‘Fantastic’ N.Y. spire goes on view

Architect Daniel Libeskind returned Monday to the Berlin building that brought him fame, inaugurating a retrospective of his work that centers on the project that led him to move to New York: the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site.

A model of Libeskind’s New York project -- with its 1,776-foot spire -- is among 16 Libeskind designs in the exhibition at Berlin’s Jewish Museum, “Counterpoint: The Architecture of Daniel Libeskind.”

Many of them, including the zinc-clad Jewish Museum itself and a never-realized redevelopment plan for the German capital’s downtown Alexanderplatz, reflect Libeskind’s fondness for Berlin, which was his home for 13 years.

Libeskind, 57, pledged that the finished World Trade Center project would be “something fantastic, inspiring, something which speaks about 9/11 and the heroes of that day, something that reasserts Manhattan as the capital of the world.”

From Associated Press