Faith & Spirit Quote by Daniel Libeskind

Libeskind opens by refusing two tempting roles: Candide, the naive believer in a world that will somehow work out, and Dr. Pangloss, Voltaire's oily salesman of "all is for the best". It's a savvy bit of self-positioning. An architect who has built in the long shadow of catastrophe (from the Jewish Museum Berlin to the World Trade Center master plan) can't afford either innocence or glib optimism; both would read as aesthetic malpractice. The line says: don't mistake my moral language for childishness.

Then he turns the screw: "but we know that faith moves mountains". The pivot matters. After disavowing Voltaire's satire of Enlightenment optimism, he keeps a kernel of conviction - not that the world is already arranged for the good, but that human commitment can rearrange it. In architectural terms, "faith" isn't theology so much as an insistence that forms, memorials, and public space can exert pressure on history: the built environment can carry grief, produce belonging, and argue with erasure.

The subtext is defensive and aspirational at once. Libeskind knows contemporary culture distrusts grand narratives; invoking faith risks sounding sentimental or authoritarian. By name-checking Candide and Pangloss, he signals he's read the critique. Yet he refuses the fashionable posture of irony-only. It's a credo for making work under political and bureaucratic gravity: you need belief robust enough to survive committees, budgets, and trauma, but skeptical enough to avoid Panglossian gloss. In that tension, his architecture lives.