The line of fire

The packed collection of writings, drawings and machines, edited by Dario Gentili and published in Italy by Quodlibet, unveils Daniel Libeskind’s operational and theoretical universe, which can be pursued in many directions.

Daniel Libeskind, La linea del fuoco. Scritti, disegni, macchine, Quodlibet Abitare, 2014. (pp. 252, 25 €). Edited by Dario Gentili. Foreword by Lev Libeskind. With a text by Aldo Rossi.

Looking is not the same as seeing the camera focus of an immobile object. The gaze moves about within the outline of what is before it, tracing incomprehensible and constantly shifting lines inside the figure in order to understand it.

Daniel Libeskind, <i>La linea del fuoco. Scritti, disegni, macchine</i>, Quodlibet Abitare, 2014 — Daniel Libeskind, *La linea del fuoco. Scritti, disegni, macchine*, Quodlibet Abitare, 2014

With just the same zeal, it is not the image that prevails in Daniel Libeskind’s drawings and words but the eagerly roving eye, during which process his vast areas of knowledge light up as he absorbs the form and significance of lines and signs. In the foreword to this packed collection of writings, drawings and machines, Lev Libeskind explains that the Jewish Museum in Berlin, his father’s first architectural project, was entitled The Line of Fire, i.e. “that leap forward through the flames” to build a home? that has accompanied human existence since prehistoric times.

The museum, which passes through flames and lines to silence the dispute between architecture and history to show disaster transfigured in space, is certainly the key project in Libeskind’s career and the text illustrating it helps readers understand its genesis, inspirations and design paths. Libeskind’s words are echoed in notes by Dario Gentili, who edited this edition and who stresses the centrality of the notion of void in the Polish architect’s experimentation. Libeskind even had an opportunity to discuss this notion with Jacques Derrida, and precisely on the subject of the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

The discontinuous void, i.e. the building’s spatial substance, cannot be filled; quite the contrary, “what an architect must do in this case is prevent the void from being filled”. By his own admission, Libeskind’s void refers to the Jewish concept of space and not to the Greek one. The same can be said of the worldliness exercised inside his architecture, not a cyclical concept of time of Greek inspiration expressed via a succession of static spaces but a spatial event that moves against the background of a linear concept of time and history.

It is Libeskind’s void destined for eternal anticipation that moves along a broken line. It is certainly no chance that, as pointed out by Derrida, Berlin’s identity runs along the same line, the line of the wall, that fell in the fire of liberation during the Museum’s development and construction, and that the city symbolizes all the divided cities in the world, including Jerusalem.

The line of fire explores, narrates and decodes, via the architect’s own words and signs, with the satisfying result of making the final image more complex and unveiling Libeskind’s operational and theoretical universe, which can be pursued in many directions and where “the margins are as important as what is said, just as in the Talmud.”

These margins have the impassioned thickness of the lines drawn by Libeskind, during the process of which the Polish architect encountered Aldo Rossi in a previously unseen and stirring dialogue from afar that comes to life in the book. Deus ex-machina, machina ex deo is Libeskind’s reflection on his Teatro del Mondo, “exemplary of Aldo Rossi’s whole vision because in both its function and its analogical state it is an affirmation of the boredom of reproduction and a rejection of the passions implicit in a self-determined dialectic.” Most of all, however, he sees the “void of places” in the Theatre; in the representation of that space, he sees the absence of an analogy with historic truth, with which the Theatre disguises itself but that deep down it refutes.

The formal results may well differ but both Libeskind and Rossi seem to defend the same void, adopting with differing degrees of awareness the “laceration within a certain order” as a design practice.

On his part, in a piece entitled Semplicemente un percorso written in 1983, Aldo Rossi performs what he himself calls a parallel reading of Libeskind’s work, in an attempt to see in it his own desire to represent “what is unrepeatable”. Rossi’s interest in Libeskind is, indeed, due to the richness of thought, “of mental, mathematical and speculative elements [that] come together in a sort of formal disaster”, and this interest is sustained by a self-analysis via writings and drawings, many of which now in this book.

Both speak of the other by speaking of themselves, even seeking a part of themselves in the other because – as Aldo Rossi argues when speaking of analytical and design tools – “he who seeks clarity must necessarily superimpose and superimposing tends to blur the reality.” Similarly, when seeking clarity in architecture, the two architects fleetingly superimposed their own paths, leaving only a faded trace of the truth and an endless series of signs guarding that void that Libeskind has pursued since the first line of fire was crossed.

The line of fire

The packed collection of writings, drawings and machines, edited by Dario Gentili and published in Italy by Quodlibet, unveils Daniel Libeskind’s operational and theoretical universe, which can be pursued in many directions.

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