Daniel Libeskind Opening of Mantovarchitettura 2025 "Architecture and Conflict"

Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder 

Paul Valery

Daniel Libeskind’s inaugural lecture at the XII edition of Mantovarchitettura offers a profound reflection on the role of architecture when it engages with history, loss, and civic responsibility. What emerges is not a mere presentation of works, but a cultural stance. Architecture is never neutral, nor simply technical:  within a field of ethical and symbolic tensions in which order and disorder, recalling Paul Valéry’s well-known formulation, persist as opposing and ever-present dangers. The Sala dei Giganti in Mantua offers a powerful metaphor for this condition. Its collapsing classical structures and the violent shattering of supposedly eternal foundations stages a crisis that resonates with contemporary uncertainties. The lightning bolt tearing through the fresco suggests a form of justice suspended in ambiguity, offering no reassuring resolution.

At the centre of Libeskind’s reflection stands a crucial proposition: architecture is not built into the earth. It's built into memory. Memory, understood not as a nostalgic repository but as an active and generative force, becomes the true ground on which architecture stands. This awareness structures the Jewish Museum in Berlin, conceived as a spatial device that translates the rupture of the Shoah into bodily experience. The central void, the absence of spaces of reconciliation, the descent into the underground, and the deliberate formal discontinuities shape an architecture that refuses symbolic closure. Meaning is not given; it is physically encountered and traversed.

A similar stance informs the Military History Museum in Dresden, where a contemporary wedge interrupts the historical building and inscribes within it the vector of the city’s destruction in 1945. Here architecture becomes a public interrogation rather than a narrative solution. No answers are offered, only questions that each visitor must confront: why do people cooperate with war? Why do they obey? Why does violence become normalised?

In the Amsterdam Names Memorial and in the master plan for Ground Zero in New York, memory is woven into the fabric of the everyday city. Names, water, light, reflective surfaces and voids prevent the past from becoming distant. As Libeskind repeatedly insists, memory does not belong to the past but to the present. It disturbs, interrupts, and resists any form of pacification. At Ground Zero, the decision not to rebuild on the footprints of the Twin Towers, relocating construction to the periphery, affirms an ethical boundary, allowing absence itself to become a form of commemoration.

The lecture culminates in Libeskind’s reflection on democracy as a vulnerable condition, constantly exposed to erosion, never assured. Democracy, he reminds us, is not a stable achievement but a responsibility that must be continually reaffirmed. In this perspective, architecture becomes an ethical practice: the construction of spaces where memory, reflection, and collective responsibility remain visible, tangible and active in the present. Libeskind’s projects suggest that architecture, when grounded in human experience, can act both as witness and catalyst, holding a mirror to the past while opening pathways toward renewed civic and cultural meaning.