"You repress almost everything to produce a building," states Daniel Libeskind during a long and wide-ranging conversation with the architectural historian Gillian Darley in the context of the exhibition Childhood ReCollections: Memory in Design at the Roca London Gallery.

"Everything is repressed because it has to fit into the context, it has to be stylized, it has to appeal to clients, it has to be normal," he contends. "But I always thought, try to show what has been repressed in architecture. It’s very difficult because people don’t like it."1

(1) Daniel Libeskind on Memory | Roca London Gallery
(2) Childhood ReCollections: Memory in Design featuring Daniel Libeskind | Roca London Gallery
(3) Daniel Libeskind discusses, from his New York office, the impact of memory on his work in relation to the exhibition Childho

In conjunction with the exhibition Childhood ReCollections: Memory in Design (until 23rd January 2016) at the Roca London Gallery, and Death and Memory: Soane and the Architecture of Legacy at the Sir John Soane's Museum (until 26th March 2016), Daniel Libeskind discusses the role of memory in his work with architectural historian Gillian Darley.

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The architect, who was born in Poland to holocaust-survivor parents, said he came up against criticism when working on the Jewish Museum Berlin as his plans for the building did not resemble a conventional museum.

"If you forget your memory, have a trauma and you repress it, it's going to come to haunt you. It's going to do something to you, something bad, something violent at some point," said Libeskind. 

"It's important not to repress the trauma, it's important to express it and sometimes the building is not something comforting," he added. "Why should it be comforting? You know, we shouldn't be comfortable in this world. I mean seeing what's going around."1

Architects and designers are often asked whose work inspired them as students –Frank Lloyd Wright or Alvar Aalto, Elsa Schiaparelli perhaps, or Charles and Ray Eames –and how this has influenced their own work.

But inspiration often goes back much further than this, into early childhood, and does not necessarily take the form of specific buildings or designs. It might do; but it can also take the form of more indirect experiences: the feel or scent of a material or place, the chance encounter of objects or sensations at a particular moment, or an ordinary incident that makes such a lasting impression that it subsequently operates on an intuitive level.

In this exhibition, the memories of 6 outstanding designers, in architecture and fashion, have been recorded and re-collected in the context of their contemporary work, to create individual multi-sensory displays that explore the relationship between memory and design. The text, both in the exhibition and guide, has been created from new interviews by Clare Farrow, and also features extracts from a new manuscript by Denise Scott Brown. The resulting material provides a fascinating insight into the origins of 6 unique visions in the world of design – personal stories that intersect with world history.

The participants are: Zaha Hadid, Kengo Kuma, Daniel Libeskind, Nieto Sobejano, Denise Scott Brown and Phillip Treacy.