Daniel Libeskind

After having studied music in Israel and New York, he gave up being a musician to study architecture in New York and Essex. Since he became an architect he has kept away from conventional architecture studios that he considers to be too redundant.

Libeskind is well known and recognised for his urban designs, for bringing a new critical discourse into architecture and for his multidisciplinary approach. His works draw from the memories of traumatic events, take for instance the Jewish Museums in Berlin and Copenhaguen, the refurbishment of the Potsdamerplatz in Berlin, or the project for the Freedom Tower at New York’s Ground Zero.

Studio Daniel Libeskind [www]

 

Proposta para a Cidade da Cultura

 

Vox Nova proposes a configuration with the nine programmes to generate a new landscape. Looking towards Santiago de Compostela and presenting the city with a flexible ensemble of public spaces and unique gardens. Vox Nova could be considered as a merger of form and space, where the form sustains the specific cultural programmes and the vertical gardens generate the entrances to the spaces for public activities. An interaction is achieved between these two elements by means of constantly mixing the relationships. Such relationships become concrete in the rich nuances of the architecture where the entirety of the programme blends into the infiltration of the gardens.

Visitors ascend through horizontal gardens to be directed through a multi-tiered landscape, each tier specific to a given cultural institution. The gardens conform a visible public space along the vertical dimension in a series of plazas. Vox Nova concentrates, accelerates and intensifies the public meeting place.

Vox Nova is a project that creates a cultural complex of nine main buildings within one single form, articulated in such a manner that it establishes a precise relationship with Santiago de Compostela and the surrounding landscape.

The two elements, the built form and the constructed landscape, constitute a unique relationship. There is a variety of innovative, landscaped gardens with dramatic weight, interacting with the existing landscape, and being essential to the plan.

The built form provides 60,000 metres squared to the programme. The Garden of the Muse and the Gardens of the Seven Days are presented as a nature reserve from which pathways are projected inviting to explore nature.