Customer Reviews

Daniel Libeskind: Fishing From The Pavement

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I love this book, precisely because it does not appeal to reviewers who try to hook a non existing fish.This work defies theory by actually constructing space that is free of cartesian,rational,sense-making,space-avoiding narrative.

Being a fan of architecture expressed in a poetic manner, this doesn't even come close to John Hejduk's "Architectures in Love." Liebeskind's combination of words finds one struggling to find the relationship between one confusing sentence to the next, let alone one page to the next and getting absolutely nowhere. Quite possibly, Liebeskind is trying to challenge the readable written world of legibility and understanding the way in which his disjuctured/deconstructed architecture challenges the visual world. Sorry Danny, but you didn't reel me in!

There's a popular theory which suggests that if you left a million monkeys, with a million typewriters, in a room for a million years, that (statistically at least), there is the possibility that one of the apes might accidentally type out some kind of gobbledygook that almost resembles a book. - "Fishing From the Pavement", Daniel Libeskind's embarrassingly, half-baked attempt at serious writing, seems to be that book. One example of Libeskind's clumsy, free-style "poetry" should suffice- "Executives are praying to a chicken, confident of their brazen dream in which cherubs can not grieve but are instead forced to defecate on ruins in their doctor's presence." Is it me? ... Or is the Emperor wearing no clothes???

"Fishing From the Pavement" is the sort of feeble-minded hogwash that a first-year architectural student would write to impress a fourth-rate academic simpleton.... or in this case, that the 50-year old Libeskind wrote to impress some fifth-rate hack, maybe even himself. For anyone who enjoys the laugh-out-loud pretentiousness of today's quasi-intellectual nobodies, there's enough material here to keep you amused for hours. If nothing else, (and, believe me, there really is nothing else), you'll get an idea why Libeskind is so often the laughingstock of the architectural profession. - Next thing you know, he'll be trying to walk erect! And maybe his typing will improve once he stops dragging his knuckles along the ground!

If there is a more ridiculous or more pretentious book or architect alive today, I challenge anyone, anywhere to show them to me. It is a truism that whereas genius has its limits, stupidity knows know boundaries. - QED "Fishing From The Pavement". - May God help you if you take this book or author seriously.