There we have the crux of it. A Libeskind building performs. It sings, it tells stories. It takes you by the elbow and points things out to you. Things you might not have noticed or understood. And, as with music or mathematics, there is an underlying harmony and proportion. This is an ancient thing. The "Spiral", at the V&A, for instance, is composed according to the ancient Greek proportioning system of the Golden Section, which in turn derives from the proportions found in all aspects of nature, from snail shells to the human body. If the Spiral is abstract, then the Imperial War Museum in Manchester is more overtly symbolic. We have War - the shattered globe - and some of the pieces of that imagined globe, arranged as linked, broken shards to form the museum. One dips towards the water of the Manchester Ship Canal. One hugs the earth behind. One - an observation tower - projects into the sky. War is waged on the earth, at sea, in the air.

By chance these are also elements. The fourth element is fire, which you might think of as war itself. Libeskind does not express it architecturally. But its absence is perhaps more powerful than its presence would be. That’s how he works. This, by the way, is very close to Old Trafford, home of Manchester United, and the vast Trafford Park Shopping Centre. It’s hardly Berlin or central London. "Sometimes," says Libeskind judiciously, "You have to make your own context." What with this and the new Lowry gallery/theatre complex just across the water, that context is becoming steadily more cultural. But then as he says, every project is cultural. Even an office block. Because its shape generates controversy and discussion, then it’s cultural. QED.

The Libeskind studio, like his output, is not very Berlin. Berlin architects are neat, have neat rows of identical computers and chairs and desk lamps. Studio Libeskind is by contrast a mess: hard to find, no formal reception area, instinctively uncorporate. In there you find a gallimaufry of objects: cardboard and wooden models, sundry detritus, chairs of all descriptions, odd bits of computer kit, and lots of people, all amazingly young. There are several big rooms, and each room has between one and four different projects going on. The discarded working models pile up on shelves reaching to the tall ceilings. In one corridor, finished models are mounted on the walls amid the clutter. It feels in parts like Sir John Soane’s Museum in London - originally the home and studio of the great late Georgian architect - which was also a personal museum of ancient artefacts. And which is also where Libeskind, earlier this year, had an exhibition. A small, choice exhibition - a few little models, a few drawings - but the most popular show in the museum’s history, such that, on the day I went, it was overcome with the demand and had to turn away visitors. "But we’ve come all the way from Milan to see this!" remonstrated the leader of one party of cultural tourists as they were politely escorted off the premises.

Libeskind had arranged his little models around Soane’s famous breakfast table, as if they were titbits ready to be eaten. Why? "I remembered that line in Alice in Wonderland - where someone says that before breakfast you must have at least seven completely new ideas. Soane was like that - seven completely new ideas about the world, before he sat down to breakfast. But arranging them round the table is saying that architecture’s not for an elite. It’s the real world."