"Absolutely. I know it just from talking to people on the streets. Not intellectuals, not art lovers necessarily, or people in the cultural world. Just citizens. What London needs, what the V&A needs, is something new. Something that contributes to an enormous history. Who needs it? The V&A needs it! The Tate has something fantastic, so has the Royal Opera House and the British Museum. They’ve reinvented themselves and become destinations. "

Ah but, I counter, what about the argument that the V&A has seven miles of corridors and not enough visitors and needs more space like it needs a hole in the head? Danny is ready for this, and is having none of it. "We’re not creating more gallery space for those glass cases. We’re creating public spaces that give completely new access to the collections, that make restaurants and cafes, and spaces for 21st century activities - which is to do with fashion and the ongoing vitality of British culture."

He pauses for breath. "It’s not about throwback stuff, more galleries - how do we hang famous paintings on these diagonal walls. No! They’re not meant for that! They’re meant to connect the other galleries and give a completely new physiognomy to the building as a whole. It’s about giving the public a means to get to grips with an incredible legacy - it’s one of the most inspiring, fantastic museums in the world! You need a sign that this is a 21st century museum - cutting edge, contemporary. It’s precisely because it is the orphan among the museums that it needs this. It needs it even more than the others. Only cynics think that such institutions should drown in their own history."

So that’s the V&A sorted, then. But who exactly is this cheerful chappie who’s got the solution to Britain’s most intractable museum problem? The Libeskinds, citizens of the world, came to Berlin in 1988 to build the Jewish Museum. It was a tough decision: so much painful history to come to terms with. That was before the Wall came down, hence the fact that you find them today in the prosperous western quarter, the office occupying several rooms of a huge, high-ceilinged converted 1920s industrial building, with a flat nearby on the well-heeled if slightly ritzy shops ‘n’ bars street of the Kurfurstendamm. Rather than, say, in some crumbling characterful block up in the former East Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg, which is where much of Berlin’s creative scene now is. "That’s trendy," observes Danny. "This is pragmatic. And the rent’s cheap."

But now, at long last, the Jewish Museum is complete. It drew huge crowds even when it was empty - some said, though Libeskind never did, that it was complete in itself, and needed no exhibition fit-out. It is true that the building, with its central void commemorating the echoing absence of Jewish life and culture in the city since the Nazi era, and its chillingly effective dead-end Holocaust gallery, is narrative architecture of a high order. But it does have exhibition spaces and finally, after more than a decade of arguing - interrupted and energised by the little matter of the collapse of Communism and the reunification of Germany - the city has finally finished the job. Which leaves Libeskind in a slight dilemma. Does he stay in the city?