Building the future

11 April 2012
The Weekender

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Once Britain exported manufactured metal to the world. On the quaysides of Buenos Aires and Bombay, Newfoundland and Hong Kong, you can still see cranes and bollards embossed with the names of proud ironmasters and their belching factories in Cardiff or Glasgow. Now we trade in financial intangibles and intellectual property, not heavy metal. In Yokohama, Japan, a monument to the newer economic order has just been completed: 450 metres of bending, warping, massive steel, made in Japan and Korea, and thought up in London.

This is the Yokohama International Port Terminal, a building whose prosaic name belies its magnificence - the full impact of which I felt for the first time on a recent visit. If the idea of passenger shipping terminals puts you in mind of sad, sickstained days at Ramsgate hoverport, think otherwise - Yokohama is to Ramsgate as St Pancras station is to a bus shelter. It is a celebration of transition, with the mundane conduits and holding bays of conventional terminals converted into great vaulted chambers and visceral passageways. It is also the modern equivalent of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, built a quarter-century ago to the designs of the young Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers.

Like the Pompidou in its era it is the newest big thing, and the calling card of the next generation of architects. It is designed by a young practice which calls itself Foreign Office Architects, or FOA, of which you will hear much more. As was the case with the Pompidou, the commission was won in a competition. After taking the prize in 1995, FOA spent years sweating blood to get it built. The project was conceived in the grandiose years of the Japanese bubble economy, and struggled into reality through the lean years of recession, finally beginning construction in 2000.

FOA's name refers to the fact that its principals, Alejandro Zaera Polo, 38, and Farshid Moussavi, 37, are Spanish and Iranian, and its office has projects in Japan, the United States, the Netherlands and Spain. Its only built London project is Belgo Zuid, a restaurant in Ladbroke Grove; it has also made a contribution to the populous elephant's graveyard of abandoned schemes for the South Bank arts centre. FOA is the Chelsea Football Club of architecture, its polyglot crew invisibly moored to the London soil.

Its office, the departure lounge for its designs, is in Pimlico, and its very internationalism is typical of London. FOA's lives and work embody in an extreme degree the fact that London is now the world's greatest trading centre for ideas and talent. This makes the firm British enough to be the sole exhibitor in the British Pavilion in next month's architectural Biennale in Venice, a cultural Olympiad every bit as nationalistic as the athletic one.

Internationalism, or "borderlessness", is also a theme of its architecture. The big idea behind the Yokohama terminal is that it is not just a machine for processing passengers, but a public place for both the citizens of Yokohama and the passing traveller. The brief given to the architects asked for a small park to be inserted in the structure. FOA decided to make the whole building into a park, its undulating wooden surface a place where people picnic, stroll, watch fireworks, sunbathe and do everything else urban humanity does in parks. At the seaward end of this long, pier-like structure is a grand hall for theatrical events and public festivals.

All this overlaps with the arrivals and departure halls, through intersecting routes and a design that eliminates walls and staircases. Its decks curve upwards and downwards to enclose rooms where necessary, and link its levels with ramps, making this big multi-level structure into a continuous flow of space, a humanised version of the mighty concrete highways that dominate Japanese cities.

At its simplest level the Yokohama terminal is another Bilbao Guggenheim, an eye-catching piece of bent metal for an industrial city insecure about its identity, an urban Rolex that allows Yokohama to walk tall alongside its big neighbour, Tokyo. But the Bilbao is a rapidly debasing currency, and every two-bit town will soon have one. What sets the terminal apart is the thinking behind it, which is inspired by the way people live now.

The terminal is built on the spot where, in 1859, after centuries of seclusion, Japan made its first trading connections with the West, an event whose eventual consequences can be seen in any electronic store. It is a fusion of the global and the local, the stable and the transient and of the civic and the functional. It is a town square for the modern nomad. It is a cross between Heathrow and Brighton Pier, and rather more beautiful than either.

At one point, the government official in charge of the terminal kept the model in his office hidden under a blanket, in the hope that the project would die through lack of interest. Eventually, the World Cup final, which was held in Yokohama, provided a reason for getting it built, and it was officially opened just before the tournament began, although it was not then complete. It is now. Unlike the England football team, Foreign Office Architects won a victory in Yokohama.

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