Architect draws notice
Celebrity designer billboard promotes a capital high-rise
By Mary Lynne Vellinga -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 am PST Monday, January 16, 2006
Story appeared on Page A1 of The Bee
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A downtown billboard features Daniel Libeskind, who created the World Trade Center reconstruction plan - and designed the Aura condo tower for Sacramento.
Architects in Sacramento usually labor in relative obscurity; their names aren't exactly dropping from the lips of the average citizen.
Now, however, a bona fide celebrity architect has swept into town, and the man who brought him here wants everyone to know it.
Denver developer Craig Nassi has erected two large billboards around the site of his planned Aura condominium tower featuring the face of the building's designer, Daniel Libeskind.
"The man; the vision," booms the billboard at Capitol Mall and Sixth Street. With his bushy gray hair and trademark square black glasses, Libeskind's oversized visage looks benevolent but also somewhat befuddled by his placement overlooking a downtown Sacramento sidewalk.
"I walked by and said, 'Who the hell is that?' " said Chuck Dalldorf, a former chief of staff to three Sacramento mayors who now works for the League of California Cities.
"Here's all these people at the RT bus stop looking at this guy," Dalldorf said.
Although the bus riders may not know it, Libeskind is one of the most famous architects in the world. Known for designing public structures such as the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the art museum expansion in Denver, he saw his business explode after he was chosen to create the master plan for the reconstruction of the World Trade Center in New York City.
Though his vision for the World Trade Center has been altered, and other architects have been picked to design the individual buildings, Libeskind remains a hot commodity.
"He's the architect du jour, no doubt about it," said John Packowski, a local designer who once was chairman of the city's Design Review and Preservation Board. "He has international cachet."
Nick Docous, an architect with Sacramento's Lionakis Beaumont Design Group, said Libeskind belongs to a group of about two dozen architects worldwide, many of them European, who have achieved star status. "We call them the black cape guys," he said, a reference to the black cape worn by Frank Lloyd Wright. "It's an architect with larger-than-life persona and ego."
Hiring one of these "starchitects" can bring instant attention to a project. These designers tend to treat the structures they create as sculptures they can mold into fantastic forms.
Examples include Frank Gehry's undulating metal designs for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and Santiago Calatrava's soaring Sundial footbridge in Redding's Turtle Bay Exploration Park.
Libeskind also has a flair for the dramatic. His design for the Denver Art Museum expansion is a heap of metal cubes that jut from the ground in different directions.
According to a recent profile in the Houston Chronicle, Libeskind, who turns 60 this year, didn't actually get one of his buildings constructed until he was 52. His designs were considered too intellectual. His first building, the Jewish Museum in Berlin, is a metal-encased zigzag intended to evoke a deconstructed Star of David. The building contains a line of empty rooms intended to represent the void left in German culture by the Holocaust.
"What star architects do is go out and make statements," Docous said.
With the housing market outstripping the office market in recent years, supernovas such as Libeskind have turned their attention to high-rise housing. Aura would be Libeskind's first residential high-rise. He has others in the works, including another in downtown Sacramento for Nassi and one in Covington, Ky., across the Ohio River from downtown Cincinnati.
Libeskind, the Polish-born son of Holocaust survivors, immigrated to New York City as a teenager. He wasn't available last week to discuss his vision for Aura, a 38-story, glass-sheathed tower planned for Capitol Mall and Sixth Street.
His scheduling director, Thierry Debaille, said the constantly on-the-go Libeskind was en route to Hong Kong. "It's very difficult to orchestrate these sorts of (interview) requests," Debaille said, adding that Libeskind "hates e-mail."
But in a DVD created by Nassi to market the project, Libeskind said Aura would be "an ascending building that is crystalline in nature and sculptured in its form."
"It's not only the museums that deserve great architecture, but also the places where people live," Libeskind said.
His renderings show exterior walls formed by a curtain of bluish glass. Open-air balconies are arranged in curving rows to create the appearance of vertical, sweeping lines on the building's face.
Both the bottom and top of the building have a sheared, triangular shape.
City leaders have reacted enthusiastically to the design.
"What he's proposing to do down here is really iconic," said interim City Manager Ray Kerridge. "People are going to come downtown just to look at this building."
Developer Mark Friedman, a leading builder of lofts in the central city, said he is "excited that someone with such tremendous talent is designing buildings in our community.
"I had the pleasure a few years ago to go see the Jewish Museum in Berlin, which gives a sense of how he evokes feeling with space," Friedman said. "It's very sculptural and poetic."
For Nassi, having an architect of Libeskind's stature is a marketing advantage. "It's just insurance that we have something no one else has," he said.
Aura is one of nine high-rise buildings in various stages of planning downtown. Developer John Saca plans two 53-story towers just a few blocks west on Capitol Mall. And Nassi has proposed a 50-story, Libeskind-designed building, Epic, at 12th and I streets.
Nassi said he has taken refundable deposits for all 264 units in Aura and has construction financing lined up. Soon, he will ask buyers to convert their reservations to nonrefundable deposits. This could be the real test of whether there's enough demand to build the tower, where units are expected to start at about $400,000. Saca's project faces a similar test in coming months.
Nassi said he met Libeskind when the architect was working on the Denver Art Museum. "We became friends, and it evolved into a business relationship," Nassi said.
Nassi had built three high-rise residential projects in Denver, all with a classical design reminiscent of the 19th century. Since meeting Libeskind, his thinking has changed.
"Today, less is more," he said. "My thinking pattern has gone from very classical and complicated to more simple and clean."
Nassi seized on Sacramento as a market with high-rise housing potential, and he brought Libeskind with him. "We think it's the best city right now to be building in, because it's not an overbuilt city," Nassi said.
Some local design aficionados applauded Nassi's decision to promote his architect with eye-catching billboards.
"I think it's cool, because it's starting to kick some attitude into the city," Packowski said.
Dalldorf, however, said a bigger picture of the building, rather than the man behind it, would have been more appropriate. "To me, it's sort of a grandiose version of a real estate business card," he said.
An eye-catching sign is positioned in front of the sales pavilion for the 38-story, glass-sheathed Aura condominium tower planned at Capitol Mall and Sixth Street.
Sacramento Bee/Bryan Patrick
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