His emergence as a world-class architect makes that old cliché about a meteoric rise look tame. Daniel Libeskind’s first completed building was opened only five years ago. Last week he won the biggest, most prestigious and most sensitive architectural commission in the world: to rebuild ground zero in Manhattan.

Architecture’s newest star had already turned heads with his extraordinary design for the Jewish Museum in Berlin, a jagged lightning-bolt of a building unlike anything previously seen.

But Libeskind has surpassed even that with his vision of the tallest spire in the world looming over the shattered site of the World Trade Center’s twin towers.

With the attention of New Yorkers focused on him with laser-like intensity, the 56-year-old architect should be walking on eggshells but he seems undaunted. By now Libeskind is almost fireproof: in Berlin he persevered despite receiving hate mail and the death of his champion, a city architect who was killed by a letter bomb.

Small and tubby in stature, he is a cheerful man who speaks in a rush of half-sentences and sports rectangular designer specs, a leather jacket and cowboy boots.

Libeskind has never flinched from breaking the mould — in the most literal sense. To research his design for the Imperial War Museum in Manchester, he threw a teapot in a plastic bag out of the window. The result is a dramatic structure of broken shards that house the museum.

Although polite almost to the point of shyness in private, to sell his ground zero design Libeskind emerged as a polished television performer. This was hardly surprising: at 12 he had been a musical prodigy playing the piano alongside Daniel Barenboim. But as the American media came to realise, he was also a street fighter. When he found himself on the shortlist, he based himself in the Four Seasons hotel in Manhattan and spent every available moment promoting his scheme to anybody who would listen.

Many New Yorkers knew that the Holocaust had nearly destroyed Libeskind’s parents and haunted his childhood in post-war Poland. But it was his description of arriving by ship in New York at the age of

13 that helped clinch the competition for him.

Presenting his scheme in December, he explained that his design for the world’s tallest skyscraper (293ft higher than the 1,483ft Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur), topped by a slender tower of internal gardens, was inspired by the sight of the Statue of Liberty bearing her torch.

His approach of appealing directly to the public worked, because ground zero does not have a conventional client figure at its head. Many groups, including families of the victims of 9/ll, are involved.

The project now faces the obstacle course encountered by Libeskind’s revolutionary design of the Spiral, the extension at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Denied a national lottery grant, its funding is approaching a critical point.

But then life has always been a struggle for Libeskind. The experience of his Polish Jewish parents was horrific. “Basically their lives were broken from the time of their youth,” he recalled. His mother was a seamstress with her own shop and his father was an office worker. When Germany invaded they fled east, only to be arrested and sent to camps in Siberia. It was the Soviet contribution to the Holocaust.