While I’m waiting for the master to free himself from a meeting-room full of clients - they’re from Denver, Colorado, where he’s building a new art museum - an assistant takes me through all the work that’s on. Including, I note, some opera productions (including costumes), a commercial office block in Dresden and a vast shopping and leisure centre at Brunnen in Switzerland. Danny’s producing operas AND doing a shopping mall? I’m still reeling from the implications of this when he shimmies into the room.

Since we last met he’s blossomed onto the world stage. Now, he has a new book out in Britain - an unconventional little number, more a manifesto than a monograph, that is bound to enhance his reputation further. But back then, he was an architect’s architect, or in my case a critic’s architect: widely admired by the cognoscenti, little built. But that was changing. It was 1998 and we were at his first significant completed building, the Felix Nussbaum museum in Osnabruck, which honours the distinguished artist who died in Auschwitz. As symbolically charged as his larger Jewish Museum in Berlin, it even includes a stretch of railway track outside as a memento of the horrors of deportation.

But Danny, whose own Jewish family in Poland was decimated by the Holocaust and who is therefore as emotionally involved as any architect could possibly be in these buildings, maintained his ebullience. He likes to give his projects subtitles: at Osnabruck it was "Rooms against Forgetting". He was helping Germany, and himself, to come to terms with its past. "It’s about memory and loss," he remarked then, "but it’s also about the future." And it was, after all, his first realized building, a cause for celebration. Over lunch his Canadian wife and helpmeet, Nina, explained the set-up back in Berlin. "Come and see us," she said. "People think we must be gloomy, serious people. But we’re not. We have a ball."

I’d had an inkling of this because, a year or so earlier, I’d met Libeskind at the Victoria and Albert Museum, on the morning he unveiled his still-unbuilt, competition-winning "Spiral" extension. Ham-fistedly, the V&A decided that this would also be the perfect occasion to reveal to the world that it was about to instigate entrance charges. Scenting blood, the assembled media moved in for the kill on the V & A’s hapless director, Alan Borg. Leaving me at the back of the room, transfixed by Danny’s stunning model of what appeared at first glance to be a casually-flung stack of tottering boxes, at second glance an extraordinary crystalline form, and at third and subsequent glances something that began to make sense of the whole rambling museum complex.

As the entrance-charges debate ran on, with Libeskind embarrassingly sidelined, he sauntered over and began to explain the project to me. He didn’t have so much other work on at that time. You have to remember that Danny, hugely admired as a theorist, was then still an architect with no buildings. This was a huge leap of faith for the V&A, and it was a big number for him. An important cultural project in Britain. One that was not to do with Jewishness, or war. And not in an edge-of-town site either, but bang slap in the middle of the sacrosanct South Kensington museums district. As he talked, I began to understand why he was starting to make real headway. Danny has total, absolute, smiling confidence in his designs and can communicate them in a few rapid-fire sentences. Mind you, not even he could save Alan Borg, a somewhat misunderstood and under-rated director who is now on his way out: but the Spiral project, despite its conspicuous lack of Lottery cash, survives today, amended, rejigged but still recognisably the object I saw back then. There are doubts as to whether it will ever materialise. But yes, says Danny now in his Charlottenburg studio on this shiny Berlin spring morning, yes, it will be built.