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.
