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Against interpreting Libeskind

John McKean considers Daniel Libeskind, on show at The Space of Encounter: The Architecture of Daniel Libeskind , 16 September 2004 to 23 January 2005 at the Barbican Art Gallery. Organised between the Barbican Art Gallery and the Jewish Museum Berlin. This review, in edited form, was published in Building Design on 17 September 2004.

As this millennium began, Daniel Libeskind had become one of the most lauded of architects.

His Jewish Museum had been visited by half a million people while yet an empty shell; with the V&A spiral, with wonderful chutzpah he'd seduced the Royal Fine Art Commission in person and won planning permission; and now he had a flood of projects, led by a string of Holocaust-related schemes. In 2001 he published The Space of Encounter, an almost alphabetic collection of output to that date.

But just then, on 9 September 2001, in an event still largely beyond comprehension, a packed passenger aeroplane was intentionally flown into each of the dumb towers of the world's most banal building

Libeskind's life, having been utterly and unexpectedly transformed 13 years earlier by his winning a major competition though never having worked a day in an architect's office, was to be utterly changed again.

Thus, when a Channel 4 film in September 2004 charted the madness of the WTC debacle, its only possible hero was Mr Libeskind. And yesterday the Barbican in London launched the first major retrospective of his work. In the run-up to this major event, he met the press; 'we are offering five to ten minute slots on Tuesday afternoon,' said the Barbican press office to my enquiry, '... and there are still one or two slots free.' (A long way from the days when, some lives ago, I interviewed other US exhibitors in London for Building Design - Charles & Ray Eames or Michael Graves for example - and we spent a relaxed afternoon together.) Diminutive Daniel Libeskind, in cowboy boots and black outfit, is now a gigastar.

As the world can see, the exemplary performer has a new act: his speech as fast and beguiling as ever, his smile as winning, his showmanship impeccable.

We all know the headlines: GROUND ZERO DESIGNERS AT WAR. On TV we see Libeskind, set up to represent the anti-corporate interests, betrayed yet battling with the appalling David Childs (of SOM) and his client, leaseholder Larry Silverstein; Governor Pataki turns up the heat, bangs together the heads of his recalcitrant children (Childs and Lovechild), and pats "these two creative geniuses" on the head, praising one's "incredible vision" and the other's "record of incredible success".

Meanwhile smothering adjectives - "strong, brave, beautiful, symbolic, sculptural, iconic" - stick to an obscenely vast tower meant somehow, in its twist and asymmetrical pinnacle, to resemble the Statue of Liberty.

Finally, in a very black remake of The Fountainhead, as together they pull aside the curtain to reveal this latest 'Freedom Tower', Libeskind's laugh sends a shiver down the spine. OK, that was the TV show.

My interview slot is arranged for when the great man arrives in town to open the show (and introduce a series of his favourite movies).

What will I say? Will I sit silently examining his ever-open smile instead of interrogating him with banalities?

What will he ask? Personae pass briefly and may try to resist interpretation: there is surely no chance of his being understood too quickly. Will I remind him of the ridiculously deep snowdrifts on our expedition from student flats in Colchester to Corbusier's Paris, my tiny car (his wife Nina and my partner packed in the back) finally getting through to Dover only to find that no ships were making the crossing to Modernism? Will I ask where precisely the tower's 1776 feet of height would be measured from, and why? (The Crystal Palace's equally utterly banal symbolic length of 1851 feet was actually the modular, centre-to-centre bay lengths of 1848' 0" plus various cladding layers and kerb added to fit.)

Will I, the hack disguised in voice and shades, grind banal pleasantries about nothing, into a well ground zero?

Forget it; step back from struggling to articulate what Libeskind represents. Instead, let's look, listen and experience the work: there is nothing like it in architecture.

As we enter this task, let us leave interpretation of the meanings of his products at the door. And, equally, leave fascination with his biography to those who finalise the fall of public man - his cowboy boots and New-York-kid cloak, his earlier childhood wrap of disappeared relatives and persistent anti-Semitism, his musical prodigiousness sharing a coat with Barenboim, Zuckerman and Perlman… and all other costume changes including the one I first met 33 years ago, that of Eisenman and Hedjuk's star student.

There are now, in the Barbican, 16 key projects from the last decade shown in model, film and drawing; there are two key sets of earlier drawings; and all is linked to the eponymous book from 2001.

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