David Chipperfield is the quiet man of British architecture. He’s probably sick of hearing it, but he is. His voice is hushed and gravelly, his face Eeyore-ish, his fame equally muted. At 56 he’s hardly a household name in his home country, despite the Design Museum retrospective — the first in his home country — that opens this month. The last time he built anything significant here, BBC Scotland’s Glasgow HQ excepted, was in 1997, and that was just a modest museum in Henley. While others of his generation — Zaha Hadid, say, or Will Alsop — are frequently on the front pages, Chipperfield lives in North London with his wife Evelyn Stern, who runs the office, and four grown-up children, and keeps mum.
But beyond the white cliffs of Dover he’s revered. His 150-strong firm has built skyscrapers in Hamburg, a mammoth City of Justice in Barcelona and apartment complexes in China. He’s rebuilding the most architecturally sensitive spot in Berlin, Museum Island: imagine a striking modern building slap bang between Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. Rising right now are an extension to Venice’s island of the dead, San Michele, another city of justice in Italy, and art galleries in Essen, Milan and St Louis. So, let me introduce you to the biggest British architectural export of his generation, the starchitect nobody’s heard of.
This may be about to change. In comparative haste, Chipperfield is building two bona fide buildings in Britain — the Hepworth Art Gallery in Wakefield, opening in 2011, and the Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate, 2010. “But I don’t expect much to change,” he says, sombrely. Two swallows do not a resurgence make.
Chipperfield has not so much given up on Britain as ceased to think about it. But what little press he does garner at home, say when he won the Stirling Prize in 2007 for his Museum of Modern Literature in Germany, always ponders why he hasn’t built more on his home turf. “A simple answer,” he replies. “We just don’t get asked. And when we try, we still don’t get asked. So I’ve sort of given up trying.”
Wakefield and Margate are mere flukes, the product of extraordinary clients “who stood up for us and architecture. I wish I could say they were followed up with other things”, he adds, droopily. “But it’s just not happening. I can’t complain. It would be pathetic to complain.”
The problem with Chipperfield is that he will insist on proper architecture, made with thought and time, and buildings made out of solid, quality materials. He will not cut corners. You want him? You have to wait, and pay, for him. Chipperfield is not an architect made for the age of Twitter.
Britain may have been on a 15-year building boom, but the architecture we’ve created is, he says, mostly “fizzy stuff”, designed dumbed down for the eyes of the media. The way we build architecture through design-and-build contracts or the private finance initiative, which both put the architect at arm’s length — “simply devalues it”, he says. “Britain is run by property developers. Money is what we value. End of story. It’s a little to do with arrogant architects, too. The profession here has been bow-tied, plum-mouthed, not wanting to engage.”
Compare this with continental Europe, where public, not private, culture rules, where architectural competitions for major projects are the norm, where young architects are supported, and where the paying public gives a damn. Or even freemarket America, “where at least if they commit to culture they give it their all”.
But he doesn’t lose sleep over it now, even over things that must rankle, such as being replaced at the eleventh hour on the BBC Scotland job when the BBC’s current Director-General Mark Thompson succeeded Greg Dyke and pennypinching replaced Dyke’s proposed architectural renaissance. “It’s just how Britain is,” Chipperfield says. “I’m not carrying round these scars. I don’t even feel cheesed off.”
Architecture, not politicians, got the blame for débâcles such as the Scottish Parliament or Wembley Stadium, both vastly over budget and schedule, tightening the noose still further.
“We just don’t want to take a risk on something as long-term as architecture,” Chipperfield says. “ ‘Just put up something pretty’. There’s simply a lack of seriousness. Success is only measured by fame and wealth. We’ve lost that voice that says ‘Go out and do something’. The voice that challenges the obvious and the easy.”
Chipperfield’s visceral, tactile approach to architecture can be traced to his childhood, when he grew up on a farm in South Devon. His father, an upholsterer from a modest background, abandoned West London in the 1950s, to “drop out”. “Grow up in the country and your senses become more alert,” the architect says. “You deal with very material things. As a kid on a farm, you have to work a lot, but you escape a lot with your friends. I can remember little places — where a stream comes through a hedge, say — I still draw upon in my architecture. I remember in the summer getting beans out of the sack, running them through my fingers. Those are my Proustian moments. My madeleines are ploughed fields. It’s hard to think of something as architectural or physically powerful as these great big mounds of red earth, freshly ploughed, the earth shiny. The smell is unbelievably strong.”
Likewise when you visit a Chipperfield building you smell it as much as see it. “When I was growing up, I was a complete failure, academically. I spent my time either on the running track or in the art room. But what I did respond to was nature.” He is, he says, “suspicious of complex inventions. I try to keep my feet on the ground. I’m hugely confident of the invincible, unchallengeable moments you find in nature. My holiday house is very simple, but it looks out over the sea. There isn’t a person who wouldn’t sit at the window and say: ‘That’s beautiful’. So my architecture isn’t a complex invention of a genius architect. It scrapes things away so we see those moments.”
The title of the Design Museum exhibition — Form Matters — is, like everything Chipperfield does, pointedly chosen. Form does matter. On show will be 15 of his buildings rendered in huge models as exquisitely made as the real thing, including his Stirling winner. The Museum of Modern Literature in Schiller’s birthplace, Marbach am Neckar, is, as it sounds, a serious, sober building, all graceful, shadowy columns and forms hugging the ground. It’s obviously modern, with its crisp abstract shape, but it also does those simple, complex things great architecture of all ages is supposed to — it embraces landscape and history, even if that history, here fascist-stripped classicism, is challenging. “Tradition is there for a purpose,” he says. “We expect things to be a particular way. You don’t put a watch round your ankle. Why not embrace that expectation?”
This nod to “tradition” and context changes, as it should, from site to site, making his work, for all its gravitas, seem eclectic. The pitched roofs of his London studio for the artist Antony Gormley, and the Hepworth and the Turner Contemporary — also in the exhibition — allude to seaside shacks and factories, rendered with modernist abstraction. An office block planned for an isolated site in King’s Cross is, essentially, a Greek temple in modern dress. In glassy American cities, though, he goes for the crystalline. He is a chameleon architect, changing shape to suit his backdrop.
“We’re always looking for this balance, between the familiar and the unfamiliar, tradition and the new,” he says. “Bless her, Zaha [Hadid] — a few of her buildings are extraordinary. A spaceship experience. But I don’t think that’s everything architecture is about. That experience distances you from the building. You’re an observer. I think architecture has to embrace you.”
Like all the best buildings, Chipperfield’s are more compelling in the flesh than in the picture. That, he suspects, is also why he’s rarely employed in Britain: “[My work] looks too dull. It doesn’t have enough bells and whistles.” Wander through his rebuilt Neues Museum in Berlin — the first part of his vast Museum Island project — and you see visitors groping the building. “People were on their hands and knees,” he remembers. “It was a little extraordinary. I’ve never seen people want to have that tactile experience.”
The 19th-century neoclassical building was bombed in the Second World War. Chipperfield let the scars pointedly remain, but inserted warm modern additions. “The ruin was like a naked thing. It’s so exposed you just wanted to touch it. We didn’t want to lose that. You’re trying to communicate with people with the building. It’s terribly nice when people go inside and like it. And not just because they’re consoled by it, because it does something to them.”
This side of the recession, Chipperfield’s dogged, independent voice sounds less arrogant, less freakishly independent, than it did a decade ago, and more correct. It’s like a nagging “told you so” from an older, wiser generation. And his lone voice has been joined by others — Tony Fretton, the favourite to win the Stirling Prize next week, Caruso St John, Sergison Bates, Haworth Tompkin: a whole new generation that preaches, like him, a return to tradition, tactility and humanism in architecture, the solid and long-lasting, though in modern dress, without the laboured historicism of Prince Charles’s followers.
Maybe Chipperfield’s right. Maybe Britain is doomed to build Twitter architecture. Or maybe he’s wrong. Maybe this is the moment we start afresh.
David Chipperfield — Form Matters is at the Design Museum, London SE1 (020-7403 6933), from Oct 21 to Jan 31
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