Lecture: Daniel Libeskind
Thursday, October 4
5:30 P.M.
Albright-Knox Art Gallery Auditorium

Seating is limited. For information and tickets, please call 716.270.8292 or visit the Admissions Desk.

This event is co-organized by Brian Carter, professor and Dean of the UB School of Architecture and Planning, and Associate Curator of Contemporary Art Claire Schneider, in collaboration with The School of Architecture and Planning at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.

Daniel Libeskind (American, born Poland, 1946). World Trade Center Scroll, 2003-04. Ink and pencil on heavy paper, 20 x 19 1/2” (50.8 x 49.5 cm.) (framed). Collection L.J. Cella, San Francisco.

In conjunction with the exhibition Drawing Architecture:The L.J. Cella Collection, world-renowned architect Daniel Libeskind, B.Arch. M.A. BDA AIA will present a lecture about his work Thursday, October 4 at 5:30 p.m. in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery Auditorium. A question and answer session will follow.

Born in postwar Poland in 1946, Libeskind became an American citizen in 1965. He studied music in Israel (on the America-Israel Cultural Foundation Scholarship) and in New York, becoming a virtuoso performer. He left music to study architecture, receiving his professional architectural degree in 1970 from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City. He received a postgraduate degree in History and Theory of Architecture at the School of Comparative Studies at Essex University (England) in 1972.

In 1989, Libeskind won the competition to design the Jewish Museum Berlin, which opened to public acclaim in 2001. The city museum of Osnabrück, Germany, The Felix Nussbaum Haus, opened in 1998, and the Imperial War Museum North in England was completed four years later. Most recently, the new Denver Art Museum in Colorado opened in 2006 and the Extension to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto was opened in June 2007. Libeskind is currently working on the design of the Grand Canal Performing Arts Centre and Galleria in Dublin, Ireland; the New Center for Arts and Culture in Boston, Massachusetts; the redevelopment of the historic Fiera Milano Fairgrounds in Milan, Italy, a 65-acre site of housing, retail, and commercial space; and new mixed use developments in Singapore, Copenhagen, and South Korea. His work has been exhibited extensively in major museums and galleries around the world, and his buildings have appeared on the covers of publications such as TIME magazine, Newsweek, Architectural Record, and The Wall Street Journal.

Libeskind has taught and lectured internationally, and has held the Frank O. Gehry Chair at the University of Toronto; Professor at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe, Germany; the Cret Chair at the University of Pennsylvania; and the Louis Kahn Chair at Yale University. He has received numerous awards, including the 1999 Deutsche Architekturpreis (German Architecture Prize) for the Jewish Museum Berlin and the Goethe Medallion in 2000, and was the first architect to receive the 2001 Hiroshima Art Prize, an award given to an artist whose work promotes international understanding and peace. Two of Libeskind’s buildings – the London Metropolitan University Graduate Centre and the Imperial War Museum North – won RIBA Awards in 2004. In the same year, Libeskind was appointed the first Cultural Ambassador for Architecture by the U.S. Department of State.

"In his speculations on the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site, recorded in pencil and ink sketches collaged on a long scroll-like sheet of paper, Daniel Libeskind imagines walking through, flying over and looking across a new world to be constructed in the aching void at the heart of New York City," wrote Brian Carter, professor and Dean of the UB School of Architecture and Planning. Libeskind’s drawing World Trade Center Scroll is included in the exhibition Drawing Architecture:The L.J. Cella Collection, along with three other works on paper.