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Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin is an interesting piece of architecture. As with all 'strange' works of building design - from Frank Gehry's dreamlike concepts to Le Corbusier's International Style - Libeskind's twisted metallic-framed museum has been as much derided as it has praised. It's simultaneously weird while being unabashedly wonderful; it's the architectural construct of Libeskind's symbolic representation of the Jewish struggle.

The new Jewish Museum is a free-standing extension of the baroque Berlin Museum that has long recorded the city's history. The decision to construct it came largely from political and public relations reasoning, to recognise and demonstrate that Jews played a central role in Berlin's history for centuries before Hitler seized power in 1933.

Libeskind, in metaphorical mood, comments, "The Jewish Museum is conceived as an emblem in which the Invisible and the Visible are the structural features which have been gathered in this space of Berlin and laid bare in an architecture where the unnamed remains the name which keeps still." Clearly, the building's design is informed by Libeskind's almost obsessed architectural thinking, and his intellectually-tinged retelling of the inspiration behind the building is perhaps why many feel his work is unbuildable or unduly assertive. However, it's his passionate belief that architecture can represent time, place, mood; that a building can at once house, for example, Jewish historical artefacts while simultaneously be an artefact in itself, that makes his work so fascinating. Indeed, art critic Arthur Lazere said in 1999, visiting the building was "an aesthetic and emotional experience of the highest order." This was before there was a single exhibit on show apart from the building itself.

It's little wonder the Jewish Museum's new design appealed to Libeskind. "Many eminent experts and Holocaust survivors discussed the implications of building a Jewish Museum in Berlin," Libeskind says. "When I was invited by the Berlin Senate in 1988 to participate, I felt that this was not a programme I had to invent or a building I had to research, rather one in which I was implicated from the beginning, having lost most of my family in the holocaust."

The importance of the museum was as much to inform of the historical struggle of the Jewish people in Germany as it was an icon situated in the heart of Berlin. "There are three basic ideas that formed the foundation for the Jewish Museum design,"

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