A new building was opened in Berlin last month that has set the architectural world buzzing. If architecture is "frozen music," wrote one observer, citing Friedrich von Schelling's famous dictum, then Berlin's new Jewish Museum is "a truly dissonant piece."

Designed to embody what it memorializes, the building itself -- as opposed to what it merely exhibits -- is said to deliver quite a jolt. Its zigzag shape suggests the lightning-bolt logo of the Nazi SS, and its metal skin is split and slashed by numerous slitlike windows. Inside, the visitor starts out in a black and white labyrinth, deprived of directions. Corridors or "roads" lead off, going who knows where; one of them, re-enacting the Holocaust, finishes in a claustrophobic dead end. If this is music solidified, then what architect Daniel Libeskind has composed is a John Cage piece in cement, zinc and glass, where there is nothing to be heard but the sounds in the surrounding air and remembered or imagined sounds from the past.

It seems clear that the Jewish Museum in Berlin will take its place among the world's notable architectural structures, those in which form most memorably follows function. The Sydney Opera House, with its soaring, earlike shells; Washington's Vietnam Memorial, that V-shaped black gash in the earth; the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, with its four towers like open books standing on end; Tokyo's own almond-shaped International Forum, sleekly mimicking the curve of the shinkansen tracks on its eastern edge: All these stand out like jewels amid the dull office blocks and skyscrapers (or, in the case of resurgent Berlin, the cranes and scaffolding) of the cities they now help to define. They are the Mozarts and Stravinskys and Ellingtons of architecture, redrawing the boundaries of the field for professionals and ordinary people alike, and it is naturally exciting when a new peak appears in the landscape.