When Daniel Libeskind was a boy, recently arrived in New York from Poland, he would spend his evenings watching his mother cook. By day, Dora Libeskind worked in a sweatshop, dyeing and sewing fur collars in such unventilated conditions that she would come home with fur stuck to her clammy skin. But after a shower in their housing co-op in the Bronx she was transformed into the inspirational matriarch her son remembers: she'd haul a live carp from the bathtub where she'd kept it since she'd bought it at the market, gut the fish, pickle the herring, and cook it for dinner, chatting to Daniel and quoting Spinoza as she went along.

It was during one of these evenings that she looked at the boy drawing at the kitchen table - as he invariably did - and said: 'You want to be an artist? To end up hungry in a garret somewhere? This is the life you want for yourself?'

Young Libeskind cited the only rich artist he knew of.

'Warhol?' said his mother. 'For every Warhol there are a thousand penniless waiters. Be an architect. You can always do art in architecture, but you can't do architecture in art.' And then she added, using the sort of metaphor that came naturally to her: 'You get two fish with the same hook.'

Ever since then, Daniel Libeskind - whose life went on to take, with stunning success, the very course his mother intended - has been attuned to the intimate relationship of architecture to food. 'Food and architecture are very closely entwined,' he tells me over dinner at his favourite Japanese restaurant - Hasaki in New York's East Village. 'I think people no longer separate: here's architecture, and here's cuisine. It's a singular experience. In fact, I think they are getting closer. I designed a restaurant for the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and it's a very spectacular place. It's like a museum space - it has a view over Toronto, and it's designed to give people who come to the museum not just a restaurant but an experience of where they are. And they've hired a very, very good chef - he's creating a cocktail based on the form of the museum!'

The original sketches for the Royal Ontario Museum were drawn on napkins - and turned out to be so close to the final design that the napkins themselves were exhibited. In fact, Libeskind has produced some of his best work at the dinner table - his famous Jewish Museum in Berlin was mostly elaborated on kitchen roll. 'I know a lot of architects who draw on expensive paper that will never disintegrate and is designed for archives. To me that's a slightly fictitious version of the creative process. The creative process involves whatever pops into your head.'

Nina, Libeskind's wife and intensely close collaborator, is sitting next to him and smiling as he says this, recalling no doubt all the ephemeral pieces of paper she has been called upon to preserve. We had originally planned to have dinner at their place, a magnificent downtown loft with a view of the skyscrapers Libeskind found so enthralling when he first arrived in New York on the boat. Nina, by all accounts an incredible cook, was going to feed us. But just days before our dinner she fell and broke her wrist, so I am forced to picture their daily - or nightly - ritual instead.

'I could eat here every day,' says Libeskind of Hasaki as they order a mountain of beautifully arranged sushi, 'but my favourite thing is not to go out, because we eat out so often around the world - by necessity. We travel a lot. To me the greatest celebration is when Nina cooks. And she's indomitable, because she comes home at 11 o'clock and cooks a dinner. Once we were flying back from somewhere and got home at one o'clock at night. She looked at me, and I had that look in my eyes, and she actually cooked a dinner. It was fantastic. And she's crazy because in New York almost no one cooks: you pick up the phone and order in five minutes.'

Every evening after they come home from their office near the World Trade Centre site, of which Libeskind is the master planner, Daniel and Nina crack open a bottle of champagne (their fridges are always stocked with it - at home and at work). Nina cooks in the small but functional kitchen that opens out into their main space, and Daniel sits at the bar overlooking the stove and reads her the New York Times. They usually eat at around 10pm. 'In 38 years of marriage,' Nina tells me, 'we've never had a meal at home without a bottle of wine, candles, and three courses.'

'Sometimes our daughter's friends come over and they think there's some kind of party going on,' adds Daniel with an impish grin. 'Rachel says: no, no, my parents do this every night!'

The Libeskinds' three children - Lev, Noam and Rachel - grew up all over the world, exposed to an extraordinary range of cuisines ('the only thing I don't cook is Japanese or Chinese food,' says Nina), and with very fixed assumptions about what a meal entails. 'A meal is not just about eating,' Daniel explains, 'it's a discourse. Some of our meals go on for five hours.' No family meal, Nina adds, is ever under three hours. And she swears that the kids have never set foot in a fast-food joint. 'I had a very strict rule when the children were growing up,' she says. 'We could not discuss work, and they could not discuss school. We could talk about literature, politics, ideas, fables - the kids were allowed to bring any book to the table.'

'It was like a Haggadah,' says Daniel, 'every meal is a storytelling meal.'

'It wasn't like I didn't want to talk to them about school,' Nina goes on, 'they could talk when they were cleaning up and at other times, but not at the dinner table. It really worked.'

Daniel is allowed to draw at this table, but not talk about his drawings - he can be inspired, but not discuss his inspiration. This routine has produced the most reliable, most literal food for thought over decades - and Libeskind wouldn't miss it for the world.

One of his favourite stories is about the time when he was working on the Victoria and Albert Museum extension. 'I was invited to dine with the Queen,' he recalls with a smile, 'in a very small setting. It was a Friday night, I was in London, and I said: I'm sorry, I prefer to dine with my wife. Everyone thought I was crazy - no one forgoes an invitation to dine with the Queen of England! But it's true: I do prefer to dine with my wife.' He smiles at Nina through his trademark black-rimmed glasses, and laughs his trademark laugh: it's infectious, and leaves him looking somewhere between a boy and a bear.

Though he arrived in New York at the age of 13, Daniel Libeskind's accent still bears the imprint of his earlier life. When he first submitted his proposal for the World Trade Centre site - which has been a famously tortured and convoluted process - it was suggested in outrage that a 'real' New Yorker would be a more appropriate candidate to memorialise those who had died on 11 September. Libeskind was appalled: there is arguably nothing more reflective of the real New York than the experience of an immigrant such as Libeskind. He now says, in the most gentlemanly way possible, that the project is 'going very well. It's started construction, and it's going to resemble my plan very closely. Despite all the battles and compromises and evolution of the project, you do your best. And it's going to shine with that spirit: maybe it will not be perfect, but it will be very moving. And that's New York.'

Libeskind has had a unique career as an architect: for most of his adult life he has been an academic, often teaching the most esoteric and theoretical aspects of architecture. Then he was invited to build a small museum in Germany honouring Felix Nussbaum, an artist who died at Auschwitz. 'Imagine that you've been trained as a surgeon but you've never had your hand on a scalpel,' Libeskind wrote in his recent memoir, Breaking Ground. 'And someone says: "Now you are going to operate on this head."' But the project was close to his heart, and the eventual building such a success that he was invited to design the Jewish Museum as a result. In other words, Libeskind's very first building was completed when he was 52 years old, and his second opened to the public just six years ago.

Now his office has over 40 projects on the go at once. Libeskind, now 61, doesn't have a desk of his own, but sits down with whatever team and project he chooses to focus on in the course of the day. He is phenomenally attentive to every detail of each scheme. There are projects in South Korea, in Singapore, in the US - including a private house and a social housing project for the elderly in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. There is a tower in Warsaw that will be the tallest building in Europe and stands only a few blocks from where Libeskind's mother was born. The shapes that populate his office are a beautiful series of spikes and curves - squares that rotate into cylinders, cats' cradles come to sparkling life, not just in the models and images of buildings, but in other forms, too. There is a Swarovski crystal-clad chandelier of LED lighting strips, a stainless-steel armchair, a spectacular grand piano.

But what has set Libeskind apart ever since he dazzled people with his plans for the Jewish Museum is not, first and foremost, the look of the buildings, but the way in which they are each conceptually based in an almost epiphanic understanding of people's lives, and their most cherished ghosts. Perhaps because of the many years he spent as an academic architect - thinking rather than becoming mired in civic bureaucracies - he is interested in ideas, in what needs to be preserved and remembered, what needs to be conserved in terms of energy or cost, in how people live. Do they need a garden or a balcony, regardless of how many floors up they are? How do they like to shop? When do they need light, and when silence?

When Libeskind was first taken to the World Trade Centre site, he pressed past the official tour until he came up against a vast, multicoloured and stratified barrier. What was it, he asked? Something called a 'slurry wall', he was told: the thing that held back the river, the boundary that had kept the rest of New York alive, without which the city would have been engulfed by water. Instantly, Libeskind knew the symbolic significance of this wall, and seeing beyond the idea of towers and monuments, decided that this single facade alone had to be a crucial part of any scheme.

As he says, architecture, like food, is about the human beings involved: 'I was never interested in the aestheticisation of food,' Libeskind elaborates. 'Of course food can be very beautiful, but it's what I've always said about architecture - it's not about walls and plumbing systems. It's like music. Food is about life.'

If Libeskind's life has been in many ways coloured or punctuated by his relationship to food, that may be because it began in hunger. His mother Dora was one of 11 siblings from Warsaw, which had the largest Jewish population of any European city. His father Nachman was one of five, the son of an itinerant Yiddish storyteller from Lodz, which had the second-largest Jewish population. In 1939, both fled their homes and went to Russia, where they were captured by the Red Army (long before they met) and sent to hard-labour camps in Siberia and on the Volga. They were set free in 1942 and began a long trek south to Kyrgyzstan, where they hoped at least to be warm. It was there that the two Polish refugees met, fell in love, and starved together. As a famine took over the region, they survived on bugs and weeds. While their friends died, they managed to have a child - Daniel's sister Ania.

When Dora discovered she was pregnant a second time, the couple chose to attempt the journey home. It was 1946; they had no idea what had become of Poland in the seven years they had been gone. Dora left Nachman in Warsaw to sell their only source of income - a sack of salt he had dug out of a mine - and went ahead to Lodz, to seek out Nachman's family, whom they assumed would take them in. When she arrived in Lodz, eight-and-a-half months pregnant and accompanied by their three-year-old daughter, Dora found that 85 of their immediate relatives had been killed. She wandered the streets - sobbing, with Ania clinging to her in fear - and finally, seeing a monstrous-looking female Russian guard with a Kalashnikov across her lap, begged the woman for help. The unlikely Samaritan took pity on them and let them sleep on a metal cot in the guardhouse. The next morning, Dora went into labour, and Daniel Libeskind was born.

'My father, because he was a survivor, said: always cook food you don't like,' Libeskind tells me. 'Because if you like something, you come to desire it. My kids remember this very well. And he told me the reason for it, which was that when he was in a concentration camp in Russia, who would die first? People from well-off families, because they couldn't take the very reduced notion of eating, whereas the poor people would survive because they had no such expectations. So he developed this theory about not eating food you like - as a precaution.'

Still, Nina adds, he didn't have to be wedded to this idea while Dora was alive (she died in 1979), since every night after they moved to New York they ate well. Dora was a wonderful cook. 'My mother was a horrible cook,' says Nina, who grew up in Canada. 'For many years nothing happened except what came out of a tin. And I'll never forget, when I met Daniel's mother ... when we were first married she invited me for dinner. She walked in with a basket of mushrooms, and I swear to you I had never seen a fresh mushroom in my life. I was 20 years old, and I thought: Wow! What do you do with those?'

Libeskind still remembers with great fondness a few of his mother's recipes - 'gogol-mogol', for instance, a Jewish eggy, honeyed concoction she would make when he was ill, and which almost made him look forward to sickness itself. Her herring, he says, would be his preferred last meal. And then, he says, turning to Nina, 'there one dish you cannot touch, and that's my mother's kreplach.'

'I know how to make kreplach!' Nina exclaims, a little peeved.

'Yes, but not the way my mother made it.'

And so, in this unassuming Japanese restaurant in New York, I am given a glimpse of a Jewish cliche in action: Libeskind and his personal 'madeleines'. 'That's the most fundamental novel of the 20th century,' Libeskind says of Proust, 'because the notion that food, that taste, can transform your life - could resurrect your life - is so beautiful, and so true, actually.'

If his mother's Polish cooking takes him back to his childhood, however, there have been other landmark meals as well. There was one in particular that offered the working-class boy a sudden surreal leap into another world, and altered his taste buds for good.

'I have to tell you that the most formative experience, in terms of cuisine, is the most crazy one that we've ever had,' Libeskind remembers with enthusiasm. 'We were living in the Bronx, and we were poor students - just married. Nina's parents had come to visit and they had left behind a guidebook - the best restaurants in New York. I was looking through it because I had just received a scholarship from New York state, and I said: let's celebrate. The book said the best French restaurant was Le Pavillon. You know, we were very naive because we never went to restaurants - neither did my parents. My father hated restaurants, because he hated to be served - he thought it wasn't right. Anyway, we made a reservation - for ourselves and a friend of ours, who was a hippie. The address was on Park Avenue and there was no sign, just a door. We opened the door, and I tell you - it was as if we'd entered the headquarters of the King of France.'

Libeskind laughs at the memory. 'By the way, in retrospect, Le Pavillon was the restaurant where John F Kennedy used to eat, and the Rockefellers. It was where Kissinger met with Nixon - it was the greatest restaurant for the rich. So they looked at us as we walked in, and they must have thought we were the very esoteric children of some wealthy New Yorkers. To make a long story short, we were trapped.'

Nina shrugs: 'My menu didn't have any prices.'

'It was beyond the point of no return,' Daniel continues. 'We ordered incredible food - it was like a fantasy world.' They both remember vividly the poached salmon hors d'oeuvre, the veal, the Chablis. 'It was like something out of a Marx Brothers movie,' laughs Daniel. 'At the end of the meal, the bill comes. Nina and my friend disappear. We have no credit card, nothing. It was the biggest bill I have ever seen in my entire life. Today it would have been an astronomical bill - a bill for a millionaire. I take out a check, and the waiter asks for some ID. I give him my school ID, which was Cooper Union. The guy says: I've never heard of this union before. I said, well it's a famous school. He swallowed hard, and I thought he was going to call the police. So I wrote a cheque, and the irony was, it was almost my entire scholarship!'

Did they regret it? Not at all. It changed their lives: they never thought about food the same way again. As Libeskind puts it: 'Our experience in Le Pavillon was a revelation of a kind.'

Napoleon's pastry chef, who produced elaborate replicas of classical buildings made out of spun sugar, once famously remarked that 'the main branch of architecture is confectionery'. I tell Libeskind that I recently read an article entitled 'Why Architects Look Sick at Building Dedication Ceremonies', which brilliantly evoked the fusion of the two arts by explaining that buildings are often opened with a celebratory cake in the shape of the work in question. The usually nervous architect is not only forced to consume a replica of his work in public, but is also obliged to look on as his supposedly permanent structure is symbolically destroyed at the stroke of a cake knife. Libeskind laughs - the only cake he's been made on such an occasion was a pleasure, he says. It was the Denver Art Museum, made by a famous local chef. 'Fabulous chocolate angles,' he effuses.

He goes on to mull over the food/architecture axis. 'One of my favourite books is Marinetti's Futurist Cookbook,' he says. 'I've always felt it was one of the most brilliant books - because, although it's supposed to be a cookbook, it's actually an architectural idea: that food needs as much structure and aesthetic attention as a building. I have a great edition of that book in my library. Even though we have not really used it as a cookbook - I think we once tried to do the meal that is the Italian flag - I use it as a book of architecture.'

He thinks back to the time when he was an academic - 'many years ago, another lifetime' - and says: 'I had a very small studio of architecture students from all around the world, and we used to invite guests - Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman ... famous architects. And each student from a different country would prepare a meal. So the Brazilians would make a Brazilian meal, and the Italians would make an Italian meal for another guest. And that was their education: they remembered not so much the drawings as those meals - which were architectural in nature because they were like an international competition: who can impress a famous architect with a meal made in their honour by a nation?'

There is a single object in Libeskind's life that epitomises this link - that is both a throwback to those early dinners with his mother and the stone on which his career was effectively carved: his kitchen table. It's not particularly pretty, or large, or refined, but it's the first object Libeskind ever designed: a hefty wooden base with a grey spotted marble top. 'I designed this table in a very Duchampian way,' he says gleefully, gesturing towards it when we are back in their apartment. 'We were living in Italy, in 1986, and the carpenter downstairs was using it to work on. I said, I need a table just like that.' So he took it: a true ready-made, adapted only by its time-tested top.

'It did not originate as an aesthetic object, but out of necessity,' Libeskind explains. 'And it's a great generator of real things: Rachel prefers to do all her computer work there. Noam and Lev love sitting at this table.' They eat dinner there every night, he has drawn much of his best work there. 'There's something magical about a table that is real, that is not necessarily beautiful but that grew out of a real situation.' And besides, he adds: 'Every time say: let's get rid of it, my family won't let me.'