Daniel Libeskind: Hero for ground zero

In 1959, Daniel Libeskind sailed into New York harbour on the SS Constitution. He was 13, the son of a Polish Holocaust survivor, and the ship had left the Israeli port of Haifa two weeks earlier, calling at Naples before navigating the last leg to the New World. "It was exactly like in the films," he recalls. "We were woken up early in the morning, five o'clock, and we stood on the deck. It was late August, dawn. And you see the overwhelming nature of New York. You see it once, like a revelation. And then you accept it, right?"

Today, that accordion-playing boy whose hyperactive mind took him on to maths and music scholarships before pitching him into New York's Cooper Union to study architecture, is dealing with something unreal. Libeskind's is one of the seven architectural practices and groupings shortlisted to rebuild ground zero, the 16-acre site that used to surround the twin towers of the World Trade Centre. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the New York and New Jersey Port Authority are due to announce the winner of the competition early in February – and current feedback suggests that it's a two-horse race between Libeskind and Lord Foster.

If New York has a mind to signal a Dirty Harry "Do you feel lucky, punk?" to terrorists – and to those who doubt the long-term viability of the American Dream – then Foster's twin towers of power are a shoo-in. These joined structures constitute fine architecture and would undoubtedly set new standards of strength and safety for glass and steel megaliths. But do they have soul? Would the burial tumulus that is ground zero, where 20,000 body-parts have been painstakingly mapped, be dwarfed by an architectural statement more intent on greatness than on salving the endless vibrations of the cataclysm?

Libeskind, flanked as always by his wife and business director, Nina, sits forward in his chair in the lounge of the Four Seasons hotel in London. And, as always, his body language and spillage of ideas and interjections signify quest and questioning – not unusual in the case of fine architects. But he contains a fissile ambiguity: he is invariably certain, and then, with equal certainty, pushes those certainties into increasingly difficult areas of meaning.

Libeskind is like his architecture and like Walter Benjamin, the philosopher he so admires – always in a condition of becoming. Anyone who encounters his buildings and imagines they are experiencing a finality misses the point. They are freeze-frame eruptions from both the past and the future, thrown up from a magma of mass and maths. And at a few minutes past 4pm in the Four Seasons' lounge, immersed in a smog of chatter and irritatingly plangent piano chords, he knows that the ground-zero project will provide him with his last chance to do what, perhaps, no other living architect can do as well.

The full potency of Daniel Libeskind's architecture has been seen only once, in the Jewish Museum in Berlin, a haunting fusion of intellect and emotion whose compelling presence exempts it from normal critical analysis. It's obvious that Libeskind sees the ground-zero project as a kind of destiny, a combined dawn and vanishing-point; and just as obvious that, in this case, he fears rejection like never before.

If the Jewish Museum proved that he had the stamina and vision to deliver a building of such original complexity, then the sanctification of the WTC site becomes the ultimate, once-in-a-lifetime test for an architect to whom questions of time, space, emotion and memory are the matrix from which all architecture should, ideally, originate. Thus, absolute destruction must be met with absolute creation.

"The world shifted on that day," he says. "And I think that day will become more important, not less. Was it Shakespeare who said that truth is the daughter of time? But this is not just about memorialisation. The voice of the people will prevail. They want something special, something significant. The event was unbelievable. The scale of the vanishing was unbelievable. You need a key to open it, right? Later on, you have to calculate, make it reasonable."

He found the key 70ft below ground. "I went down to the site. I had no preconceived idea. I said to Nina, 'I have no idea, none.' I said, 'What am I going to do?' And then, when I walked down to the bedrock, I saw the whole scheme. And I said to Nina, 'I'm only afraid that everybody's going to do the same thing! It's so obvious.' "

The origins of that vision – a "memory foundation" made up of a series of shard-like buildings, a memorial walkway, transit hubs, Heroes Park and Wedge of Light – lie in Berlin, a matter of days before the Libeskinds travelled to New York to prep their project. Nina recalls: "So I said to Daniel, 'Before we go, what should I get? What do you need?' And he said he had everything he needed. And he went and he got out his anthology of Walt Whitman, and then he got out a very obscure story by Herman Melville. And then he read – because our daughter has a copy – the American Constitution. And he said, 'Now I'm beginning to feel that I'm prepared.' "

Libeskind beams. "I forgot that! That's prophetic. It's kind of, 'What are you going to concentrate on? You're not going to concentrate on square metres.' Like the Jewish Museum, I never thought, 'It's a project; it's gotta get built.' I didn't calculate, 'Now, I have this eight weeks – what can I do for $40,000?' It's also personal. It wasn't just abstract. It's also spiritual, and cultural. Restore the skyline, connect the streets – what does that really mean? I didn't have to go to the library or the archives to find out what I felt about this project. It was instant. It was visceral, not just intellectual.

"It's not that everything should be weighted toward the tragedy. You also have to tie the tragedy to the light and the beauty and vitality of the site. If you think of Greek temples, what's depicted on the front of the temple? It's war, right? And conflict. But the temple is not about that. It frees you to look at light and space, and it's something positive. That's the crux: how you connect this whole event, without turning the whole site into something that nobody wants to know – that's too heavy."

The Park of Heroes and the Wedge of Light were "about the light of the site, not just the massing of the buildings. It was a struggle to accommodate the density, the phasing of the site. I spent more time on the phasing than almost anything in my life. How do you get a handle on it? What do you do first, right? What can you achieve, in a realistic way, that's also adaptable to a future that, in a way, is abnormal? What do you connect? Where are the streets?"

They're the same questions that applied in 1959, when he first encountered New York. "It's something of another world for the immigrant, who has no idea what's going to happen to them," he muses. "They have their expectations for the future – their dreams, right?" Libeskind, and six other architectural practices, are also immigrants, to a vast landscape of loss and renewal.

But whose architectural dream is right for New York? One thing is certain: even if Libeskind's scheme is not picked, its layers of content will provoke a rigorous re-examination of the one that is. And that alone would make his "memory foundation" a revelation of singular power.

All seven ground zero projects can be viewed at www.renewnyc.com