Tracing the empathy of an architect

It may take a decade before his exciting complex is complete. But Americans can see what may be in store for New York with his two earliest works in Germany: the acclaimed Jewish Museum Berlin and the little-known Felix Nussbaum House in the northwestern town of Osnabruck. Visiting them is an emotional, even wrenching, experience.

It's easy to see both on a visit to Germany, as I did on a trip last year while gathering material for a profile of Libeskind. It was the beginning of my research, and I was no better informed than the average tourist. I had read news stories about the opening of the Jewish Museum in September 2001, but I knew little about the Felix Nussbaum House. The effect these two wondrous works of architecture had on my feelings was greater than I could have imagined.

I started my research in Berlin. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and reunification, the German capital has reveled in nonstop construction and restoration, much of it in the hands of the world's finest architects. Norman Foster, who designed the Great Court at London's British Museum, restored the Reichstag, the old German parliament building, and Frank Gehry designed the DG Bank Building, with its enormous sculpture of a horse hovering over the atrium.

Neither of these works has had as much effect as Libeskind's Jewish Museum. Many critics place it alongside Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, as one of the most exciting architectural achievements of the last 10 years.

The Jewish Museum was the first architectural commission awarded to the 56-year-old Libeskind, the Polish-born son of Holocaust survivors. It's one of Berlin's most popular attractions, averaging 2,000 visitors a day. The steady stream of people, most of them German, makes the museum feel busy and dynamic but not crowded because there are so many byways and passages.

From the outside, the museum is spectacular. Libeskind has restored a Baroque 18th century stone Prussian courthouse and placed alongside it a gleaming zinc-clad building that zigs and zags like a thunderbolt. He describes it as "a compressed and distorted" six-pointed Jewish star.