By Pola Esguerra del Monte

They say that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. What happens, then, when Daniel Libeskind’s buildings are set to the music of Charles-Valentin Alkan?

Against a monotone skyline of prosaic concrete boxes, Libeskind’s towers form crystalline, rectilinear distortions that are as tense as an Alkan fugue. The towers extrude upward and then divide into branches. Traditional 90-degree corners are replaced by dramatically acute angles. Planes intersect and create peculiar dimensions. If Libeskind’s structures were rendered in classical music, they would translate to the
pieces of Alkan, whose notes skitter teasingly in the air at preternatural speed, slipping in sudden, unpredictable tonal shifts and launching surprise jolts of dynamics.

Marked by an intense bravura, a merciless execution of runs, and movements so technically complex no one plays them, the opuses of Chopin’s neglected comrade compares to Mr. Libeskind’s distinctive architectural masterpieces—grandiose, different, exceedingly complicated, and excruciatingly virtuosic.

The Polish architect’s individuality is, at times, diminished by cynics’ resistance to anything remotely radical. Non-supporters dismiss his work as “overrated,” “lame,” and “trying too hard.” Even his title was challenged: in 2012, a British architecture publication was instructed to stop calling him, and Renzo Piano, architects. It was a legal issue, capitalizing on their lack of license in the country, but it inevitably sparked a debate on entitlement. Online news articles were flooded by comments with a resounding dual view: on one hand, there were people who saw the subjects as effective landscape changers who accomplished more than “legitimate architects” who haven’t built anything for the world. On the other hand, there were those who called the two
“properly licensed professional architects who... [are] trying so hard to create buildings that are just weird for the sake of being
weird.”

Did this taunt him? No. And perhaps the boldness to persist is a prerequisite to create new things. Farther back when Mr. Libeskind’s masterplan for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center, a stint that launched him into fame, was drastically altered due to controversial politics, he lashed out, “I am the people’s architect!” He filed a lawsuit
and went on a noise barrage, claiming that the people’s choice, his plan, had to be done.

When a dramatic settlement finally occurred, with the maturity of a trusted son, he gradually mellowed and focused on the masterplan
rather than his failures. Instead of giving up on the project, he ended up one of the site’s most ardent supporters.

That is, in fact, how an artist is made. An artist always makes sharp decisions. Never safe. He could never please everyone, so in his fancy thick-rimmed glasses and all-black ensemble, he played on. Mr. Libeskind continued building weird towers and weird halls and weird houses, and he was admired as much as he was criticized. He just finished the Leonardo Icon sculpture in Milan’s Biblioteca Ambrosiana, that claims to have the
world’s largest works by Leonardo da Vinci. He is changing the face of the earth one structure at a time, in his own style. His improvisation. His fioritura.

ARCHITECTURE OF MUSIC
“Just like in music,” he underlined, “there is no such thing as ‘approximate music.’ Either there’s music or there’s no music.” That afternoon, Daniel Libeskind was resting in between events during the groundbreaking ceremonies of Century Spire, his first project in the Philippines. “Like architecture. There’s no ‘approximately architectural,’” he pointed out. “It’s either architecture or no architecture.”

Despite a long day that had preceded—he spoke over lunch, entertained questions from young Filipino architects, opened the showroom and toured around it with his wife—he was smiling and generous with his wisdom.

He answered in the same sage voice he used in his TED talks: surely, seamlessly arranging his words into poetry, his thoughts into the
song of his soul. “I always remind people that the sense of orientation is not in the eye,” he said, “it’s in the ear. The inner ear is where we
find the balance. Everything which is deeply musical is deeply architectural.”

Mr. Libeskind was a child prodigy who, after immigrating to America from Poland, studied music in Israel and in New York. At the age of six, he was a virtuoso pianist and accordionist, performing in live concerts and
on television. Concert venues were filled with his etudes, fugues, and serenades.

The music, however, turned sour. His fingers lost energy and he grew tired of long rehearsals. Applause lost its magic. As a young adult, he abandoned music. His hands shifted from stroking piano keys to sketching houses. He earned his professional architectural degree at 24 from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City, and went on to receive his postgraduate degree in History and Theory of Architecture at the School of Comparative Studies at Essex University in England the following year. He established his architectural studio in Berlin, Germany after winning the competition to build the Jewish Museum in Berlin. He was 43.

Now 68, he thinks of music as an echo, a haunting reminder of a vocation he left behind.

“You know,” he said, leaning on the woodentable as if about to tell a secret, “even though I am no longer a virtuoso performer I continue my work in music in architecture.” Architecture and music, to him, are related. “Even the way architecture is produced is very similar to music because they both come down to drawings. In my case, I start with a drawing—like a score, in music.” After a series of sketches is
processed through the latest software, “the drawing becomes interpreted by the workers to come alive. Like an orchestra.”

“You have to be a great technician to play music,” Mr. Libeskind said. You never approximate tones or note durations, you hit them in an exacting manner. You cannot fall flat mid-phrase, you can’t overdo a note
and sing it sharp. Music is very measured, very precise.

“But,” he warned, “if you are only a technician, then you are not a musician: you play every note correctly, but nobody hears any music.” A computer can play notes exactly as they are written on a score, but it can never recreate passion. Beauty is a delicate balance between precise technique and human emotion. 

“It’s communicating to the soul,” Mr. Libeskind said. “Just like in architecture, you need incredible discipline, incredible technical ability, but in the end, the audience has to forget the technical all together.”

The best musicians play with a flawlessness achieved through extreme mastery.

“That’s the difference between a great musician and a mediocre one,” said Mr. Libeskind, who used to practice daily for hours upon hours (“None of my teachers were lax.”).

“Great musicians can eradicate the technique. Bad musicians, like bad architects, show you the technology.”

Mr. Libeskind, however, also believes that success it is not all discipline, “You have to have the talent for it,” he said. “Without talent, it doesn’t matter how much you practice. You will never succeed. It’s a combination of commitment and talent.”

He added that no one can be forced to be a musician, the same way that no one can be forced to become an architect or an artist.

“Because they’re art. They’re about art and technique. That’s the beauty of architecture and all art, they all use technique but it’s not about technique. It’s about using the technique and what can never become technical, is the art.”

THE COUNTERPOINT
Considering his repertoire, which includes, notably, Alkan’s works as well as Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “The Flight of the Bumblebee,” Daniel Libeskind identifies the counterpoint as the most difficult style he
had to learn.

"Counterpoint” refers to the compositional technique of combining different melodic lines that have both a degree of harmony, and a degree of independence. “The contrapuntal writing, the fugue, the canon, those great forms are so complex because they have layers, intertwined meaning, they are not just lines of music but structures of music,” he
said. “You can say four-dimensional structures because you hear them in space but they’re also about time. Those are to me the most beautiful forms of music.” 

Today, the style that was the most challenging has become his life’s work. “Architecture, for me, is a counterpoint. Everything is contrapuntal, has to coordinate itself with what it isn’t and it should be in harmony also.”

Daniel Libeskind imagines his work as a series of counterpoints: buildings as a counterpoint to people; mathematics, to emotion; music, to architecture; discipline, to passion.

“First of all, it’s the ethic of how you practice architecture. You have to take it seriously. Not just for entertainment, not for getting money, not for the shallow ideas of life,” Mr. Libeskind said about what he learned from music. “You have to be in love with what you do. You have to be part of it. You have to be inspired by the masters. By the gods. By the
spirit—to be part of that field.”

“And the lessons are everywhere,” he said. “It takes long to work on a project,” harking to the Jewish Museum that took him 12 years to complete. “But the idea,” he said with a wide-eyed, conspiratorial grin, “has to be like a lightning strike. It has to come out of the darkness, with a huge lightning bolt, and shock you. That’s the beginning of a project.”

(“So,” High Life asked curiously, “where do you find the lightning?”)

“Ahh,” he answered, reclining against his chair and putting his hand on his stomach. “You can’t buy it. You can’t ask for it. You have
to be just ready for the unexpected. Because if you’re not ready for the unexpected, you will miss it. It’s very difficult to find it. So you have to be open to reality and then at the moment something happens to you, then that’s the lightning.”

(“But what if you have a deadline?”)

“You have to be lucky,” he said. “You have to be inspired. I think everything in the world has a deadline, but you have to be connected
to do a project.”

(“Well then, do you have a certain environment to inspire inspiration?”)

Master architect Daniel Libeskind, that afternoon in a building in Makati City, answered: “No, never. You should never. I don’t even have an office in my own studio. I don’t have a private room. My desk is everywhere. I don’t believe that you should be locked away with a special piece of paper, special music, no, you should be ready that the inspiration will come to you in the least expected place. In a moment when you know, you look at somebody’s eyes, or you hear something, or touch the ground in a particular way, you listen to the world, and then suddenly—”