Honorary Graduates

Orations and responses

Response by Daniel Libeskind

Thank you very much. I’m delighted and truly honoured to be here, in particular to be with the graduates of today who have reached a milestone in their own education. I am often asked why did I go to the University of Essex ? People see it on my curriculum vitae  and they know that  I have completed a professional degree in architecture in New York. What is a person from New York doing in Colchester at the University of Essex they ask me. And I have to say: It was really a lucky chance in my life that on a street in New York I bumped into somebody who introduced me to Joseph Rickwood. Then I was lucky enough to discover that something very radical was happening at the University of Essex. A completely new course of study was invented which was not going to hone the professional skills of architects but would really challenge the understanding of architecture and how it affects us.

So instead of joining a large office, instead of going on to a technical school, to further education in the so-called field of work in which I was trained, I departed for Essex.  It was here that I met Dalibor Vesely, my teacher from those days, and a friend ever since, and many other people whose horizons opened to me a new understanding of what it means to think, to be aware of the importance of human relationships, particularly the effect of technical objects on our lives. Architecture, after all, is made out of steel and concrete and glass, and yet its significance is wholly human and spiritual.

It was here, therefore, at Essex, in a very original programme, which gave me the opportunity to delve deeply into the history and into the memory of architecture that I was able to depart from the common wisdoms which see architecture as an inevitable continuum along a single projection line. In fact it isn’t.  Just like all human activities which involve the human spirit architecture is something that is amenable to human discourse, something which has to do with how people dream and think. It is not something which is just on an operating table, lying waiting for the next operation.

So this university, with its magnificent demonstration of  the new, and, I have to say,  the image of this university - and often people show the Constable paintings of Wivenhoe Park with the cows - but there is something about the space here. The newness, the daring idea of creating a whole new institution in the middle of a historical site, that too is part of the legacy of modernity, and to think how it is to be reconciled with all the complex issues which face humanity, resources, and the world itself. 

So the combination of the concrete demonstration of building a daring university, and the intellectual contents which were only offered in this course and nowhere else, these two factors I think formed an unique experience in my life. I have to say that I would not be doing the thing I am doing if I had just gone the shortest distance between two points.

People thought at one point that I was really wasting my time. Why should I  be reading obscure texts from the 6th century? Why should I be delving into manuscripts which had nothing really to go on in terms of apparent construction?  Why should I be interested in places that hardly bore any visible fruit?  But I do believe that precisely delving in those areas which seemed to have a kind of hopelessness, a disconnection in history, is what gave me personally the idea, the vision that it is those things which are the most vulnerable, which are important for architects to know about. Not simply the power and the work of production of architecture but what is it that connects it across millennia to the human spirit.

What is the tradition really about and how does one really communicate that tradition to people who are born in other times, with a new perspective and with a new world ?  And that is perhaps the thing that  I  think about a lot. How does one go on, given all the complexity of the problem?  How does one delve into the problems in some original way without just repeating once again the follies of yester-year?  I think the only way to do so is to study, to be radical.  And what could be more radical than this institution built on this landscape - radically challenging what we think of as tradition and yet at the same time radically connecting itself to that tradition?

I wish you all a life really full of excitement and adventure and not the predictable shortest line between two points.