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Jonathan Glancey: Frozen skyline as architecture works out how not to come to a halt in the recession

'I didn't lose any work in the first recession I experienced," says Zaha Hadid, "because I didn't have any work." This was the early 1970s, the time of the three-day week, when the lights of Great Britain Ltd appeared to be switching off for good. "I was drawing with freezing cold hands in rooms lit by candles. It seems almost unbelievable now. If I learned something, it was that anything can happen. We're doing well today, but this is partly because so many of our projects are in places like Dubai, which seem immune from recession. But you never know."You certainly don't. Last week, Frank Gehry's first major project in Britain was ditched, making it the first big victim, architecturally, of the credit crunch. Plans for a dramatic development of 750 flats facing the sea at Brighton were dropped when the developer, Karis, failed to find fresh funds, three months after Dutch bank ING pulled out. If Gehry - creator of the famous "Bilbao effect", by which thrilling architecture triggers urban regeneration - can be tossed aside by recession-wary banks, what about less celebrated architects?"Housebuilders are in such a hurry to drop projects," says Amanda Baillieu, editor of Building Design magazine, "they're text-messaging architects to tell them to stop work. At the same time, banks are foreclosing on loans made to small architectural practices set up over the past few years, in the hope of cashing in on the housing boom. The prediction is that one in five will go bust."Some 40% of architects lost their jobs in the last recession, says Sunand Prasad, president of the Royal Institute of British Architects. "It was very hard for young architects in the early 1990s. Luckily, architecture encourages broad thinking. Many found new careers in law, academia, catering and so on. But, when the good times came again in the lead-up to the millennium, it seemed an entire generation had gone missing. It took some time to find them again."Older architects are no strangers to recession. The current slump, though, is likely to be very tough indeed. Why? Because in the past, the public sector - whether in Britain, continental Europe or the US - was able to step in when housebuilders and developers pulled in their horns. Take President Roosevelt's Tennessee Valley Authority. Between 1933 and 1944, some 16 magnificent dams with hydro-electric power stations were built along the river, giving thousands of jobs to architects, engineers and contractors, not to mention bringing irrigation, power and economic growth to the poor farming communities of seven southern states. Today, not only is the TVA the biggest energy producer in the US, its mighty structures remain tourist attractions. Closer to home, the superb architectural and engineering work accomplished by the London Passenger Transport Board, a public corporation established in 1933, proved what could be achieved when the going was tough: extensions to the tube, new stations and rolling stock. Such work was inspiring; it also created many jobs.Today, though, the public sector in Britain has increasingly been privatised. Schemes such as PFI and PPP - private finance initiative and public-private partnerships, which fund new public buildings, especially hospitals and schools, and the renovation of the London underground - have turned out to be as ill-conceived as critics said they would be a decade ago. With banks and markets floundering, public projects are feeling the squeeze, and there is certainly nothing around the corner as grand and bold as Roosevelt's awe-inspiring TVA."About three-quarters of our work is in the public sector," says John Pringle of Pringle Richards Sharratt, architects of the Millennium Galleries, Sheffield. "But, as we can't be sure what will happen to PFI and PPP, we can't rest easy. I feel for the many young practices that were hoping to design intelligent new housing. Aside from the sudden fall-off in work, they're up against new layers of bureaucracy." Pringle is referring to increasingly complex building contracts and the rocketing numbers of quangos and regeneration agencies poking their noses into the business of architecture. The simple client-architect relationship of yore - there's a building I need and I'd like you to design it - has been buried beneath jargon-laced red tape. "The bureaucracy is bloody awful," says Will Alsop. "To get jobs beyond house extensions, young architectural practices have to show satisfactory accounts for the past three or four years to prove they're a safe pair of hands. How the hell are they going to be able to do that during a recession? There wasn't any work at home when I set up in the late 1970s. We went to Germany and got some good work without anyone asking us about our finances - zilch! - or even our track record. What the Germans wanted was imaginative new architecture."In times of recession, architects may well need to follow commissions around the world. "If I tell you we've got work in 22 countries," says Norman Foster, "it's not to brag, but to underline how you can only really beat a slump - unless you're a one-man band with minimal overheads - if you have commissions spread internationally. Foster and Partners is not 100% recession-proof, but we've always been prepared to go where the work is. Today, we're also known as urban planners and product designers, so we're not hostage to sudden drops in the building market. We were lucky to win the commission to design the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank headquarters in 1979, when there was little work at home. In fact, this was about the only job in the office. So we gave it our all." This building, one of Foster's finest, opened in 1986, when the British economy was beginning to pick up. It stood Foster and his team in good stead, setting a new standard for corporate HQ. Foster has never looked back. In a curious way, the recession served him well.Yet, as Nigel Coates, professor of architecture at the Royal College of Art, tells his students: "You don't choose architecture for the money. You should only do it if you love the idea of being an architect. But I've also been saying that recession isn't altogether a bad thing. Of course, I don't want people to lose their jobs, but there's been a lot of boring and plain bad new building during the boom years - frumpitecture, I call it. Young architects are unlikely to find an interesting job, or any job, in the coming months, so it's a good time for them to study, think and dream of what a next generation of architecture might be."What might post-recession architecture be like? Alison Brooks, an architect whose practice shared the 2008 Stirling prize for the design of the much-feted Accordia housing development in Cambridge, says: "So much housing raced up in recent years has been mean and transitory. No one wants to lay down roots in homes that are pokey, fast-buck products. What's the point of building houses no one really wants just because they're low cost and meet official targets?"A new housing scheme Brooks designed at Newhall, Essex, shows what might be done. It is a fine balance of modesty and ambition, modernity and tradition. Timber-framed family houses, with generous rooms, offer a fresh take on traditional local styles. They use every square inch: roof spaces are family dens, while courtyard gardens are like outside rooms. As for energy conservation, they meet current guidelines, or even exceed them. Indeed, what we may see is a swing towards a less showy architecture, with invention squeezed into pint pots. Some of Christopher Wren's most inspired buildings, after all, were the gem-like City of London churches he built around St Paul's. Clamber up the steps of St Stephen Walbrook and, behind modest ragstone walls, you find yourself beneath a magnificent dome that might belong to one of the great baroque churches of Venice. Or visit Le Corbusier's Petit Cabanon and see how a tiny building can be highly charged. "I have a chateau on the Côte d'Azur," he wrote to a friend. "It's for my wife. It's extravagant in comfort and gentleness." It is less than four metres square. The years following the Wall Street Crash saw in "Depression deco", a sort of late-flowering art deco. While we might not see anything as distinct as that, we could yet discover a likable new modesty: offices gathered around courtyards with rooftop gardens, rather than look-at-me skyscrapers; supermarkets dug underground rather than swaggering over historic towns; schools doubling as performing arts centres. And, if the Olympic Delivery Authority cares to take up the offer of a low-cost, take-apart sports building, as suggested by Dipesh Patel, a director of Arup Associates, we may yet see the 2012 Games proving that swanky buildings are not the only way of going for gold.Still, if you happen to be an architect hooked on wildly adventurous design and are willing to travel (and work competitively), then Dubai, Abu Dhabi, India, Russia and South America beckon. In Britain, meanwhile, the recession, while painful, might spark fresh debate and instill new ideas, readying us for the next building boom when the money flows again.ArchitectureRecessionguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

A life in art: Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor's studio, a sprawling collection of warehouses in a quiet street in south London, is both artistic crucible and thriving workshop, the kind of place where charts stuck to the walls indicate what kind of hot beverages are preferred by the employees (should Kapoor ever pop round, offer him black coffee, not tea). Twenty-five people labour here, either coolly in the fresh white offices above, or in the sweat of masks and overalls below. As we meet, Kapoor has just designed two stage productions: Pelléas et Mélisande for La Monnaie in Brussels, and a dance-theatre piece called in-i for Akram Khan and Juliette Binoche at the National Theatre in London. He is also preparing to open an exhibition at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London; and he has a clutch of projects, ideas and commissions simmering away - not least Britain's largest piece of public sculpture, for the Tees valley, and a retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts next year.Kapoor stands alone in the British art world: he is a touch younger than the so-called New British Sculptors such as Richard Deacon and Richard Wentworth, though he has often been spoken of in the same breath since he is represented by the Lisson, the gallery indelibly associated with that group of artists. And, when he won the Turner prize in 1991, aged 37, he was the senior artist on the shortlist, a decade or so older than the other contenders, who included Rachel Whiteread - this was a new generation of Young British Artists snapping at his heels. But he also stands apart because his work is entirely sui generis: strongly voiced, unmistakably his. Kapoor conducts a vigorous tour of his studio. The first thing he shows me is an enormous, deep resin tube, on which one of his masked accomplices is working amid the noise and dust of the workshop. It looks like an enormous semi-erect penis, I cannot help observing. "But it isn't!" Kapoor laughs . "It's the opposite. I'm interested in the opposite, and in the not-opposite. It's both. It will have a very, very dark interior. The idea is that a person will be able to walk in ... I have always been interested in antiphallic form - the opposite of which, of course, is deeply phallic. Hahahaha! It's not onwards and upwards ..."It is inwards and downwards: Kapoor is a psychic tunneller and excavator. Seeing his sculptures en masse in the studio, it makes one almost queasy sensing how many of them are concerned with feminine holes, clefts, entrances, slashes - often sculptures in a deep, primal red that screams of female human flesh, menstrual blood, the blood of childbirth. But Kapoor has never been interested in anything other than abstraction. The exploration of the feminine bypasses a lurid fascination with the specifics of the female form; it is more, perhaps, to do with an investigation of the dark places of the imagination. Not for him the world of art as commodity; not for him irony. He says: "Donald Judd used to say that art doesn't get made, it happens. The implication of that is that the studio is a place of a certain kind of practice. And there things occur that hopefully have deep quotidian recall - but are not directed by the quotidian world. So the post-Warholian notion that everything in the world is all art - it's fine, but what it avoids is the truly poetic, or the poetic of a slightly different order. And it's that order I am interested in."Figures such as Damien Hirst represent one branch of post-Duchampian art; Kapoor, however, takes on that history in a rather different way. "If Duchamp declared that all the objects in the world are art," he says, "then I am interested in the next stage of that argument, which may have been prompted by Beuys in some way - that all the objects in the world are symbolic. Now Duchamp, to be fair, was very careful about what was the found object; the found object was always deeply symbolic. So the arguments in fact come together and they don't get confused by the idea that you can put anything in a glass case and it's art. It isn't. It is the artist's duty to find poetic meaning in things." More baldly, he declares of the Hirsts on sale recently at Sotheby's: "It's just stuff , you know. It's not an artistic challenge. it's just stuff ... It's completely irrelevant." Later he adds: "It's almost not art. I'm going to go as far as to say it's not art."From the Hephaistian busyness of the artistic forge, Kapoor now ushers me into another large warehouse, silent and empty but for a number of tables covered with maquettes and models for large-scale sculpture. This is normally Kapoor's private space, the thinking place. The models are laid out in preparation for display at the Riba headquarters in London. "All these projects are about a certain kind of architecture," he says. "Many of them are thoughts about a certain kind of almost religious space. This, for instance, is a very crude model of a piece made in a museum in Japan - a void in the floor - called L'Origine du Monde, for obvious reasons." He laughs. This, he says moving on to a model of a silvery bridge that resembles an elongated bead of mercury, "is a bridge that we've been working on for years and years and years. Whether it happens or not is another matter. It's a kissing bridge. It opens in two halves, and both parts open and slide across the channel." Where is it? "I'm not allowed to tell you. I'm not going to tell you because it's still a bloody confidential pain in the backside, but anyway. It's quite a heavy shipping route in the UK."He's off again, to another model. This seems to be pure fantasy: it is an enormous circular hole in a valley in a mountainous landscape, a deep void leading to nothing and nowhere. "It's massive. It's kilometres across - and completely dark," he says. "One of the things that has emerged out of my work over all these years is this idea of the non-object, the absent object, the immaterial part of the material."Kapoor is very interested in negative space, in spaces filled with a nothingness that is, paradoxically, deeply present. He recalls: "I made a work at Documenta [the five-yearly sculpture exhibition at Kassel, Germany] many years ago. You walked inside a building like a bunker, and inside there was a hole in the ground. It was completely dark - so dark that the hole resembled a carpet on the ground. One person was let in at a time. And there was a man who waited for 45 minutes, and when he went in he was absolutely furious. 'I've done many things in the cause of contemporary art,' he said, 'but I have never stood in line for all that time to look at a piece of carpet.' And he took his glasses off and flung them on to the carpet - and, of course, they disappeared down the hole. And then he was truly terrified. That's what I am interested in: the void, the moment when it isn't a hole, it is a space full of what isn't there."Kapoor has also investigated this notion by way of his mirror pieces - a large group of sculptures of varying scale that include concave, circular wall-mounted mirrors several feet in diameter, and the huge Sky Mirror that was mounted near the Rockefeller Centre in New York in 2006. His Cloud Gate, a 110-tonne sculpture with a reflective surface for the Millennium Park in Chicago, also perhaps falls into this category, though it is a three dimensional piece, shaped somewhat like a kidney bean. He talks about these objects in terms of painting: the effect, he explains, of a traditional painted surface is to draw the viewer into a space that apparently recedes beyond the picture plane. In the mirror pieces, by contrast, "the space doesn't recede - it comes out at you ... a new sublime that's forward of the picture plane."We are now in a quiet warehouse, where various sculptures sit awaiting their fate and the scrutiny of their creator. One mirror has a surface made up of a tiled pattern of squares and hexagons. Looking into it, parts of your reflection seem to dance in the space between you and the mirror; others seem to float back in the distance. Kapoor says: "I'm interested in the almost idiotic phenomenology of this. On one level you might say it's not art, it's a silly game. But I think there's something in that little edge which is interesting and problematic. There is something going between the meaningful and the banal."Anish Kapoor was born in 1954 in Mumbai, his mother an Iraqi-Jewish daughter of a rabbi, his father a hydrographer in the navy. He went to the prestigious Doon School, in Dehra Dun. "The good thing about education in India in the context I knew it was that it was really cosmopolitan. We learned just as much about Jahangir and Akbar as we did about Louis XIV and Elizabeth I." His parents were "modern, wonderfully modern"; and for Kapoor, there was a deep sense - as a Jewish boy with a white mother growing up in a household speaking English in India - of being an outsider.Kapoor's parents were keen for both their sons to see something of the world. "In those days, a plane ticket cost more than my father's salary for a year. So we were both encouraged to emigrate to Israel, because they paid for the plane ticket." It was there that "being an artist became not only an option, but something I could actively do something about". He moved to London, where he studied at Hornsey College of Art and at Chelsea School of Art, as it was then known. College was "a total liberation" - partly from a state of deep psychological disturbance that afflicted him in his late teens. "I was seriously fucked up, full of inner conflict that I didn't know how to resolve." To tackle this turmoil, he eventually went into psychoanalyis, which lasted for 15 years and ended just before he met his wife Susanne (they now have two children, and have just built a new family home in Chelsea).Art college was a "kind of respite" from his psychic turbulence. He recalls his student work, much of which was performance-based. "The pieces were all very symbolic and they normally involved interaction between two people. They were non-narrative, but there was a process; and it was normally left to the two people to enact the piece with props. The props were really important - quite sexual. All the language was there already, dammit!" He left art school in 1977. At that time, Kapoor reckons there were perhaps 10 artists in Britain who were able to make a living just from selling their art: he assumed he would find some kind of teaching post. He rented a studio in Wapping, and for a while scraped money together by making furniture for the society decorator Nicky Haslam."Then," he says, "in early 1979 I went to India . . . and I suddenly realised all these things I had been making at art school and in my studio had a relationship to what I saw in India." And this relationship? "It was a certain attitude to the object. I was making objects that were about doing, about ritual. It was that 'doingness', that almost religious doing, that I saw everywhere ... It felt like a huge affirmation."It was from this idea of ritual that his first significant works sprang: his pigment pieces ? bright shapes set on the ground covered in pure pigment. "I would almost ritually lay on the pigment; they are very much performed," he says. "I made them all in three years. It was an incredible time of discovering something new every single day. I really didn't know where they came from; I felt that they had tumbled out into the world."This feeling of unforced creation still happens, once in a while, for Kapoor. He shows me something he has been working on over the past couple of days: a model for a huge installation for the Grand Palais in Paris for 2011. What eventually gets seen in that vast space may bear no relation to what he shows me, he says, but what has come to him is a scenario in which the glass roof of the space is covered over with red gel, JCBs busily tunnel into the ground, and a large inflatable sphere, 25 metres in diameter, hovers over proceedings. There is something hellish about it."It's got a sense of being an excavation of the interior. I would never have made a model like this 10 years ago. I would never have allowed this kind of apocalyptic moment." The mess and the chaos of it have an imaginative relationship with the recent works he has been making out of gunky, visceral, blood-coloured Vaseline and wax, such as My Red Homeland (2003), 25 tonnes of the stuff in a circular container constantly formed and unformed by a large steel arm. "After years and years of looking for a kind of wholeness in my practice, I find myself over the past couple of years dealing with tragedy and anxiety - with things that are fragmented," he says.The sculpture for which Kapoor is most famed is Marsyas, the trumpet shaped structure, like a flayed skin stretched over a framework, that occupied Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2002. It was seen in some quarters as a triumph of size over substance. "Every idea has its scale," he says. "Marsyas wouldn't be what it is if it were a third of the scale. The pyramids are the size they are because they are. Scale is a tool, a tool of sculpture."While vast, Marsyas will seem small in comparison to Temenos, the first of a five-part installation known as the Tees Valley Giants, which will be the largest public-art initiative ever, the design for which was unveiled in July. Has public art become a clichéd response to the urge to regenerate post-industrial cities? "I think we've gone totally public sculpture mad," he says with vehemence. "I hate public sculpture." So why are you doing it? "It's really a problem, I've got to say it's really a problem. Public sculpture ... oh God, even the phrase makes me feel tired. Why I am engaged in it? Well, I think, as a sculptor, that is something of one's lot. Because scale is a tool of scultpure, and it needs to be worked with."He shows me the model for Temenos, which will be 100 m long. It is a tube of nylon cut from a pair of tights stretched between two rings, one of them propped on a pole - blissfully simple. Temenos is the Greek word for a sanctuary, a place set apart; and Marsyas is also a reference to ancient Greece: he was a man flayed for daring to challenge Apollo to a musical contest. "It is a myth of conceit, the conceit of art," Kapoor laughs. "The conceit of the artist!"Kapoor on KapoorThere had been a long tradition in sculpture that said that materials have to be what they appear to be ? this thing of truth to materials. I couldn't deal with that. Even as a student I didn't know what that meant. It seemed to me that art's all about illusion and the unreal. "Truth to materials" ran, and runs, contrary to everything I want to do. Quickly I realised that when you make an object and place pigment on it, the pigment falls to the ground like a halo around the object. And the implication is that it's like an iceberg: that most of the object is hidden, is invisible.And so I became more and more interested in the invisible object. There was part of it that protruded into the world but the rest was really interesting. If you look at the pigment pieces, nearly everything else I have done is set there, and I keep going back to them. Sometimes I long for that kind of ebullient outpouring. That year I started making them was unbelievable. I didn't know where they were coming from. I didn't think them up, they popped into my head.Anish KapoorArtguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds