ABSTRACT
Daniel Libeskind views his professional development, from music to art to designs for the built environment, as a natural progression. Before Libeskind was an architect, he was an artist. He emigrated from Poland to the US with his family in 1959, at the age of 13. Because he spoke no English when he enrolled at his first school in the Bronx, he was placed in a class for those with low IQs. There, he communicated in the language of the hand-drawn sketch. Then he was immersed in Cooper Union's first-year foundation program a Bauhaus-inspired studio for potential artists and architects fully engaged in the drawing process, copying from the masters at the Morgan Library and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. A building itself may become a highly valued piece of civic art like Giotto's Campanile, or Libeskind's Ground Zero but it starts out drawn from life, in an act of faith.
