At the far end of a large and empty industrial space tucked away behind the
Notting Hill Gate crossroads in West London, there is a dull brick wall,
punctuated only by a metal, industrial door painted in fuchsia pink. There
is no one about and no obvious bell to ring, and it does not seem quite the
thing to shout. So I try pushing the door and find to my surprise that it is
unlocked and opens directly into a vast, white hangar-like space, lit from
above. Inside I am greeted by a small mountain of shoes, boots, trainers,
high heels and sneakers, all jumbled together, some more mature than others.
Beyond the shoe mountain is the office of Future Systems, the architectural
practice responsible for the gloriously odd NatWest Media Centre at Lord’s
cricket ground and the voluptuous Selfridges in Birmingham, which
transformed our idea of what a department store could be. The office is
purring. There must be 40 people in here working away at their computers,
but there is virtually no noise. So self-consciously calm is the practice
that when I ask the closest person where I might find Future Systems’ senior
partner, Amanda Levete, she answers in a sibilant whisper. She’s in the
shower. I sit down to wait and find myself removing my own shoes.
Levete appears, padding barefoot towards me on the pink carpet. She’s been for
a jog. In her early fifties, she is petite, elegant and poised, with an open
smile. We retreat to a table at the far end of this former warehouse. Before
Future Systems won the competition to build the NatWest Media Centre in
1995, the practice consisted of just two people: Levete and her professional
and personal partner, the Czech architect, Jan Kaplicky. Now there are 30 or
so full-time architects, plus others providing back-up. Levete has separated
from Kaplicky and last October, on the night of the Stirling Prize final,
she married Ben Evans, director of the London Design Festival and the son of
Tessa Blackstone, the former Minister for the Arts. Levete and Kaplicky
still work amicably together (he has also married again, to a Czech film
producer), and as with many practices with two principal partners, they
inevitably have their own particular projects.
Levete, who no doubt would not want to be known as a “woman architect”, is
increasingly recognised for her daring novelty of form, for her supple and
curvaceous buildings based on radical designs which often take preconceived
notions and turn them inside out. You want to run your fingers over her
buildings. Some might consider her a fantasist, just as many people
considered Zaha Hadid a fantasist before she started getting her buildings
built, but although Levete’s designs are expensive to realise, she seems to
have consistently achieved results.
Conditions are ripe right now. The world is awash with money for radical
architecture and Levete has been busy working on some humdingers – a series
of extraordinary underground stations in Naples, a loop-shaped hotel and
department store complex in Bangkok, a novel bridge in Dublin and some
smaller but no less unexpected domestic commissions.
But what is occupying her mind this month is the series of furniture pieces
she has designed for an exhibition at Established & Sons, the design gallery
run by Alasdhair Willis, whose wife is Stella McCartney. Four of Levete’s
pieces of furniture – a desk, a set of shelves, a bench and a console table
– will be displayed in the four corners of the gallery. I think it is fair
to say that not one of them accords with our expectations of what a desk,
etc, should look like. They look more like sculptures: beautiful objects
that began life with the twisting and stretching of smooth slabs of
Plasticine. The desk, for example, has just one leg, and not really a leg at
that, but rather a curved loop to support the softly projecting hip and
swooping belly of the desk, which is fixed to the wall at the other end.
“I find designing furniture incredibly liberating because you can explore a
language and form on a completely different scale, and experiment in a way
that you can’t so readily do in a building,” says Levete. “I see it almost
as a kind of laboratory for exploring form which then goes on to inform
bigger architectural projects. It happens the other way round, too, when
building designs inform my furniture designs. That crossover interests me.”
There is a level of finesse and professionalism that Levete can achieve with a
piece of furniture that she would never be able to reach with a building.
And she clearly enjoys that enormously. “Of course we all strive for
perfection, but with a building you have to design to allow for
imperfection. With a piece of furniture, however, it’s all about touching it
and feeling it and looking underneath… It’s refreshing to work on something
so different, where you don’t have to worry about the roof leaking, or
building regulations or planning permission.”
The four pieces of furniture in the show are designed to go in corners, which
is ironic given that few of Future Systems’ buildings ever include corners.
The desk will be cut out of a single piece of marble. “When I was in Rome I
loved the baroque sculptures in marble. I marvelled at how they did it: the
finesse, the way the light picks up on a line, the way you can express
something so soft with such a hard material.”
The bench, which incidentally does not look very comfortable, is shaped like a
figure of eight, a form that has since made an appearance in one of Levete’s
current projects, the hotel and department store complex in Bangkok. This is
the largest project Future Systems has ever taken on. “It’s very much a sort
of loop form, which consists of a 25-storey hotel tower on top of an
eight-storey department store. I wanted to avoid a sort of plinth and tower,
but to merge it into a single form. And you can, I think, see the derivation
from the bench.”
Levete is also working on a bridge in Dublin which appears to have very
peculiar proportions. “It’s like a handkerchief – it’s almost wider than it
is long. There will be two lanes of trams, two lanes of traffic and two
lanes for bicycles and pedestrians. It came very much from this sort of line
of thinking with furniture, about how you get the sag and how you articulate
the central section, and how a plane in the middle should fold down to
become a kind of viewing platform. It was interesting to see how much I
referred to my furniture design when thinking about this commission.”
The Naples project, due for completion in 2009, has been designed in
collaboration with Anish Kapoor. The brief was to create a fully functioning
tube station that is in itself a work of art. “The two entrances to the
subway are a response to their particular urban condition,” Levete explains.
“With the backdrop of a mountain, the Università entrance in COR-TEN steel
appears to have been pulled from the underground to create a powerful and
almost primal form. The Traiano entrance has a more refined aluminium form
which appears almost impossibly supported as it slips into the void below.”
The Università entrance looks daringly gynaecological. In fact the voluptuous
curves and rolling bellies of many of her buildings appear to be distinctly
feminine. “No, I wouldn’t say there’s been a feminisation of architecture,
but I do think that after an era of hard edged modernism there is a bit of a
backlash, and these smooth, curved forms with more fluid geometry are
probably part of that. Also, it is only relatively recently that computer
technology has made the design of these kinds of building possible.”
Levete is clearly ambitious and determined, and she is known among her peers
as a networker, a talent that probably helps a great deal in her line of
work. She also has bags of energy. Towards the end of our conversation, her
teenage son rings, having arrived home from school with a minor leg injury.
Levete switches into domestic mode, concerned that he won’t be able to go
skating the following day, reassuring him that she’s now not going out to
dinner, and that she’ll be home soon.
With visits to Bangkok roughly every other month, and trips to Dublin, Naples
and Milan to fit in too, she seems to be juggling everything pretty well. “I
do work long hours, and it’s very consuming emotionally,” she says. But the
results are memorable. You may hate her buildings, but they are always
interesting. You certainly cannot fail to notice them.
Around the Corner by Amanda Levete is at Established & Sons, 2-3 Duke
Street, London W1, until March 26 (020-7968 2040; www.establishedandsons.com)
