Toronto Star

It's true Daniel Libeskind only wears black, but beyond that he really isn't like other architects. For one thing, he insists, "Architecture is all about emotion." Not many practitioners would agree with Libeskind on that one, or with his secondary assertion that "architecture is a form of storytelling." Whatever his limitations may be, Libeskind has certainly proven his point that architecture can be a vehicle for something more than mere aesthetics — or worse still, economics. He demonstrated that at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the Imperial War Museum in Manchester and in his proposal for the World Trade Center site in New York. Each project speaks eloquently of pain and loss, of the voids that cut though ours lives and of the need to remember. As an architect of commemoration, Libeskind may be leading practitioner of his generation. But there's more to it than that; Libeskind now presides over a worldwide operation that comprises 120 staff members in four studios. These days, he and his colleagues are doing commissions around the planet, from Toronto and New York to Milan, Jamaica and Dresden. Among the projects on his drawing board are a shopping centre in Switzerland, a media centre in Hong Kong and a 50-storey condo in Sacramento, as well as our very own Royal Ontario Museum addition, the Crystal.