For those who haven’t worn out their tyre treads visiting the startling structure, here is the book of the building, describing its evolution and construction. It is a tale of David conquering Goliath. Michael Spens takes us through the design competition that attracted more than 150 entries and on to the final duel, between Alsop and Sir Norman Foster. All the wise money was on the gleaming white knight, Foster, whose sparkling international credentials and cool rationale looked certain to secure first prize. Alsop was the outsider, with a handful of fine buildings in Germany to his credit together with smallish projects in England and Wales. Much to everyone’s surprise, Alsop won the day with a scheme that was described as “convivial” in a local daily paper.

Alsop’s design is certainly intriguing and captivating. The protruding, cigar-shaped Deliberatif containing the council debating chamber is pulled right out of the front of the building. Lashed behind are two parallel administration blocks separated by a vast covered courtyard. We learn that very early on in the planning of his design, Alsop wanted to distinguish clearly the space used by elected representatives from that occupied by the administrators. It is a brilliant device – the Deliberatif juts out as a proud symbol of the democratic process.

Excellent views of the city and the distant hills are provided from the balconies as a constant reminder to the councillors of their responsibilities to the region. There is no hiding away in the dark chambers stowed in the belly of more traditional government buildings.

The book is generously illustrated. There are lots of Alsop’s early squiggles, delicious oil paintings and watercolours used to develop the design concept and the completed formal technical drawings. It is fun and informative to watch the design progress. The text is racy too, and offers not just insights into the workings of Alsop’s office, but also into historical precedents for this type of building, the relationship between architect, engineer and client, and the construction processes. There are, however, several patches of heavy architectural jargon.

Absolutely unmissable is Alsop’s own architect’s note. This is crisp and clear, and zings with the intensity of the building’s ultramarine coat.

Starck has turned his hand to designing everything from motorcycles and a mineral water bottle to François Mitterrand’s presidential apartments at the Elysée Palace and squiggly pasta shapes. According to the shaggy-haired guru, among his proudest achievements is the curvy toothbrush that has been snapped up by his disciples.

The roadshow ground to a halt in the early 1990s when, tragically, his wife and business partner Brigitte died from cancer. Starck withdrew from the spotlight and declared his loathing of the excesses of the 1980s. If he was going to continue as a designer, he said, he would do it with more soul – “less to see, more to feel”.

Whatever else may have changed, the reconstructed Starck, reborn for the spiritual, antimaterialist 1990s, has not lost his ability to surprise and attract attention. Starck kicks off this latest book dedicated to his architectural projects by saying: “I am not a designer. I’m not an architect … I consider myself to be a political agitator who uses design and architecture.” Like his wavy toothbrush and spidery aluminium lemon squeezer, this sort of Starckism is difficult to swallow. I’m sure that, for many, this element of political agitation is not only difficult to detect in his work but it is also of little interest. OK, he makes the odd jibe at the bourgeoisie, but for most of us, the most glorious treat in Starck’s architecture is the promise of fun mixed with the unexpected. There is always drama, always showmanship, always seduction.

Like so many designer monographs, this book is stronger on illustration than on text. It is infinitely preferable, and more interesting and illuminating, to look at the exquisite drawings and photographs than it is to wade through the meandering text. Some of the Starckisms have suffered in translation. For example: “My job is essentially didactic, that’s why it’s pretentious; it’s a job that involves propositions which are at the disposal of people. It is for this reason that I work on many things at the same time, because everything is, in fact, an excuse. A building is an excuse …” and so on.

There is little respite from the blather. Of his early project Les Bains-Douches Night Club, Starck is reported as saying: “I wanted to show the opacity, the uncertainty, the isolation of the ‘done’, of indecision and greyness.” It is unclear whether the quote is recent or dates back to the completion of the job in 1978. It involved the conversion of an old bathhouse into a club – Starck kept the tiles, put Soviet slogans on the walls and hung red banners around the place. These are simple, dramatic and effective techniques that are a hallmark of Starck’s architecture to this day and which continue to pull in the hoards.

Starck’s big break came with the Mitterand commission in 1982. He matured rapidly and began to develop his design vocabulary. Beautiful sculpted shapes began to appear – many of them inspired by aeronautical design – wing sections, taut curves, fins. The influence is drawn from science fiction – Starck is a great fan of Philip K. Dick, author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the book upon which Ridley Scott based his film Blade Runner – and from Starck senior, an engineer and designer. Young Philippe spent much of his childhood with his head in scientific magazines or playing under his father’s drawing desk, poring over the blueprints that had fallen to the floor. One of Starck’s early claims is that he was easily bored by children’s games and would amuse himself by redesigning all his toys – “always to have them more aerodynamique”. His father encouraged invention and imbued Philippe with the philosophy that it is better to make a creative mistake than to stay within the bounds of good taste but remain in a state of stagnation.

Free of a professional architectural training, Starck is sure to have made architectural gaffes but, without the constraint of rules, he has also managed to create excitement. The spaces and shapes he creates are unusual and refreshing, and their interiors are always furnished with his own designs, often down to the fine detail of door handles. Café Costes in Paris – a square space marked out with fat, cylindrical columns, a pyramidal central stair and curved bar – has grown a little shabby, but is still fun to visit 10 years after it opened. At the more recent Royalton Hotel, New York (1988), Starck was invited to remodel the interior and accentuated the fact that it occupied an awkward narrow plot by running a long slice of corridor right into the depths of the building and making guests walk its entire length before reaching reception. A few blocks away at the Paramount (1990), guests enter a tall dark box with a massive wedge of stair in the corner which leads to a gallery where it’s possible to watch the theatre of activity below.

Throughout the 1980s Starck’s irreverence and frivolity attracted attention from the Japanese. Invitations flowed thick and fast. He was asked to design restaurants, an opera house for Tokyo, the bull-nosed, green Nani Nani building and, most extraordinary of all, a beer hall and restaurant for the Asahi beer company in Tokyo’s run down east end. This last project, completed in 1990 and one of Starck’s largest, involving both building and interior design, is an enormous black granite-clad casket pierced with tiny portholes and topped by a massive 360-tonne steel shape in yellow steel that Starck calls a “golden flame” but others have described as anything from a huge sperm to a root vegetable.

The book concludes with a series of sketches of Starck’s most recent projects and, fittingly, a surprise – photographs of a house that can be built from a kit, designed for the furnishings company Trois Suisses. This timber-built, two-storey house is modest, rustic, low-tech, and quite unlike anything else he has produced. Green-eyed detractors may call Starck a showman and decorator, but this book demonstrates his invaluable contribution to the excitement and fun of contemporary architecture.

Ever since we started seriously to worry about our environment, the
sprouting of planet-friendly architecture has followed the pattern of the
health food industry in its early days. Most green building so far has been
wholesome, small-scale, home-grown, hand-crafted, back-to-nature and very
far removed from the mainstream. It is often coarse-grained and occasionally
hard to swallow, but at least it’s good for you.

While many green architects persist with their ideals of rural, low-impact
construction, simplicity of form and the use of natural materials, a small
number have gone on to create some complex, urban, technologically sophisticated
and intriguing eco-structures.

One leading exponent is the brilliant Malaysian architect Ken Yeang,
who exploits the opportunities offered by modern invention and technologies
to design economically viable, ecologically sound buildings. Tall buildings,
says Yeang, are inevitable. What should be of concern is the way these are
designed.

Yeang calls his buildings bioclimatic skyscrapers. The shimmering, towering
office and residential structures dotted around Southeast Asia include buildings
for clients such as IBM, British Petroleum and the developer MBf Holdings.
What makes them distinctive are their unusual and irregularly punctured
facvades, ‘skycourts’ and balconies, and tiers of hanging gardens. They
are the result of grafting refreshing ideas and economic realism onto green
architecture. Yeang estimates that his buildings can make savings of as
much as 40 per cent on a building’s energy costs during its normal life.

The exciting shapes, shadows, floor plans and facades offer some clues
to Yeang’s influences. He has drawn inspiration from designers such as
Richard Buckminster Fuller from the US, the British Archigram group from
the 1960s with its technological fantasy forms and ideas, and the anarchic
and irreverent work of Cedric Price. Price was Yeang’s tutor in London at
the Architecture Association during the late 1960s before the young architect
headed for Cambridge to study science and the environment.

The driving force behind Yeang’s work is the compulsion for economy
with materials and land, combined with the use of design to relate the built
environment to natural systems. Every design is influenced by the Sun’s
path, and therefore by patterns of light and shade, and wind direction.

The great Menara Mesiniaga IBM tower in Kuala Lumpur, for example, is
a seminal Yeang building. The low-energy circular tower has its block of
lifts and stairs on the east side of the structure, where the Sun strikes,
to act as a screen; balconies and louvre shades protect the west side. The
cool centre of the building is given over to offices, and employees have
access to the generous outside terraces through full-height glass sliding
doors.

At intervals, spiralling around the exterior, holes are punched in the
steel and aluminium facade to make single, double or even triple height
skycourts, from which plants trail down the exterior. ‘These atriums enable
the channelling of a cool flow of air throughout the building’s transitional
spaces while the planting provides shade and oxygen-rich atmosphere,’ explains
the architect. Rain waters the plants.

Yeang’s book is beautifully illus-trated, fascinating and thought-provoking.
He even offers the hope that his style of eco-design might offer the architectural
profession the opportunity to earn more public confidence: ‘One has to be
increasingly aware of energy as a scarce resource; the need for architects
to design for a sustainable future becomes a self-evident imperative. The
design of energy efficient enclosures has the potential to transform architectural
design from being an uncertain, seemingly whimsical craft, into a confident
˛őłŚžąąđ˛ÔłŚąđ.’

Fay Sweet is a journalist specialising in architecture and design.

A famous ploy used to great advantage in the intellectual panel game
The Brains Trust on BBC radio was to preface any discussion with the phrase
‘It depends what you mean by . . .’, but most panellists would have had
their work cut out defining organic architecture. Even Frank Lloyd Wright,
the great promoter and exponent of organic architecture, could not accomplish
it in less than the 51 separate definitions that made up one of his lectures
on the subject in 1930.

Central to Lloyd Wright’s pro-positions was that: ‘In organic architecture,
it is quite impossible to consider the building as one thing, its furnishings
another and its setting and environment still another.’ He ventured further:
‘One of the essential characteristics of organic architecture is a natural
simplicity.’ And: ‘It is a spiritual thing to comprehend what simplicity
means. In attempting to arrive at definitions of these matters, we invariably
get into the spirit. The head alone cannot do enough.’

Organic Architecture contains a collection of essays on contemporary
thinking and case studies of recent projects. For a reader new to this series,
and perhaps new to the subject, there are two problems. First, this publication
is, in fact, a magazine. The front end of the ‘book’ is packed with features
and reviews unrelated to the central subject. Secondly, and especially given
the problems of definition, there is little historical scene-setting or
the staking of boundaries. With the book placing great emphasis on organic
architecture’s links to eco-friendliness, for example, how can the inclusion
of so many large, rural, land and material-hungry homes be justified?

When you eventually reach the meat of the book, however, you are greeted
by a series of essays by architects which, in their diverse ways, move on
and expand the debate from Lloyd Wright’s day.

Spirituality, simplicity and wholeness remain constants in this form
of architecture. It is a combination that conjures up images that are folksy,
homespun, small scale, never mainstream and emphatically anti-urban. The
book’s editor Maggie Toy must be congratulated for kicking off the essays
with a discourse by Sidney K. Robinson on the new Canadian Museum of Civilisation
in Hull, Quebec, designed by Douglas Cardinal, which shatters the organic
stereotyping. Not only is this building massive – more than 9 hectares –
but it is very firmly stitched into an urban setting.

‘Nature is somehow at the heart of organic architecture, but as a referent,
not an origin,’ says Robinson. ‘This architectural statement can hardly
be mistaken for a pro-duct of nature. It is obviously a human construction
even when the architect describes his architectural forms as being ‘sculpted
by the winds, rivers and glaciers’.’ Robinson adds that, while the building
follows convention by containing level floors, fairly regular room heights
and economical repeatable components, ‘elements like walls and roof are
freer to depart from more conventional ideas of buildings’. The result is
a non-rectilinear limestone, concrete and copper building of sculpted soft
curves contained within a stepped facade of undulating layers – like an
eruption of the Earth’s crust. Disappointingly, towards the end of his description,
Robinson loses his nerve and suggests that ‘the museum may be too big to
be considered organic’.

The question of size is important because the description organic architecture
tends to fit buildings of a modest scale more comfortably. Most projects
featured in the book are small scale and rural.

Contemporary exponents are drawn to organic architecture for a whole
raft of reasons. It is anger in the case of the Hungarian architect Imre
Makovecz, who explains in his essay: ‘I create this new architecture as
a protest about the situation imposed by meta-nature.’ He has an apocalyptical
vision: ‘The whole of nature is being destroyed . . . an atmosphere of a
coming tragedy is gathering.’ He sees evil in the quest for money and information
– this is the meta-nature that is driving ‘societies farther and farther
away from original nature’. Inspiration, derived from cultures living close
to the earth, produces structures – a church, a chapel and a woodland retreat
are featured – that are anthropomorphic, embracing and often built of wood.

It is this need to express continuity with nature which is also deep
rooted in the work of Christopher Day. His excellent Steiner Kindergarten
in Wales grows from the earth as a series of mounds complete with low, curved,
earth-coloured walls, irregular window openings and turf roofs. The place
is intriguing and even magical. Day is a good, clear writer and offers one
of the most fascinating insights in the book when he describes his work
process: ‘What I do first is try to listen to the place, listen to the idea
and find ways in which they are compatible.’ Of course, this approach has
attracted scorn, but Day’s buildings are loved by their users.

The second half of the book contains case studies. Most are splendid
examples – the wood-built Waldorf School in Norway, with its plan that resembles
a spine where rooms are the segments of vertebrae, the cave-like Moon Dust
residence in India, the tree houses of the Post Ranch Inn in California,
the compact beach house at Lechuza Point, California, which incorporates
huge boulders into the rooms – all shown with excellent photographs and
plans. However, I remain unconvinced that the inclusion of some of the huge
private homes (mostly in California) encapsulates the spirit of organic
architecture. It is not enough that just because a structure is made from
wood and stone, and the form borrows from the animal, vegetable or mineral,
it qualifies as organic architecture. Perhaps it all depends what you mean
by . . .

Fay Sweet is a freelance journalist specialising in architecture and
design.