Beautiful building syndrome

10 April 2012

It is like a gleam in the clouds, or a flash of ship seen from a desert island.

Or an inscrutable structure left behind by a lost civilisation in some post-holocaust sci-fi movie, to be wondered at by grunting, uncomprehending survivors. It shines, it sparkles, it has decadent curves.

So, at least, it seems; 10 Hills Place is actually a small office building in a stubby inlet off Oxford Street, in fact an extension to a refurbished historic building that faces the main drag. There is not all that much to it, beyond a stylish façade whose reflections bend buses into abstract streaks of red and whose sloping windows slot into its surface with the satisfying smoothness of door handles on a nice car. But we are so used to hearing only of recession and austerity that this spot of luxuriance stands out.

It is the first work, under her own name, of Amanda Levete, the architect who for nearly 20 years was one half of Future Systems in partnership with Jan Kaplicky, to whom she was also married. Their marriage ended in 2006, and they were dividing up their business partnership when Kaplicky died this January. It was not an easy split — Kaplicky would sometimes throw potential clients out of the office if he felt he was being left out of the loop — but there is a clear lineage in Levete's current works from the curvaceous, shiny things that he and she used to design together.

Kaplicky, 18 years her senior, had made his name with visionary, unbuilt projects before Levete, who is now 54, joined him. She brought to the practice the desire and ability to turn these visions into reality, in the form of the Media Centre at Lord's, a house in Islington for the restaurateur Jeremy King and the bulbous, disc-dotted Selfridges in Birmingham. He was the dreamer and she the doer. This is therefore a critical time for her: she has to show that she has a creative identity of her own.

Her office occupies a big concrete barn in Notting Hill, a structure that has escaped gentrification thanks to having an electrical substation next door. It was Future Systems' office too, but now it is buzzing as never before. You are greeted as you were previously by a display of models like a parade of exotic ­crustaceans, but now there is a greater likelihood that they will be built.

Before, hypothetical projects for ­ecological towers dominated. Now, in progress in the studio, are plans for a hotel tower and shopping mall in ­Bangkok, a dynamic spiral in the ­manner of Zaha Hadid, which is due to start construction early next year.

There is also a tower of flats in east London now going through the planning process, a completed bridge in Dublin and designs for a house for art collectors in the same city.

A metro station in Naples, designed in collaboration with Anish Kapoor is under construction, and building work is due to start next year on interiors of a super-swanky house in Knightsbridge. Recession, you think, what recession?

Most dramatically, Amanda Levete Architects has been asked to transform Fortress Wapping, the forbidding structure which in the 1980s helped Rupert Murdoch destroy the power of Fleet Street unions, into new headquarters for News Corporation.

Levete's connection with the Murdoch clan started when Kathryn Hufschmid, wife of James of that ilk, took a fancy to one of her furniture designs. From this grew the commission to house 4,500 employees of News Corporation, of which James Murdoch is chief executive. Despite hard times, Levete says this project, which is currently working its way through the planning system, will go ahead.

In person, Levete was always the opposite of Kaplicky. She is animated, petite, mobile, fashionable, and grins easily. He was tall, monk-like and, though capable of being very funny, glum-faced. He, she says, was "like an old master. He would do a drawing and that would be it. Everyone would have to follow it".

She is more collaborative and likes working with the likes of the "confident and instinctive" younger Murdoch, and is now married to Ben Evans, director of the London Design Festival, who is a much more social animal than Kaplicky was. She likes moving in the milieu to which her work introduces her: as well as towers and corporate headquarters she has designed a trolley and washbasins for Scott's restaurant, and a chandelier for Swarovski. An important part of her development, socially and creatively, has been the furniture she has designed for ­Established & Sons, the company set up by Stella McCartney's husband, Alasdhair Willis.

She enjoys playing around with the different ways of making things, from tiles that will create shimmering moiré effects on the Bangkok tower, to the embossed silk and parquet floor — modern updates of traditional techniques — that she will install in the Knightsbridge house. She speaks of the "really beautiful waxed lustre" of a wooden chimney breast, or of the way the Dublin house will "dramatise the sunlight", with the use of emmental-like holes in its undulant roof.

Before Future Systems she worked for both Richard Rogers and Will Alsop, and she has some of those architects' playfulness and theatricality. For News Corporation, the old building will retain some of its roughness, as apparently the Wapping hacks "miss the rumble of the printing presses", but its grimness will be subverted by sweeping staircases and inter-galactic light fittings.

She says she is more "fluid" than in Future Systems days, and more willing to "go in a direction that is not necessarily clear". "There wasn't a moment where I changed," but "we're moving a line of inquiry in a different direction." She sometimes does things because they're nice, and stylish, and a little hedonistic, without always ­worrying whether they have a greater meaning.

Kaplicky wanted to dream up ideas that would change the world. Levete is more interested in changing small pieces of it at time, as she has with 10 Hills Place. There her shiny wall brings a dull little street to life, and it is cut open to form windows in a way inspired by the slashed canvases of the Italian painter Lucio Fontana.

The wall also bulges outwards on each floor so that the windows can scoop up views of the sky. The Birmingham Selfridges achieved almost all its effect through an intriguing wrapper on a simple building, and Levete has done something similar here.

There is a danger in this success story that Levete and her office could come to resemble other practices that have long done well out of peddling cut-price versions of Future Systems' best ideas. If they merely convert Kaplicky's vision into look, they will become parodies of their former selves. The tension between his idealism and her directness was an essential part of their best projects, and if they now become too easygoing, something will be lost.

Levete's smaller projects look more convincing than their larger ones — the Dublin House looks delightful, the Bangkok hotel and mall overwrought. But at their best Levete and her office have the ability to create objects and buildings that give pleasure. And, as not that many architects can do this, it is an ability to be treasured.

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