Not that he always expected to be an architect. In his late teens he was a gifted musician, having first started playing as a boy on a piano accordion. This was by no means Fiddler on the Roof. For a Jewish boy in post-war Poland, anti-Semitism was still a potent force - as strong, he says, as it had been before the war. When shut, the accordion looked just like a small suitcase. It didn’t look like a musical instrument. Unlike a violin case, it didn’t attract attention, hostile or otherwise. Then the Libeskinds emigrated to the new state of Israel, where young Daniel took part in a high profile American-Israeli musical competition. He emerged as a future star, alongside Daniel Barenboim, Itzhak Perlman, and Pinchas Zuckerman. Next the family moved to New York, and there Libeskind started to play piano professionally at Carnegie Hall. The money was good - better, he says, than architecture has ever paid. But when he gave up, he gave up absolutely. He listens to music, he even sometimes presents his building designs on lined music paper, but he never plays, even privately. Having performed, he knows it would irritate him, having to acknowledge the imperfections.

There’s a theory that Danny gave up music because it meant interpreting the works of others, when he wanted to create for himself. This he refutes, pointing out that a good performance is always an act of creation. But whatever it is in Libeskind’s head that made him a good musician, he transferred first into the study of mathematics, then into architecture. For many, architecture and music are related via their shared concerns with rhythm and counterpoint: this is why architecture is sometimes described as "frozen music". For Libeskind, who has explored this shared realm through his drawings, it’s also a matter of polar opposites. Music works on the mind, is ephemeral, leaves no physical trace: architecture is weighty, physical, permanent. But both are, or can be, public performances. And of course Libeskind had given up performing. "It is strange," he says now with his characteristic laugh. "Because so much of what you have to do in architecture is performance. Not just the way you have to present your ideas. But the way the buildings themselves perform."