Daniel Libeskind talks fast, and these days he needs to. Showered with commissions on foot of his sensational Jewish Museum in Berlin, he is in the air 200 days a year, travelling between cities and projects, armed with a "pile of books" and a sketchpad. To him, planes offer a monastic environment in the sky. "You're above the world, above the clouds, and it's fantastic. Take-off is the moment of truth, with the single text 'Fasten Your Seatbelts' as a sort of metaphor for humanity, of the dangers we all face," he says.
Libeskind has certainly taken off. His studio in the west Berlin district of Charlottenburg, cluttered with models of past and future projects, is currently working on major buildings in Denver, London, Manchester, Majorca and Bern, to name just a random handful.
He was also sought out by Dublin-based developer Terry Devey and talked into designing a mega-structure to replace the derelict Carlisle Pier in D·n Laoghaire Harbour. What appealed to him about this project was the idea of arrival and departure, of coming and going. "The man is an absolute genius," says Devey. "I feel very privileged that we managed to get him to Ireland in the first place and then to have him take such an interest in this project. He feels so passionately about it that he's almost taking responsibility for it."
Libeskind might have become a musician, but turned to architecture instead, spending years in universities propagating his Deconstructivist ideas. Amazingly, the Jewish Museum was his first building project, and he was already 43 when he designed it in 1989.
The biggest scheme on the Auto-CAD terminals and model-making rooms in Studio Daniel Libeskind at present is an enormous shopping centre on the outskirts of Bern, the Swiss capital. Though he had never designed a shopping centre, his ideas won him the commission.
"I told them I love shopping, but I hate shopping centres," he says. "So when they asked me what my concept was, I mentioned the Marx brothers' film, The Big Store, where they move into a department store like Macys and they start living in it, and bring in all their friends. So we're developing it in a very different way, as a public space. Of course, it has the required number of stores, but the language is new. We're giving it a human dimension by bringing in daylight, because people should know where they are and what time of the day it is."
Libeskind, a Polish Jew who has been a US citizen since 1965, is a very persuasive salesman for his work. But his extraordinary success must also be attributed to the steely determination of his Canadian Jewish wife and partner, Nina; together, they make a formidable team.
When things first went awry with his emblematic Jewish Museum, after the Berlin Senate decided to scrap the project in 1991, "it was Nina who said: 'Don't despair, it's a political process'. And you know the famous line about how you can't fight City Hall - well, you can! It was very interesting. Over time, it blossomed into a really important debate in Germany. 'Do we need such a museum? What is it about? Why does this building look like that?' - these were the sort of questions."
A year later, the Berlin Senate agreed it could go ahead.
"You have to able to risk failure," says Libeskind. "If all you want to do is to get a smooth image across, you won't achieve anything. So I strongly believe in the democratic process. I believe that if you can find an opening to the heart and soul, then you have the chance to succeed."
Daniel Libeskind, many of whose relatives perished in the Holocaust, didn't know anybody in Berlin when he won the competition in 1989. His visa from the German government specifically stated that he was being admitted "to realise his project for a Jewish Museum in Berlin". The last thing he anticipated was that Berlin would become his home.
"People from my background always avoided Germany, and I was almost disowned by my family back in Lodz. 'How could you be doing this?' they said." But the architect had to go; he had a museum to build.
He gathered around him a talented group of young architects, mostly straight out of college, including Letterkenny-born Tarla MacGabhann, and turned them into disciples of his brand of deconstruction; they were to take nothing as given - even down to what constituted a window.
Libeskind invests all of his architecture with layers of meaning and symbolism, some of it quite obscure. Who would have guessed, for example, that the characteristic zig-zag shape of the Jewish Museum, with its "bolts of lightning" windows, is an exploded Star of David? In the architect's own words, "the Jewish Museum is conceived as an emblem in which the Invisible and Visible are the structural features which have been gathered in this space of Berlin and laid bare in an architecture where the unnamed remains the name which keeps still".
Like all of Libeskind's projects, though, this one had its own name - Between the Lines, because he wrote his original text describing the project on musical notepaper. Berlin's planners were so diverted by this unusual approach that he got their letter of approval in two weeks.
"It was the music that did it," he recalls, excitedly. "We just had a very interesting conversation and got to talking about Bach, Wagner, etc. We discussed nothing to do with the building. Had we started discussing the project, it would have been dead in five seconds."
Libeskind agrees with Alberti's advice that an architect should know about music, mathematics and philosophy as well as geometry and grammar, because architecture is "not simply about technology and building a work of engineering, but first and foremost one of the arts". He also believes that architecture should be "hand-crafted". Thus, all of the design work on the museum was done completely by hand, without any resort to computers. "It's not on disk, it's on paper!" he exclaims, insisting that he uses AutoCAD only to execute projects.
Though plagued by problems, the museum finally opened to the public on September 9th after lying vacant for two years while a fractious debate raged about what to put in it. But there was such interest in the building that even empty it attracted 200,000 visitors.
The voids remain as powerful as ever, particularly the Holocaust tower. Its irregular shape, soaring concrete walls, single chink of light, steel ladder out of reach and going nowhere and the heavy door that clunks shut after you enter combine to make it utterly unforgettable.
The rest of the museum, which attempts to tell the story of Jews in Germany from the time of Constantine to the present, is too cluttered by exhibits. Indeed, Frankfurter Algemeine complained that it had "broken the spell of Libeskind's architecture once and for all".As for those who argued that nothing should be put into it, the architect says: "I always designed it as a museum, with the voids giving contrast to the exhibits. It was never meant to be an empty space. It's about great heights of achievement, not just about nothing."
After he won another competition in 1996 for the so-called Boilerhouse extension to London's Victoria and Albert Museum, his daring design slotted into the sedate environs of South Kensington provoked such a reaction that he thought he might be strangled by some opponents.
"I'm not one of those architects who say 'This is my project - take it or leave it.' I appreciated the process of consultation with the various societies, the public meetings, the opinions and comments people expressed, because I always thought that I could learn from it all.
"You can't do anything good if you don't bring people with you, or if you cheat them. So when it came to designing the shopping centre in Bern, I advised my clients, who were slightly tenuous about it, to make all the drawings available, don't hide a single one. Just show it all."
One of his most popular projects in Britain was a temporary pavilion in Hyde Park last summer, which appealed to children in particular. "Don't believe the myths that Londoners are more conservative than elsewhere. They love new architecture, provided it's interesting."
Libeskind's submarine-like Imperial War Museum in Manchester, due to open next March, is bound to be another big hit. Inspired by the idea of a world shattered by conflict, he took the crust of the Earth, broke it up and reassembled the fragments in a most unusual way. Spatially and kinetically, it will be "very exciting" and not at all pompous. "It's all double curves, including the floor. So when you come into the building, you are actually standing not on a flat plane, but on a piece of curvature of the Earth, which is pretty dramatic." He hopes that visitors will get a sense of conflict, but also of the idea that the world is coming together through increasing globalisation - which is ironic, given that it was his wife's niece, Naomi Klein, who provided the bible for anti-capitalist protesters by writing No Logo.
Libeskind denies that he, too, is becoming a global brand name. "I think I'm very lucky. The people I'm working with are not interested in a brand, they're interested in interesting buildings. They don't commission me because of a style, so I haven't fallen prey to branding." Yet his name appears repeatedly in the Jewish Museum and its zig-zag shape has become its logo. It is branded on every plastic bag in the museum shop and you can even buy a stainless steel block miniature for 59 DM (IR£23.75), inscribed "copyright 2001 D. Libeskind/Aedes". He says he would like one day to write a book about architecture and money. "Because it should be about investment and what can you do with limited resources. If I was asked to do a building in wood or in gold, I would do the wood building. I like to have limited budget."
Libeskind thinks it's "fantastic" that he is now in demand from the private sector. Just as museums must have shops and cafΘs to be viable, he firmly believes that commercial projects need to embrace "the art of public space". So there is to be a restaurant on the top floor of a new corporate headquarters he's designing in Dresden, open to everybody and not just the business - though he concedes that the public has a justifiable fear of developers' greed and "the cynicism with which cities are built".
Not so in D·n Laoghaire, he says. "I've been an emigrant many times. I understand what it means. The mailboat pier is not just another site to be exploited for picturesque requirements. What we propose is a new programme for the site, a link between the past and the future." History, he says, "is not like a bank. You can't just take money out of it, you've got to put something back in". The scheme for the Carlisle Pier, with its hotel, apartments, shopping mall and diaspora museum, is not about "ripping off" a public amenity, but "comes from the heart".
The pier is within sight of the Martello tower in Sandycove. "Everyone who has read Joyce knows that route. But none of us can count on survival through nostalgia alone. History must be creatively reinterpreted." And that applies as much to D·n Laoghaire as to Berlin.
Daniel Libeskind gives a lecture at DIT Bolton Street on November 23rd, 7 p.m. - 8 p.m.