds that a site emits. In the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the last Void, which I call the ‘Memory Void’, was my architectural attempt to complete the music of Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘Moses and Aaron’. Schoenberg composed this piece while he was still living in Berlin. But then, after his flight from the Nazis and his exile to America, he could not finish the music of the last movement of the opera. So I tried to complete that opera with the music of the footsteps and whispers of those visitors to the Void.

Both architecture and music are arts which, if done properly, should affect one’s emotions. Music is totally abstract but what we hear touches not only our intellect but our hearts. Architecture has the opportunity to touch at our spirit and our soul.

6. Is it accurate to describe your work as deconstructivist, and what does this mean to you?

Deconstructivism has a profound meaning in philosophy, literary theory, legal studies and so forth. However, in architecture, although this word has been used in a ground-breaking exhibition in which my work was shown at the Museum of Modern Art, I believe it is not a good term. Deconstructivism implies the taking apart and redistributing of structure, whereas in architecture it is all about construction. The term ‘Decontructivism’ has to be used with great caution when applied to architecture, and I personally don’t feel it’s a helpful term. At the same time, deconstructivism opened up the world of architecture to expressive forms. And I am a believer in the expressive.

7. In the light of the Holocaust and other humanly-created catastrophes, isn’t the spirit of optimism bound to be qualified?

It is precisely because of the catastrophes that befell the world in the 20th century (of which the Holocaust is surely the culmination) that there has to be a way forward that reaffirms humanity. The 20th century showed the dead ends, which denied the individual, through ideologies of both the left and right. These ideologies dehumanized reality by use of violence to create the future, and created a general loss of liberty in the world. In face of these facts the way forward is to reaffirm the sanctity and humanity of life, which we better appreciate by understanding and never forgetting the realities of the 20th century.

8. You have referred in earlier interviews to the difficulties posed by the project of the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Could you say what some of them were?

There were many difficulties posed by creating a Jewish Museum in Berlin. Initially, right after I won the competition, there was opposition; particularly to my design, which was neither sentimental nor nostalgic about a vanished Jewish culture in Berlin. However, the debate which began in Berlin in 1989 and continued until the building was almost finished, was one which dealt with the question of how to address the new capital of Germany, with regard not only to the Holocaust but also to the two-thousand-year-old Jewish history of Germany. There was a point in 1991 where the Senate of Berlin voted unanimously to scrap the project because money was needed for building infrastructure in the now-unified Berlin and for an Olympic bid and so forth. These obstacles to the building of the Jewish Museum were not minor ones and required many debates and worldwide discussion to create a consensus that the Jewish Museum was a key and integral component of developing the German capital of the future.

9. Could you also say something of the difficulties, as you perceived them, of the 9/11 memorial?

At Ground Zero there were initially many different voices: emotional, political, urbanistic, and architectural. Tensions existed between the shareholders, the Port Authority, the developer, the Governors of New York and New Jersey, the Mayor and the families. There were questions about what should be built on the site and how it should be planned. Perhaps the most fundamental difficulty for many was the fact that my master plan left almost half of the Ground Zero site for the memorial and public space, believing that the site was no longer simply a piece of real estate but a place of memory to reflect on the future. This thought had to garner support from many competing factions, who did not see the site in the same way I did. Ultimately, the difficulties were overcome by the master plan in proposing to bridge memory and the future of New York by laying memory foundations. The master plan I believe ultimately presented an exciting future for New York City in a way that also provided a balance between the memorial within a neighbourhood of vitality and optimism.

One of the two memorial pools for 9/11

10. In your TED lecture you say that architecture is the asking of questions. Why is it?

We have seen the positivist and technocratic notions of architecture as an engineering of social reality and the failure of it. Contrary to this I believe architecture, just like science, philosophy and art itself should be directed to ask fundamental questions and refrain from giving false answers. Questions in architecture can be raised in terms of the horizon it offers and the light that befalls it and the connections between past, present and future. In this sense, architecture can become, once again (though always part of technology), the true centre of the humanities.

11. What is your relationship to Israel? Are you hopeful about its future?

I always felt that I was fortunate enough to experience two paradises – Israel and America! I have a very close relationship to Israel. It is still a young country which has faced numerous difficulties in its short existence. However, I am hopeful that this nascent nation, despite its geographic location and problems both internally and externally, will continue to grow and be a positive force for good and democracy in the region.

12. You have spoken on one occasion of the freedom represented by America to everyone in the world. Can you enlarge on this, please – especially in view of the fact that not everyone, I think, would agree with it.

While not everyone may agree, or like American policies, the United States is a country of extraordinary ideals which affirm freedom and liberty.

World Trade Center and Memorial

Here’s a local story but one telling of a form of stupidity that is all but universal – and of the proper response to it.

Soccer coach Ihab Leheta sees his role as not only instilling a love for the game in his young protégés, but also teaching them some life lessons – such as speaking out when they witness injustice.

The ban on turbans by the Quebec Soccer Federation, despite medical evidence that they pose no danger and a directive from the Canadian Soccer Association that they be allowed, offered Leheta, who coaches under-14 players in Brossard, such an opportunity.

The QSF move, and a suggestion by its director that Sikh children affected by it play soccer in their backyards, sparked outrage in the province, across the country and abroad.

A city councillor in Montreal plans to present a motion denouncing the federation; “disgusted” parents Donald Pinkerton and Philippa Settels have pulled their 6- and 11-year-old sons from Greenfield Park soccer in protest; and a member of the Sikh community in Switzerland has asked Sepp Blatter, president of Zurich-based FIFA, to intervene. Some of the 13 soccer clubs in the West Island are putting pressure on Lac St-Louis Regional Association to appeal to the QSF to reconsider.

Yet the provincial body appears to have dug in its heels, refusing to respond to questions on the issue and removing contact information about its board of directors from its website.

Saddened by it all, Leheta, 46, decided he couldn’t just sit back in silence. He had a chat with his undefeated team last Friday before Saturday’s big game against Granby.

“I asked them what was more important than this game,” Leheta said Monday in an interview. “One said school, another said family, and then someone said injustice.”

Although there are no Sikh boys among the 18 team members, age 14 and under, Leheta asked them what they would do had one of them been excluded because of a turban.

“I told them you can either say: ‘It’s not my problem,’ or you could decide to do something to help out.”

With the enthusiastic support of his players and their parents, the coach headed off to the Sikh temple in LaSalle the next morning before the big match and borrowed 20 orange scarves that the boys then donned as turbans at their game in Brossard.

The referee didn’t object while doing an equipment check, until he spoke to the coach of the Granby team.

“The ref came back [and] said we couldn’t play if we were going to wear the turbans, so I showed him the FIFA rules and he said OK,” Leheta said. “But as I shook hands with the Granby coach before the game, he said he thought what we were doing was stupid.”

The Brossard team lost 2-1 in the end, but learned an invaluable life lesson, the coach said.

The full story is here. (Thanks: JQ.)

This has been the cause of some soul-searching on my part since Sunday (£):

A nonfiction book based on a person who doesn’t exist is an unusual sort of work. But that is The Norm Chronicles. “Norm” represents that dream of probability theorists, the absolutely average person slap in the middle of every distribution curve. Unfortunately, as the authors of The Norm Chronicles admit, such a person does not exist, and never will. None of us is exactly average, not even for the age we happen to be at any particular second.

As you can see, I have reasons for concern on more than one count: ‘absolutely average’ is not very encouraging; but is it worth it if you get chronicled?

Of course we should dedicate significant resources and effort to stopping terrorism… The U.S. should certainly try to prevent terrorist attacks. [Second emphasis added – NG.]

That being Conor Friedersdorf, but with the usual guff about sharks, car accidents, and the death rate from diabetes.

And here, though quite independently of Friedersdorf, is Dan Hodges explaining the logic of those who oppose terrorism while also opposing every single measure designed to combat it.

This recording was made in Gezi Park in Istanbul on Saturday. ‘Capulcular Korosu’ means ‘The Choir of Marauders’, that being the word Prime Minister Erdoğan keeps calling the protesters.

The first song is ‘Özgürlük’, which means ‘Liberty’. It’s an adaptation/translation of a poem by Paul Eluard. You can find the original French text here and an English translation here. It’s a very well-known song in Turkey, translated and adapted from the French by Zülfü Livaneli.

The choir then sings (at 4 minutes 30 seconds in) ‘Do You Hear the People Sing’ from Les Miserables – a song the relevance of which requires no explanation – before tearing into ‘Özgürlük’ again.

Much of the commentary on events in recent days in Turkey has focused on comparisons with various Occupy movements in countries such as the United States. Some of the protestors are doing this themselves. I think it is an error. The moral and political importance of the protests in Turkey is much greater, given the nature of its government, the country’s history, dominant religion and strategic importance.

For every iPad carrying hipster protesting in Istanbul, Ankara or Izmir over the last week, there seem to have been four or five people from a variety of social classes and cultural groups on the streets of drab Anatolian cities and towns.

I wonder how long it will take certain sectors of the chattering classes in Britain and the US to class them as ‘Islamophobic’. (HG.)

Irwin Cotler, former Canadian justice minister, has been keeping busy. Here Terry Glavin details Cotler’s part in efforts ‘to focus the world’s attention on the victims of the Khomeinist despotism in Iran and to end the privileges of impunity that Tehran’s butchers have been enjoying all these years’.

This week in Ottawa, Cotler brought Conservative and Opposition MPs together around a House of Commons motion initiated by the Massacre88 Campaign, a movement of Iranian-Canadian lawyers, activists and academics. The motion makes Canada the first country in the world to formally recognize the Khomeinist slaughter of thousands of political prisoners in the summer of 1988 as a crime against humanity.

You can read the rest here.

Then, in the Jerusalem Post, Cotler himself highlights ‘the failure to prosecute and convict those responsible for the indiscriminate terroristic murder of Argentine civilians in 1992 and 1994 – attacks that targeted innocent civilians based on nothing more than their identity as Jews or Israelis’. Cotler writes:

It is simply unacceptable – and indeed incomprehensible – that, despite the issuance of six international arrest warrants there have been no convictions in connection with these horrendous terrorist attacks. Simply put, the Argentine government has failed to pursue any international juridical remedies against the Iranian regime for its demonstrable complicity in these acts of international terrorism, which clearly constitute grave violations of Argentine sovereignty and international human rights.

But worse, reports from 2011 show that Argentinian Foreign Minister Hector Timerman had reportedly offered to freeze the ongoing AMIA inquiry in exchange for enhanced economic relations with Iran, despite the outcry in Argentina by the families of the victims, Argentinian jurists, Argentinian special prosecutor Nisman himself, and the by the broader Argentine public.

‘Simply unacceptable’ – except for those for whom it isn’t.

I cannot have overlooked it – but I have. My friend Tom Deveson reminds me (on Facebook) that today is Cole Porter’s birthday, and one of Tom’s links is to ‘Night And Day‘. What a song! And it’s love, all right. Here…

‘Only you beneath the moon and under the sun’ is knowing how to woo someone, especially if you can also dance like Fred. And that’s not overlooking Ginger’s contribution.

[The series is introduced and indexed here.]

Further to my post on Raphael Lemkin and the state of international law regarding genocide, Andrew Sullivan makes an interesting remark in passing in his column in the Sunday Times today. Andrew is writing about President Obama’s recent appointments of Samantha Power and Susan Rice as, respectively, US ambassador to the United Nations and US national security adviser and he explains the move as designed ‘to ensure that the Democratic party’s liberal interventionists stay in the Obama tent as the world simmers and occasionally boils’. What caught my eye, though, was this (£):

[B]oth women are strikingly out of line with the president’s cautious realism in dealing with intervention abroad. Power wrote a book about genocide that simply assumed it was the West’s job to intervene anywhere to prevent it. Rice still smarts from her time in the Clinton administration when the Rwandan genocide took place. She later remarked: “I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required.”

I’m interested in the phrase ‘simply assumed it was the West’s job to intervene anywhere to prevent it’; because one could argue that, in view of the UN Genocide Convention, that’s a reasonable assumption to make, and not just about the West. Article 1 says: ‘The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.’ So, if this article of international law were already an authoritative and effective legal norm, the assumption in question – of Samantha Power’s book – would not be a wayward one at all. Unfortunately, as things stand, the UN Genocide Convention is more like an ideal – something the international community is committed to as a future aim, but one that for the present is frequently blocked by considerations of great power politics. In this light, simply assuming it is the West’s job to prevent genocide becomes more problematic. Yet the world is a lot worse for this fact than it would otherwise be.

Ever heard of Bob Fletcher? Me neither. He is someone people should know about:

Bob Fletcher, a former California agriculture inspector who, ignoring the resentment of neighbors, quit his job in the middle of World War II to manage the fruit farms of Japanese families forced to live in internment camps, died on May 23 in Sacramento. He was 101.

His death was confirmed by Doris Taketa, who was 12 when Mr. Fletcher agreed to run her family’s farm in 1942, the year she and her extended family were relocated to the Jerome War Relocation Center in Arkansas.

“He saved us,” Ms. Taketa said.

After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, the United States government forced 120,000 Japanese-Americans on the West Coast out of their homes and into internment camps for the duration of the war.

Near Sacramento, many of the Japanese who were relocated were farmers who had worked land around the town of Florin since at least the 1890s. Mr. Fletcher, who was single and in his early 30s at the time, knew many of them through his work inspecting fruit for the government. The farmers regarded him as honest, and he respected their operations.

After President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order in February 1942 that made the relocation possible by declaring certain parts of the West to be military zones, Al Tsukamoto, whose parents arrived in the United States in 1905, approached Mr. Fletcher with a business proposal: would he be willing to manage the farms of two family friends of Mr. Tsukamoto’s, one of whom was elderly, and to pay the taxes and mortgages while they were away? In return, he could keep all the profits.

Mr. Fletcher and Mr. Tsukamoto had not been close, and Mr. Fletcher had no experience growing the farmers’ specialty, flame tokay grapes, but he accepted the offer and soon quit his job.

For the next three years he worked a total of 90 acres on three farms – he had also decided to run Mr. Tsukamoto’s farm. He worked 18-hour days and lived in the bunkhouse Mr. Tsukamoto had reserved for migrant workers. He paid the bills of all three families – the Tsukamotos, the Okamotos and the Nittas. He kept only half of the profits.

Bob Fletcher ‘never did agree with the evacuation’. Of his actions during the war he said, ‘I don’t know about courage… It took a devil of a lot of work.’

You’ll just never run out of folk willing to embarrass themselves over the absurd claim that there’s no such thing as an enduring human nature. A few years ago I highlighted the fact that Guardian journalist Oliver Burkeman seemed to know of people for whom a belief in human nature was ‘incendiary‘, and I then followed up on his failure to come up with anything persuasive in response to what I’d said.

Now there’s a post by Jesse Spafford taking me to task for having cited the denial of human nature as an example of a deepity (a concept explained by Daniel Dennett). But, according to Spafford, while I do establish satisfactorily that the denial of human nature is manifestly false on any straightforward reading of that claim, I don’t successfully show what reading of the claim makes it true but trivial. Sorry, Jesse – you just missed it, is all. Here is the true but trivial sense: ‘So it turns out that the denial of an enduring human nature amounts to some changeable or non-universal features of the human character not being unchangeable. What else is new?’ Spafford thinks the prevarication of those who deny a human nature can be rescued because what they’re really meaning is that ‘people aren’t necessarily selfish [or] dominance-seeking’ – which is a significant proposition. It is. But if that’s what they really meant, that’s what they could really say. To deny there’s a universal human nature, only to fall back on the thesis, when pressed, that there’s the human nature there is but not the one there isn’t, is a fool’s game.

Spafford has trouble, likewise, with my treating the denial of biological differences between men and women as a deepity. Well, to say there are no such biological differences when what you actually think is that there are only the biological differences between men and women that there are, is a waste of people’s time. You’d start out on a sounder footing if you tried to distinguish, through empirical research, biological differences from non-differences.