The woman who wants to rebuild London

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10 April 2012

Amanda Levete is the new architect with the job of making a public place out of the most controversial site in London - a small boilerhouse yard adjacent to the Victoria and Albert Museum on Exhibition Road, South Kensington.

It was once to be home to a vigorously iconic proposal by German architect Daniel Libeskind, but his "Spiral" extension for the museum to overspill into was canned in 2004 after an acrimonious fight between objectors and supporters. Now the V&A, after a long selection process, has settled on a proposal by Amanda Levete Architects, a practice whose only completed work is a small office building just off Oxford Street.

Until 2008, Levete, 55, ran Future Systems, an architect partnership with her late ex-husband, Jan Kaplicky, and they together created the aluminium bubble of the media centre at Lord's Cricket Ground and the bulbous, bellying facade of Selfridges' store in Birmingham. But this latest £35 million project at the V&A - her first public project, announced last week - sees her step out of that long shadow.

The museum extension will also be one of very few major cultural commissions in Britain in the coming years of parsimony for the arts. For now it's all systems go: the detailed design work begins immediately, with a planning application expected at the end of this year and completion by 2014.

For Levete, the Libeskind controversy is ancient history but she still defines her proposal in relation to it.

"[The Spiral] was a building of its time, and that time has passed," she says. "It's not the moment for iconic buildings but I do think it's the moment for an iconic place. It will be a truly public area, accessible, it's about opening up the V&A to new audiences and inviting people to drift off Exhibition Road and into the museum."

Her design will create an alternative entrance for the museum facing Exhibition Road, making a public plaza out of an inaccessible boilerhouse courtyard and creating a large underground exhibition space for temporary exhibitions. There will be a patterned, paved court, gently sloping down to a new entrance at the western side of the Madejski Courtyard. A pavilion-like café building will animate the plaza.

Underground will be a large and column-free exhibition hall, and skylights in the plaza will bring natural light down into this sunken hall.

This will be a single room, with a ceiling spanning 38 metres and 10 metres high at its highest point. The distinctive folding surface of the ceiling - for me the thing that set Levete's proposal apart from the other six shortlisted teams - is reminiscent of Foreign Office Architects' seminal Yokohama Ferry Terminal in Japan, or even of Jamie Fobert Architects' (also shortlisted for the project) galleries for the new Tate St Ives in Cornwall.

A meandering oak staircase, lit from above by a large skylight, will lead down to this large room. A lot of the work will be more or less unseen. "The biggest challenge for this is that it is a major public project and yet it's invisible," Levete says.

She is a quietly spoken woman who looks younger than her years. She sits barefoot on a white sofa in her cavernous warehouse office in Notting Hill Gate. The office has a pale pink carpet throughout, and all employees, including her, take their shoes off at the door. She hardly drops a historical reference or theoretical proposition during our hour-and-a-half-long meeting, which is rare for an architect. Despite the expressive and sometimes eccentric formal language of her design work, her attitude is more that of a builder than a thinker. She doesn't write theoretical tracts ("and I don't intend to..."), instead preferring to write a column in the more prosaic Building magazine, a weekly journal mostly read by building contractors.

Yet her strident ambition is palpable, and her lack of theorising does not mean that she is without strong opinions on London's built environment.

"I'd love to do a building in the City, a tall building," she says. "At the weekend, Ben [Evans, her second husband and the director of the London Design Festival] and I walked around the City, and there's so much happening, it's just fantastic. But surely there should be greater planning control about the quality of building that goes on in a place of such privilege.

"How can you let some of those buildings through? It's shocking. I am unashamedly elitist when it comes to this kind of thing. There should be a system where you have to pass some kind of peer recognition test in order to be able to build there."

Levete was trained in the most intellectualised environment imaginable. She grew up in west London and left home at 16 when she went to Hammersmith School of Art. After a year in New York she returned to London in 1975 to begin her architectural education at the Architectural Association on Bedford Square, which at the time was a maelstrom of new theories and unbuildable proposals. Zaha Hadid was in her final year when Levete started, and a host of other superstars (Will Alsop, Rem Koolhaas and four members of Archigram) were teaching there.

"I remember walking out of a Daniel Libeskind lecture because it was so impenetrable," she says. "I couldn't understand what he was saying. I thought, if you can't put it in everyday language ... Those people were very satisfied with this world: their dream was not to build."
Levete and Hadid are now two of Britain's only leading female architects in a profession still dominated by men. But Levete strongly resists taking on any kind of feminist leadership role. It is just the nature of the beast, she says.

"You look at the women in architecture who have really made names for themselves: Zaha doesn't have children, Eva Jiricna doesn't have children.
It's no coincidence. Architecture is a very, very tough profession, you have to be extremely committed and passionate, it's a profession you don't leave behind when you go home.

"There's a lot of middle-class angst about childcare but people make their life choices. Some people just get on with it and don't bleat about it - at the supermarket checkout there are people who have kids and they're working. A lot of women say when it comes the time to have children, 'I want to take time off' - but architecture is project-driven and a difficult profession to come back into. So many women drop out."

Levete cut her professional teeth as a project architect working for commercial architecture practice YRM, learning what the AA hadn't taught her: management, building regs, budgets, law etc - the pragmatic stuff that she still clearly enjoys. She describes it as "a brilliant education". After that she joined Richard Rogers' practice to work on the conversion of Old Billingsgate Market, and still calls him her "mentor".

But it was meeting (and later marrying) the Czech architect Jan Kaplicky in 1987 that proved most influential on Levete, and she left Rogers to work with him in 1989. He was a well-known figure in the architecture world for the work he had done with Foster & Partners, but also for his visionary designs, well-published but never built.

"Jan clearly had a brilliance but it was all on the drawing board. For him building was a compromise. I was determined to change that."

Living in his tiny ex-housing association flat off Lancaster Gate, they survived for years on a shoestring until winning the commission for the Media Centre at Lord's (completed in 1999). After that technically demanding and formally unprecedented building won the Stirling Prize, Future Systems was appointed to design Selfridges' new store in Birmingham and they entered a new era of bigger commissions.

"Things got more difficult after that, because we became a bigger office," Levete says, "and Jan and I wanted to go in different directions. He was following the line of enquiry he had been pursuing, and I wanted to open it up and work in a different way. That coincided with the breakdown of our personal relationship as well. That the office held together is a great tribute to the people here."

In 2006 the couple divorced, and two years later the practice was divided into two, and Levete began winning commissions under her own name. Kaplicky died in 2009.

Little has been completed by Amanda Levete Architects so far (the shimmering steel 10 Hills Place office building, just off Oxford Street, was the first) but plenty is in the works, including projects in Lisbon and Naples, and a controversial proposal for a residential tower on Bethnal Green Road in Shoreditch. But Levete's design for the V&A courtyard will be by far the most important for her, taking its place in the broader, pedestrian-friendly resurfacing and part-pedestrianisation of Exhibition Road (now under way). Her courtyard will be the obvious place for visitors to linger along this new promenade and will no doubt be intensively used.

Levete's noble intent is that it will become "South Kensington's drawing room" - whether or not she succeeds in that aim, the result will indeed be judged on how the project fits in to the spectacular and endearingly stuffy world of SW7.

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