MANCHESTER, U.K.- Daniel Libeskind’s Imperial War Museum North has just opened in Manchester. Daniel Liebeskind has been a leading light in architecture for 30 years, yet he did not build a thing until 1999. However, the Jewish Museum in Berlin was both a professional challenge and a personal test. As a Jew of Polish origin whose parents were Holocaust survivors, Germany, he says, and "de facto Berlin" was a place he had avoided all his life. And as an adult he had visited just twice - once for an exhibition he held there and once to take part in an urban planning competition, City Edge, which was shelved post-reunification. In America, there was a villa waiting, five assistants and a salary. In Berlin, he did not even have a contract. He spoke no German. There was no guarantee that the building would ever happen. And Libeskind, then 43, had never in fact built a building. He had worked for almost 20 years as a kind of theoretical architect, an academic, an intellectual, writing, teaching, reflecting on the meaning of architecture. Meditating, in other words, on meaning.

It was 10 years before the building opened in 1999. History intervened, the Wall came down, Berlin was reunified. The financial aid that had poured in post-unification dried up. Altogether, in the 12 years it took from conception to opening, Libeskind has said: "There were seven changes of government, six name changes to the museum, five senators of culture, four museum directors, three window companies, two sides of a wall, one unification, zero regret." When the museum opened in 1999, it opened empty by public demand. In its first year, all the time empty, there were half a million visitors. Architecture filled the space and the space, much like music, orchestrated the emotions. Libeskind left it to the viewer to weave meaning into the space. He originally conceived the design, 15,000 square meters, taking as his starting point a map of prewar Berlin, on which he plotted the streets where Jews had lived - 185,000 Jews inhabited Berlin before the second world war, 85,000 live there today. Nothing is random, he is saying, nothing is arbitrary. Look for the meaning.

Libeskind has become the architect who can get impossible buildings built. His office in Charlottenburg, seat of the 17th Prussian dynasty who founded Berlin, has in the past 12 years swelled to over 10 times its original size. He now works with 65 assistants. There are projects ongoing in Tel Aviv, Toronto, Dresden. In Denver, he has won a competition to build an extension to the existing art museum. In Britain, there is his controversial "spiral" extension to the Victoria and Albert Museum on the Boilerhouse Yard site.

Libeskind’s magnificent and surprisingly delicate Imperial War Museum North is his first permanent British building. It is not a museum of weapons but a museum designed to express 20th-century conflict; designed, that is, since it is Libeskind, to make us think about conflict not as something external to us - in the past - but as something in which we participate. He has constructed it, he says, as an image of conflict. And he took as his central image the idea of a shattered globe broken into three parts.