23 FEBRUARY 1991, Page 34

ARTS

Architecture

The well- tailored building

Alan Powers on why the best British architects have to go abroad to build

Architecture is a matter of economics. Budget and time have as much influence as the way you draw. The site shapes the design, and construction is largely a matter of speed and cost. These are the hard reali- ties defined by Kenneth Armstrong, winner in March 1990 of the international compe- tition for the Maison de la Culture du Japon, the last of the Parisian `grands pro- jets'.

The partnership of Armstrong and Jenifer Smith has only been in existence since 1986, during which time they have had to learn the hard way. Although the late 1980s now look like the vanished boom time, the position for architects trying to do serious work in Britain was never encour- aging. Small practices like Armstrong Associates, often hatched from the grand high-tech offices of Foster and Rogers, suddenly had to cope with the reality of British construction: nothing on time, noth- ing to budget and inability to make any- thing in a proper straight line. These are the things that architecture school fails to prepare you for. It's all very boring, says Armstrong, but how do you build in a country where patronage and pride in con- struction are lacking and jobs are still handed out in the golf club bar?

In Armstrong's case, the experience has produced some elegant minimalist shop and office interiors, such as the Issey Miyake shop in Sloane Street (now ironi- cally a branch of Joseph), whose cool use of Portland stone and painted changing- room walls in 24 layers of rubbed-down colour speak of the same perfectionism and transformation of function into style that is found in Miyake's clothes. Modern archi- tects used to abjure fashion and everything it stood for — architecture was eternal truth or it was nothing. Cultural criticism, from Gombrich down to Derrida, has eaten away any such Platonic certainties, and the eternal truths of 20 years ago now look pre- cisely datable. The fashion business has always accepted the mutability of things, although Miyake, concerned with high- quality fabrics and the structure of the human body, works towards a timeless style. From Japanese origins, internation- alised in New York and Paris, he can draw freely on the world's cultures, but trans- form them in the process. Is timelessness anything other than understanding the job and getting it right? As Diana Vreeland wrote of Miyake, 'He believes that only by knowing well the basic tradition of a craft can one break away.'

This commonsense philosophy could apply to any of the second-generation high- tech architects in Britain. Architecture is not the same as couture, but they relate Model of the Maison de la Culture du Japon in Paris, designed by the British architect Kenneth Armstrong more closely than architecture and some of the other analogical disciplines promoted in the era of post-modernism, such as lan- guage. The emergence of Michael Hopkins in the big league exposed the childishness of the Richard Rogers 'sod you' attitude to design, and equally made Norman Foster's work look bland and over-processed. Kenneth Armstrong and his contempo- raries are not re-inventing architecture, but they are fine-tuning the repertory of mod- ernism, and their work shares Hopkins's undogmatic flexibility of thought. Armstrong speaks of trying to avoid the graphic and emblematic qualities which have been uppermost in the post-modern period, and the needless expression of technology. He is designing some very stripped-down furniture, and recognises an affinity with the pragmatism (and the puri- tanism) of the English Arts and Crafts movement. He too is aiming for timeless qualities, but expressed on the limited hori- zon of trying to design the architectural equivalent of the Chanel cocktail dress.

The analogy between clothes and mod- em architecture is an old one, dating back to Adolf Loos's essay on men's fashion of 1898 which praised the anonymity, func- tional purity and invisibility of the English gentleman's suit, as opposed to the con- scious stylism of German tailoring. Loos's architecture is also dandyish, in the original sense defined by Beau Brummel of atten- tion to construction and detail and elimina- tion of the superfluous. In opposition to the development in Vienna of the new dec- orative language of Jugendstil, Loos pro- posed the return to something simpler and more essentially architectural, The English themselves eventually got this message as far as industrial design was concerned, and the British pavilion at the Paris Exhibition of 1937 (a temporary building that stood a few hundred yards from the site of the Maison de la Culture du Japon) concen- trated on sports clothes and tailoring, things we knew we did well. If a new build- ing doesn't feel as good as a new suit of clothes, it has failed.

All ambitious architects want a job out- side England. We have a downward spiral of cause and effect, involving planners, clients and the construction industry, which swallows all architectural endeavour. We don't have any grands projets, and it is ques- tionable whether we could select the right architects and get them built even if we did. In France, major buildings are subject to well-conducted limited competitions, in which the architects, always including younger firms among the established, are funded to produce schemes. Public interest is aroused through exhibitions at the Pavillon de l'Arsenal, a permanent centre for architecture and urbanism near the Place de la Bastille.

Some of Britain's most famous architects have never built in this country, although London remains against all odds a centre of architectural thought and debate. In Britain, as in America, the split between those who think and teach and those who practice becomes ever wider. The comple- tion in 1990 of a housing block in Berlin by Peter Cook makes it the first built work by the Head of the Bartlett School of Architecture, who has been a figure of world renown since the Archigram days of the early 1960s. Before winning the Maison de la Culture competition, Armstrong had two quite harmless development schemes in London turned down by planners for failing to 'keep in keeping' with areas lack- ing any character at all. Architects can per- haps be excused their paranoid delusion of seeing the Prince of Wales's thought police lurking on every planning committee, for although the 'Prince of Wales effect' in British architecture has been a valuable irritant, exposing the inability of architects to communicate with the public and vice versa, it has entrenched the false dichoto- my between modernism and tradition.

To look at the recent state of the RIBA, one would not think that the profession had a hope of putting its own house in order, and it remains for this year's new president, Richard MacCormac, to cut the hype and come down to earth. The Arts Council's recently announced architecture department could be valuable in creating an educated public for architecture with a relationship to the real world, so long as it avoids repetition of the endless circular debates carried on inside the profession and a concentration on big names rather than a true understanding of why architec- ture is different from other arts.

In spite of the enormous amount of vol- untary, non-specialist activity in architec- tural conservation throughout the country over the last 20 years, there is still no organisation available for the public to join as a pressure group for good new architec- ture. By default, the amenity societies have occasionally taken on the role of design arbiters, so that vox populi is assumed automatically to be the voice of conserva- tion, encouraging another false dichotomy between conservation and new architec- ture, for which the irresponsibility of cer- tain architects is mostly to blame.

Kenneth Armstrong's success in winning the Maison de la Culture competition is indicative of the recent upsurge of talent in Britain which is in danger of being wasted as new construction grinds to a halt. It looks like becoming the most sensible and practical of the grands projets, the least 'look at me' in style. It occupies one of the last free sites facing the Seine, just down- stream from the Eiffel Tower. Its curved façade is a continuation of the adjoining Australian embassy by Marcel Breuer. The competition was won by neatly packing the accommodation on to the small site, and still making best use of the available views. The outer wall consists of a skin of glass, standing away from an inner skin to create a segment of light-filled space. The hand- ling of colour, transparency and opacity here aims purely for aesthetic effect, with- out the pseudo-functional ornament of Jean Nouvel's Centre du Monde Arabe with its photo-sensitive pierced screens. There is nothing specifically Japanese about the design, nor yet Parisian, although it is conceived in precise terms for its site.

Miyake will design the small garden at the back of the triangular site, but not in Japanese style. The result, for completion in 1993, will be as international but perfec- tionist as the Chanel cocktail dress, or indeed the Englishman's suit.