Daniel Libeskind is no stranger to tragedy. The Polish American architect is best known for his crystalline designs that commemorate historical trauma, from the Jewish Museums in Berlin and Copenhagen to the World Trade Center master plan in New York. His latest project, though smaller in footprint, is perhaps more complex in scope: a new 45,000-square foot complex in Pittsburgh for a new national organization dedicated to ending antisemitism, simply called Tree of Life. It was there that on October 27, 2018—during morning prayer services for Shabbat—a gunman opened fire, killing 11 people and wounding 6 others, including several Holocaust survivors. It was the first mass murder of Jews on U.S. soil, shattering a congregation, a community, and the image of America as a haven from antisemitism.
For Libeskind, who is Jewish, the project is deeply personal. Tree of Life had been targeted because of its affiliation with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which brought his family to the U.S. in 1959. He was selected as lead architect last year after an open call for proposals and spent months speaking with survivors and victims’ families. Although different in scale from the World Trade Center master plan, Libeskind says Tree of Life was similar in its challenges: “It wasn’t easy to bring all the different stakeholders to come together and to agree on all the aspects of the rebuilding.”
