Toronto Star

Liebeskind's proposal

A few blocks from Ground Zero, Daniel Libeskind — the man who dreamed up the master plan for recreating the World Trade Center — rushes from room to room at the sprawling head office of Studio Daniel Libeskind. Colleagues, assistants and Nina Libeskind — his Toronto-born wife and chief lieutenant of his operation — come and go with urgent bulletins about projects in Milan, Denver, Switzerland. But this morning he is concentrating on Toronto, perplexed by the negativity that greeted images of the startling new tower he proposes to build adjacent to the Hummingbird Centre, and suggesting that there have always been prominent people in Toronto who suffer from chronic small-mindedness. "The 40th anniversary of Toronto's city hall is coming up," he remarks, smiling and eager to chat. "I was just reading an article about it, which reminded me of the angry reaction it received in the 1960s." Libeskind was hugely impressed by it when he came to Toronto to court Nina, daughter of veteran NDP leader David Lewis and sister of Stephen Lewis. "It's still one of the most beautiful buildings anywhere in the world," says Libeskind, "but I had forgotten how myopic Toronto was about it at the time, including people at the University of Toronto's school of architecture. `It doesn't fit in with our city,' they said."