The global financial meltdown is likely to have one unintended side effect, David Chipperfield predicts: Fewer attention-seeking buildings will go up.

"It's an architecture of excess, a consequence of there being too much money around," the British architect says. "At a time when people are worried about other things, those things become really irritating and probably less relevant. So I think we will see a mood shift -- a certain sensibility coming back."

While peers are busy putting up signature towers with nicknames -- the cheese grater, the walkie-talkie, the shard -- Chipperfield makes work that is hard to identify, often touching up what is already there. His best-known project is Berlin's bombed-out 19th-century Neues Museum, where he is preserving what is left, and not replicating what was ruined.

After years of having little work at home, Chipperfield is finally getting British validation, too. He won the RIBA Stirling Prize last year and just became one of the governing artists and architects of the Royal Academy of Arts.

Chipperfield, 54, has an explanation for the iconic-building frenzy. Architects, he says, are under pressure to deliver structures with "the 'wow' factor" to attract funds and visitors. While the search for new form has been "liberating for the profession," it also "produces a lot of rubbish," he says bluntly.

Where does he fit in?

"I am highly suspicious of doing the extraneous and the superficial, of doing things for effect, of doing things that look silly after a few years," comes the unequivocal reply.

At the Neues Museum -- where a wing, a courtyard and the central staircase were destroyed during World War II -- he has kept traces of the damage visible, like scars half-hidden by plastic surgery. Resisting full restoration, he has replaced the wrecked staircase with a modern concrete-and-marble structure.

Chipperfield has many other projects to his credit: the America's Cup building in Valencia, Spain; sculptor Antony Gormley's London studio; the Stirling-winning Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach am Neckar, Germany. U.S. projects include the modern glass Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa, and museum extensions in Alaska and Missouri.

Among peers, Chipperfield defines Frank Gehry, who designed the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis, as "probably a genius" in his ability to "work outside the conventional boundaries." Zaha Hadid, with whom he studied, has "contributed enormously," although as her buildings "get bigger and more fanciful," he finds them "less convincing."

Unlike Gehry and Hadid, Chipperfield has never won the Pritzker Architecture Prize and feels he's not ready yet.

"There are lots of people who are in the queue first," he says, citing Peter Zumthor of Switzerland, who built the Kunsthaus in Bregenz, Austria, and Japan's Kazuyo Sejima, who co-designed the New Museum in New York.

Not until he completes Berlin, which will also involve a glass entrance building to the museums and a link between them, will he consider himself eligible.

"When the Neues Museum opens, then I will have contributed something serious," he says. "That's a serious piece of urban architecture, it's a serious contribution to a city, and to the history of architecture, I think."