Gabion: Daniel Libeskind interview 1/7

It is a bright spring day in Charlottenburg, Berlin, and Danny Libeskind, the world’s most radical working architect, is in an equally bright and beaming mood. Not, now I come to think of it, that I’ve ever known him any other way. This is despite the fact that he has done some sombre stuff, including the building that first brought him to international attention: the silvery zig-zag thunderbolt of Berlin’s Jewish Museum, which finally opens, after twelve years in the making, this September. Or Britain’s fast-appearing Imperial War Museum in Manchester, its form based on fragments of a shattered globe, which opens next year. Libeskind is a formidable intellectual, his writings sometimes opaque, his buildings inevitably controversial. You might expect some gloom, angst, ennui. Well, forget all that. Danny, as anyone who knows him will tell you, is just fun to be around. So long as you can keep up.

This is the man who wants to pull London’s Victoria and Albert Museum into the 21st century with his astonishing "Spiral" extension, an unprecedentedly outre building for conservative Britain. It threatens to become a saga as long as the Berlin museum, but the beleaguered V&A, despite all criticism from those who see the Spiral as an alien intrusion or an unnecessary luxury, is slowly and determinedly gathering the funds to build it.

This is the man who reinvented architecture in the 1980s along with America’s Frank "Guggenheim" Gehry, Britain’s Zaha Hadid, Holland’s Rem Koolhaas, France’s Bernard Tschumi. He is, in short, one of those who threw a bomb at conventional architecture and then rearranged the pieces. The phenomenon was, for a while, called Deconstruction. But if I had to spend time on a desert island with any of them, it would be Danny. Danny, for me, is the gaffer. Danny knows literature. Danny knows music. Danny knows mathematics, philosophy, everything, but in conversation he wears his learning lightly. He is not a closed book. He is receptive. He is good company.

Even before I meet him this time, he pulls one rug from under my feet straight away. I’d got ready to fire a question at him to the effect that landmark cultural buildings are one thing, but the everyday world of commercial office blocks and shopping centres are quite another. That the hatchet-faced, ultra-cautious, bottom-line businessmen responsible for such places would forever be immune to Libeskind’s theorizing, his extreme shape-making, even his famous charm. That he is, effectively, an architect for a cultured elite. And I’m wrong.