Daniel Judah Liebermann was born in South Orange, New Jersey in 1930 to engineer Morton and Dr. Shulamith Liebermann. He attended New York’s prestigious and private Fieldston School prior to receiving an undergraduate degree from Johns Hopkins University. Following graduation, he spent more than a year in the master of architecture program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, before leaving for a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture at the University of Colorado, Boulder. From 1956 to 1958 he was a member of the Frank Lloyd Wright Fellowship at Taliesen, in Scottsdale, AZ and Spring Green, WI. In 1959 he moved to California first working with landscape architect Thomas Church and then with Aaron Green Associates, Wright’s associate for the Marin County Civic Center project. Apart from a nine-year span in Northern Europe, he lived and practiced architecture in Northern California for the remainder of his life. He passed away in 2015

In 1960, Liebermann began working for a landscape architecture firm in Marin County where he met his future wife, Eva, a landscape architect from Germany who earned her master’s degree in Hanover and worked for the Frankfurt Planning Office. Liebermann established his own practice in 1961 designing (or co-designing) more than three dozen single-family homes in the San Francisco Bay Area. His modest yet spacious houses made of wood, concrete, glass, and recycled materials explore an architectural philosophy that integrated ideas from Wright, John Lautner, Bruce Goff, Knut Knutsen, Paolo Soleri, Pier Luigi Nervi, Félix Candela’s thin concrete shells, and the 300-year old Dutch Farm House he lived in as a child, in New Jersey.

His work bridges “organic” architecture and California mid-century modernism. His buildings are conceived as coherent whole forms with continuous open interiors. He was an early proponent of ecological architecture, believing that houses should create a harmonious relationship between humans and nature. The houses are typically organized around a central sculptural column, constructed of different materials including woven steel rods, cast-in-place concrete, and interlocking brick arches, with wooden beams radiating outward to define the building periphery. His designs incorporate passive solar strategies, thermal mass, radiant-heat flooring, reused building materials, and found objects such as thick polycarbonate airplane windows used as horizontal light tubes in masonry walls.

Daniel Liebermann taught at The Technical University in Trondheim, Norway, at the San Francisco Institute of Architecture, and UC Berkeley Extension. His work has been published in Architectural Design, L’Architettura, California Home + Design, The New York Times, Hand Made Houses: A Century of Earth-Friendly Home Design and New Organic Architecture: The Breaking Wave, among others.

Sources: Evans, Ben. Daniel Liebermann Obituary. Point Reyes Light, 2015 https://www.ptreyeslight.com/article/daniel-liebermann-architect-dies-84 Accessed 11 April 2017