CH: Daniel, given how contemporary and sharp-edged your architecture is, don’t you think people will be surprised to learn you’re living in a Florentine apartment?

Libeskind: Well, the images people will have when I say the word Florentine might be the nostalgic images from Ruskin. But I mean Florentine in the Brunelleschian sense of the avant-garde, the never-before-tried. I think we’ve created a series of spaces that might be cozy but are also very crisp, very modern.

CH: How many square feet?

Libeskind: About 2,100. It’s not very grand. For example, I have a very large library, which I’ve always had at home—in Berlin, we had a much grander apartment. I realized that if I wanted to bring in all my thousands of books, they would overrun the entire apartment.

CH: So no bookcases at all?

Libeskind: I’ll keep my books in my office, which is just a few blocks away, and have a few books at home while I’m reading them.

CH: There’s something of a student-mentor quality to your relationship, because the two of you first met back when Alex was a student at Cooper Union in the late seventies.

Gorlin: Daniel was on the jury for my thesis. It was a project to re-create Solomon’s temple.

Libeskind: It was a spectacular project. It was very unusual in a school that was basically so Modernist to see somebody who was exploring historical issues and dealing with theology and philosophical ideas.

Gorlin: And then we met again on Victoria Newhouse’s jet!

Libeskind: Oh, that’s right. I had forgotten about that.

Gorlin: I was helping her with her book on museum architecture, Towards a New Museum. We went over on the Concorde and then took a private jet to Berlin with Daniel, and we all saw his Jewish Museum together.

CH: Alex, can you describe the first formal presentation you made to Daniel of the apartment design?

Gorlin: I treated it in a really conceptual manner and brought all these supporting texts—from Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and from the section of Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture called “Manual of the Dwelling.” And then I brought these diagrams showing the vectors connecting the site to views of various monuments around the city.

Libeskind: Again, Alex knew all my weaknesses!

CH: There’s something very New York about the shape of the site.

Libeskind: Absolutely. It’s not the whimsical shape of the building; it’s the gridded street taking shape in lower Manhattan—and I think that’s powerfully felt in the apartment. You really feel the struggle of the grid as it makes its way to lower Manhattan, and what it has to do to negotiate those changes.

CH: Were there echoes of your thesis presentation for you, Alex, in that meeting?

Gorlin: Absolutely. It was a psychological drama!

CH: Daniel, has this process revealed anything to you and Nina about your respective tastes that you didn’t know before?

Libeskind: I suppose it has exacerbated the differences in our sensibilities—her preference for cozy rooms versus mine for completely open space. Her preference for a well-equipped kitchen versus my preference to call out for dinner. But it goes the other way around, too. I was convinced that we should have curtains in the apartment, but just today Nina said she didn’t care for such an old, bourgeois idea. She wants plain, modern screens.

Gorlin: Oh. Well, we have to talk about that. That I hadn’t heard yet.

Libeskind: Yes, it’s just now I’m telling you.

Gorlin: Maybe she thinks I mean curtains like big velvet things.

Libeskind: No. She said, “I want the apartment very crisp. I don’t want any of this nostalgic cloth near the windows.” And actually, I think I agree with her.

Gorlin: Uh-oh.

Libeskind: You’ll have to try to re-convince her. See, that’s why it was good to have Alex around. He was able to reconcile different points of view and then create a consensus to build. Otherwise I really would have been in trouble. Between Rachel, Nina, and our grown sons, it might have taken twenty years for me to get this apartment done.

Gorlin: In that sense, an architect is like an analyst.

CH: So what would an analyst say this design reveals about the Libeskind family?

Libeskind: I think it says we have a strong marriage, because we’re still together after this process. Moving houses, moving apartments—it’s the biggest single cause for divorce.

CH: What were the toughest things to agree upon?

Gorlin: Nina wanted wood floors, and Daniel wanted this type of white resin, and we compromised with Florentine stone. In fact, Daniel at first wanted the whole apartment to be white.

Libeskind: I did play around with that idea, but of course the critics from all sides of the family began to question it. I mean, that’s how the process works: You go from fantasy to reality.