The Painting/Architecture Continuum

Will Alsop works on a sketch in his trademark colours
at this offices in Battersea, south London. Photograph: Sarah Lee
Will Alsop,
the Stirling prize-winning architect who carved a reputation as the profession’s
enfant terrible for his blob-shaped buildings and disdain for conservative
planning, today quit his practice to spend more time painting.
At an age when
most architects are entering their most productive years, Alsop, 61, announced
plans to walk away from day-to-day architecture and launch a “serious inquiry
into painting” instead. He said his decision was partly the result of opposition
to his style of architecture within parts of the establishment.
The surprise
decision by the Royal Academician follows a controversial career which has
veered between critical success and financial frailty. In 2000 Alsop scooped the
Royal Institute for British Architects building of the year award for Peckham
library, a typically exuberant turquoise and yellow structure. Four years later
he was forced to sell his firm to venture capitalists after it entered
administration.
“I love architecture but one of the things that gets up my
nose, particularly in London, is that doing anything is like pulling teeth,” he
said.
“There are so many hangers on and architectural advisers who know
nothing and it gets in the way. For example I am doing nothing for the London
2012 Olympics and it has got to the point where I don’t feel like asking so I
don’t give them the satisfaction of saying no.”
Alsop has often rubbed up
against the establishment. He used his televised victory speech after receiving
the Stirling prize to berate one of London’s most conservative planning
authorities. “Fuck the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, but thank God
for all those imaginative boroughs that know that the way out of their problems
is architecture.”
He now intends to spend at least two days a week painting,
time which until now he has used mostly to sketch his early ideas for
buildings.
“I don’t know if it’s any good, but people tell me they like it
and I want to give it some time to see how far I can go,” he said. “I think you
can carry on changing in life, whatever your age. If something’s not right, you
need to change it.”
“His architecture has always looked like sculptural
painting,” said Tom Bloxham, the chairman of Urban Splash, a developer for whom
Alsop has designed several schemes. “It was always big swirls of the brush and
big gestures.”
Alsop’s friends include the artist Bruce McLean, with whom he
shares painting holidays in Norfolk. At his architecture studio in south London
Alsop has a room where he sketches with thick brushes and bright colours on
wall-sized sheets of paper. During the 1990s and the early part of this decade
Alsop became known as the leading light in an architectural sub-genre known
jokingly as “blobitecture” for its fusion of space-age curved forms with
straight-edged modernism.
His style seemed to be catching on when he beat
Richard Rogers and Norman Foster to design a “fourth grace” for Liverpool’s
pierhead, but the building, which looked like a floating cloud, was never built.
Alsop plans to act as a consultant to his former firm and has not ruled out a
return to designing buildings.
Robert Booth

vir: http://slowpainting.wordpress.com/2009/08/08/the-paintingarchitecture-continuum/