Libeskind is born in Poland, grows up in Tel Aviv, and moves to New York to study architecture at Cooper Union on a scholarship. After graduating, he continues his theoretical studies at Essex University in London and becomes a teacher at the Cranbook Academy of Art and Design. In 1986, he founds a nonprofit experimental and teaching laboratory in Milan called Architecture Intermundium.
His highly experimental projects appear in the baseline exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture held at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1988. The next year he is in Los Angeles teaching at the Center for the Arts and the Humanities.